Journal articles: 'Anti-poverty society on the American plan' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

In 1934, the Society of Jesus was asked to respond at global and regional levels to the increasing threat of world Communism. In North America, the Jesuits initiated plans to meet the twin threats of Communism and atheism. Between 1934 and 1939, two separate streams of Jesuit anti-Communism began to emerge. The first was a macro-style vision grounded in social reconstruction, which the Jesuits called “Establishing a Christian Social Order,” known colloquially as the “xo” program. The other plan was put forward as early as 1934, and elaborated in July 1936 at the Jesuit meeting in West Baden, Indiana, by the writer and editor John LaFarge. LaFarge’s plan, known as the United Front, has never been evaluated by historians. It was a localized program of reactive initiatives meant to meet the gains of the cpusa with effective Catholic counter-Communist public attacks. LaFarge aimed to recruit students, pastors, and fellow Jesuits to see to it that cpusa gains in labor, culture, education, government, and churches were met with equal and effective public counterattacks. In 1937, the publication of the papal encyclical Divini redemptoris signaled that social reconstruction could become a part of authentic Catholic anti-Communism, indicating the eclipse of LaFarge’s United Front. After 1939, when the Jesuit general Włodzimierz Ledóchowski called for an adoption of the “positive message” of social reconstruction as the dominant means of Jesuit anti-Communism, LaFarge’s more bumptious and militaristic plan began to fade for good. This article chronicles the heretofore unknown struggle between these two antipodes.

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133 Background: Improvements in early detection, screening, and treatment of cancer translate into survivors living longer, highlighting the need for guidelines to address the late and long-term effects of cancer treatment. A particularly concerning effect is Cancer Therapeutics-Related Cardiac Dysfunction (CTRCD). Cancer treatments can result in a range of cardiovascular toxicity including left ventricular dysfunction, heart failure and radiation-induced heart disease (RIHD). Various consensus statements related to cardiovascular care for adult cancer survivors exist; however there are no globally accepted follow-up guidelines. Our purpose is to create a protocol to stratify a survivor’s cardiac risk and provide a basis for follow-up recommendations. Methods: We first evaluated existing resources within our institution and identified key stakeholders who were recruited to form a multidisciplinary workgroup (2 survivorship advanced practice providers, an oncologist, a radiation oncologist, and 2 cardio-oncologists). We then reviewed current research and literature on cardiotoxic cancer therapies and identified two consensus statements from the American Society of Echocardiography and the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging which helped inform our protocol. Finally, we created a cardiac assessment that could be applied in the pre-treatment phase and extend into the post-treatment phase. Results: Two assessment tools were developed. The first is an algorithm initiated in the pre-treatment setting by an oncologist when a Type I or Type II cardiotoxic agent is planned. The second is a risk assessment tool that is initiated in the post-treatment setting to stratify cardiac risk and provide follow-up recommendations. Conclusions: Development of standardized guidelines for assessment and treatment of late and long-term effects of treatment is critical. This protocol has been developed to account for the many factors that contribute to overall cardiac risk after various anti-cancer therapies. Further data is needed to evaluate long-term cardiac and survival outcomes based on this protocol.

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BACKGROUND: Multiple myeloma is a relatively uncommon hematological cancer that occurs when the bone marrow produces malignant plasma cells that enter the blood stream. In the United States, the lifetime risk of getting multiple myeloma is 1 in 132 (0.76%). American Cancer Society estimates that about 32,110 new cases will be diagnosed and about 12,960 deaths are expected to occur among multiple myeloma patients. (American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts and Figures 2019). An increasing number of treatments are available for multiple myeloma, however, due to the highly refractory nature of the disease surviving patients must eventually resort to best supportive care (BSC). Selinexor is a first-in-class Selective Inhibitor of Nuclear Export (SINE) for the treatment of relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (RRMM). OBJECTIVE: To estimate the budget impact of Selinexor in combination with dexamethasone (Sel-dex) for the treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma who have received at least 4 prior therapies and whose disease is refractory to at least 2 proteasome inhibitors, at least 2 immunomodulatory agents, and an anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody in US. METHOD: An interactive budget impact model was developed to evaluate the addition of Selinexor for treatment of RRMM using a hypothetical health plan of 25 million lives over a time horizon of 3-years (2019-2021) after the introduction of Selinexor. The model compares the formulary without Selinexor to a formulary with Selinexor and considers direct cost only. The model was developed following guidelines from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. The key assumptions in the model are that there is no reasonable alternative to Selinexor besides BSC, the use of Selinexor will not meaningfully reduce the cost of BSC, and the number of patients eligible to receive Selinexor is expected to remain the same for each of the 3 years evaluated in the model. The assumed uptake rates for Selinexor were included. The average per-person drug cost for each year of treatment is calculated by accounting for the cost of the drug including dosage, frequency, and duration of treatment. The costs of treatment-emergent adverse events occurring at grade 3 or higher occurring in at least 5% of patients in the STORM trial (NCT02336815) were included. As Sel-dex is taken orally, wastage was not considered for this model. Total annual treatment costs included drug costs, AE costs, and BSC costs, and were calculated for each scenario to estimate the budget impact of making Selinexor available as a treatment for eligible patients. One-way sensitivity analysis was conducted to test the robustness of the model results and the sensitivity of the results to uncertainty in key model input parameters including time on treatment with Selinexor (weeks), uptake of Selinexor in year 1 after market entry and the drug cost of Selinexor. Results were calculated in terms of total plan, per-member-per-month (PMPM), and per-treated-member-per-month costs. RESULTS: In the hypothetical health plan of 25 million lives, the annual number of patients eligible for Selinexor was estimated to be 182. After the adoption of Selinexor, the base case results showed minimal budget impact with $0.01 per member per month incremental cost for year 1 and $0.02 for both year 2 and year 3. For Commercial and Medicare patients, the incremental cost was < $0.02 per member per month for all three years. CONCLUSION: The results indicated that with limited treatment options in the later lines, Sel-dex for the treatment of multiple myeloma will have a minimal budget impact for a US health plan. Disclosures Gould: RTI International: Employment. Bassali:Karyopharm Therapeutics: Employment, Equity Ownership. Mehta:Karyopharm Therapeutics: Employment, Equity Ownership; Sanofi: Equity Ownership; Alkermes: Equity Ownership. Shah:Karyopharm Therapeutics: Employment, Equity Ownership. Mladsi:RTI International: Employment.

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Background. Postoperative pain is a common problem among intensive care patients. Pain management includes pain assessment and documentation, patient care, and pharmacological treatment. Materials and methods. The study used a prospective, cross-sectional design. Nineteen intensive care nurses and 72 intensive care patients after cardiac surgery with sternotomy approach were studied. Toronto Pain Management Inventory was used to assess nurses and the 2010 Revised American Pain Society Patient Outcome Questionnaire was used to assess the patients. A research protocol was used to document pharmacological treatment data and Visual Analog Scale (VAS) pain measurements. The pharmacological therapy data was available for 72 patients, but patient satisfaction measurements were acquired from 52 patients. Results. Postoperative pain for intensive care patients after cardiac surgery is mostly mild (68.66%). Pain intensity had a tendency to decrease over time, from a mean VAS score of 4.66 two hours after extubation to a mean VAS score of 3.12 twelve hours after extubation. Mostly opioids (100%) and nonsteroidal anti‑inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs, 77.8%) were used for pharmacological treatment, and treatment was adjusted according to pain levels and patient needs. Patient satisfaction regarding pain management in the first 24 hours after surgery was high (94.2%), even though the nurses’ pain knowledge was average (X = 60.6 ± 7.3%). Conclusions. An individualized pain management plan requires pain documentation and ensures high patient satisfaction. Pain levels after cardiac surgery with sternotomy approach are mostly mild and patient satisfaction is high.

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This article clarifies some of the contradictions of post-war American conservatism. It chiefly investigates and critiques the traditionalist (i.e. classical) conservative origins of the anti-statism and anti-welfarism of the American New Right and some of the main outlets from which its ideas were mobilized during this period. This brief intellectual and political history explains some of the origins of the anti-statism and anti-left populism which are so visible in today’s conservative movement and which significantly inform contemporary policy discourse. The article concludes that while a fundamental contribution of the American New Right was that it successfully integrated variable forms of conservatism, which had benefited the conservative movement, both politically and ideologically, it had not yet adopted an analysis of poverty and welfare entitlements which highlighted the racial composition of the welfare rolls and behavior explanations for economic hardship. Nor had it yet problematized the changing American family structure.

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This article addresses a lost housing alternative at the dawn of post-New Deal, homeowner-centered America. At the end of the 1940s, the State of New Jersey attempted to launch a state public housing program for lower-middle-income families who had been left out of both the private market for prospective homeowners and the existing public housing projects. The program, however, was incompatible with business-backed plans to create a mass homeownership society. Galvanized by anti-tax sentiment among current and prospective homeowners, voters rejected a state housing bond referendum necessary to the program. An additional factor was white residents’ politics of exclusion that produced anti-public housing hysteria. Finally, plan proponents’ lack of consensus about financial resources and grass-roots activities failed to sway public opinion and resulted in low voter turnout in central places.

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This article attempts to answer the question: what role does the process of early childhood education and care play in reducing the effects of poverty among children? The main argument of the article states that education (started as early and lasting as long as possible) is the only chance to limit the negative consequences of poverty, as well as to overcome the intergenerational transmission of poverty and social exclusion. Relying on the results of foreign (mostly American) surveys, it has been proven that good quality early childhood education and care is beneficial for children living in poverty, as well as for society as a whole. It positively influences the social and emotional development of children, their language skills and school achievements. Children who benefited from institutions / programmes for early childhood education and care, in adulthood do better in the labour market, have higher earnings and are less likely to seek stimulants. Society bears lower costs of special education, anti-social behaviour, criminal proceedings, social welfare and health of young people and adults.

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Background:Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a chronic, autoimmune, inflammatory disease that may cause progressive joint damage and deformity, leading to functional disability and reduced quality of life. However, there is often a long waiting time for the first assessment in Rheumatology Clinic by doctor. Development of rheumatology nurse-led clinic allows early assessment by qualified rheumatology nurse for patients with suspected RA. It may potentially facilitate the decision and treatment plan in the first doctor clinic. A nurse-led Early Arthritis Clinic (EAC) for RA patients had been established in Caritas Medical Centre (CMC) since January 2018.Objectives:To determine the effectiveness of the EAC by early identification of new cases of RA and to facilitate decision in early initiation of disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) during the first doctor clinic assessment.Methods:New cases were screened and recruited by Rheumatology nurse from January to December 2018 to nurse-led EAC. The recruited new cases were seen in EAC around 1 to 4 weeks before the first doctor clinic. Rheumatology nurse performed nursing assessment in EAC according to the 2010 ACR-EULAR Classification of RA. These cases will be reviewed by Rheumatologist during the first doctor clinic for confirmation of diagnosis and formulation of treatment plan. If urgent problems were identified during assessment in EAC, patients would be prioritized to have an earlier doctor clinic appointment or hospitalization may be arranged.Results:A total of 128 patients with articular symptoms were seen in nurse-led EAC during the study period. Nursing assessment revealed that 71 patients were required further evaluation for the diagnosis of RA (26 males and 45 females, mean age for males: 51, mean age for females: 56) and they were recruited into the study. 36 of these 71 patients were confirmed with the diagnosis RA by rheumatologist during the first consultation of doctor clinic. 13 of 36 patients were prescribed with DMARDs on the same day of consultation. Before the establishment of EAC, the mean time of confirmation of RA by rheumatologist was 8 weeks (range from 4 to 12 weeks). Therefore, EAC facilitates both the early diagnosis of RA and the prompt initiation of treatment after confirmation of diagnosis. Reduction in disease activity was also noted after treatment. The mean Disease Activity Score of 28 joints (DAS 28) during the assessment in EAC was 4.66 (range 3.22 to 6.54) while post treatment after EAC and the first doctor clinic was 3.30 (range 2.08 to 5.16) with mean difference of -1.36 (p<0.01). Other diagnoses were also made among the 71 patients. 8 patients were diagnosed of Spondyloarthropathy, 2 patients were diagnosed of psoriatic arthritis and 2 patients were diagnosed of systemic lupus erythematosus. 3 of these 71 patients were identified urgent medical problems required early intervention. Among these 3 cases, two patients with liver function derangement and one of them needed hospital admission for assessment of acute hepatitis. Another patient was arranged hospitalization to rule out sepsis due to raised total white cell count and erythrocyte sedimentation rate.Conclusion:Rheumatology nurse assessment in EAC is effective in assessing patients with suspected diagnosis of RA. It shortened the time to confirm the diagnosis of RA, and facilitated the decision on treatment plan. It effectively improved the disease activity of patients due to the prompt initiation of DMARDs by Rheumatologist.References:[1]Aletaha et al. 2010 Rheumatoid arthritis classification criteria: An American College of Rheumatology/European League Against Rheumatism collaborative initiative. Arthritis and Rheumatism 2010; 62(9): 2569-2581.[2]Mok CC et al. Management of rheumatoid arthritis: 2019 updated consensus recommendations from the Hong Kong Society of Rheumatology. Clin Rheumatol 2019. (in press)Acknowledgments:DR DANIEL KAM HUNG NGDisclosure of Interests:None declared

Abstract:

Despite the many years of reform since the Civil Rights movement, racial justice in the United States has remained elusive because of the endemic nature of racism and anti-Blackness at all levels of American society, including the structures of the welfare state. Using a critical race theory approach, this article examines the evolution of structural social policies from the Great Society of the 1960s to the devolved entrepreneurialism of neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium. If the large-scale social programs of the American welfare state were seen as the only entity with sufficient capacity to collectively change structural racism in the Great Society, neoliberalism brought an austere decentralized vision of social policy that sought to roll back collective security in favor of individual responsibility and risk. Social enterprise emerged in the 1990s as a highly touted method to achieve social justice on the grassroots level amidst the rise of neoliberal ideologies that hollowed out many of the core programs of the American social welfare state. Many extolled the value of social enterprise as a rigorous way to apply efficient business methods to social welfare without taking into account the history of Black enterprise. The neoliberal logic of social enterprise ultimately deters systemic thinking because it focuses on individual abilities and uplift, rather than institutional and structural change. The article ends by reflecting on how the radical imagination of social movements like Black Lives Matter might contribute to achieving racial justice in the United States by re-envisioning collective welfare.

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In early twentieth-century America, the novel technology called “eugenics”—a potent hybrid of biological science, statistical method, and cultural assumptions—won a diverse following of academics, animal breeders, social workers, criminologists, psychiatrists, institutional superintendents, philanthropists, and activists spanning the political spectrum from socialists to white supremacists. Although heirs to the Enlightenment pursuits of science, reason, and a rationally organized state, eugenicists rejected the Enlightenment's egalitarian strain, insisting that hereditary endowment determined social structure. Fusing Darwin's theory of evolution and Mendel's discoveries in plant heredity, eugenicists claimed to find distinct genetic roots for the many problems of personality and society that alarmed their contemporaries: from “feeble-mindedness” and “psychopathy” to “delinquency” and “hypersexuality.” Within the bright lines of a eugenic worldview, the poverty and crime that pervaded an avowedly meritocratic urban-industrial democracy were comprehended as the offspring of hereditary “mental defects,” racial “mongrelization,” and sentimental charitable efforts that, in a vain attempt to reform deviant individuals, had only assured their survival and reproduction.

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Although the United States has elected an African American president, since that election there have been numerous indicators that racism remains a persistent, and complex, issue in America. Shortly after President Obama took office, for example, renowned Harvard University professor Henry “Skip” Gates was arrested for being uncooperative with the responding officer when police mistook him for a burglar at his own home. This incident served as a small reminder of the resilient nature of racism in the United States. More importantly, there has been an increase in the number of hate groups since 2008, and the proposed plans for an Islamic cultural center near the site of the former World Trade Center have initiated a wave of anti-Islamic sentiment. Despite the hope that Barack Obama would usher in a new era in race relations, it seems as though his election has brought to the surface tensions that some people assumed had disappeared. Among scholars of black politics, race serves as the central construct. In some cases, race serves as a lens through which other variables such as class and gender are filtered. In other cases, race serves as the key independent variable explaining a number of factors that influence the lives of blacks. Each of the texts reviewed in this essay examines issues of race to varying degrees, and each one reveals the complex nature and long-lasting impact of race on American society.

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The perception of the Soviet Union in American public opinion wasn’t permanent and changed depending on a number of factors – ideological and allied, Soviet propaganda, the Red Army movement, breaking international agreements. Relations between the US and the USSR which was built within the anti-Hitler coalition was perceived by American society and liberal politicians as a model for cooperation in peacetime. Among the higher-level politicians who had a stable vision of the USSR as an ally and a partner, there was the vice-president of the United States H. Wallace. In the article, the author has attempted to identify the main causes of the distorted Wallace’s perception of the Soviet Union on the basis of which he made plans for the post-war US-Soviet cooperation. The reasons that influenced the aberration of the perception by H.Wallace of the Soviet Union include the informational isolation of the USSR, the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda, and an idealistic worldview. The deep differences in the value system of the Soviet dictatorship and Western democracy were falsely perceived by H.Wallace as insignificant differences. It is worth noting that a similar image of the USSR dominated during the period of Wallace’s vice-presidency in the minds of a significant part of Americans. After the presidential election of 1944, H.Wallace was removed by political methods from the possibility of influencing US foreign policy. He remained committed to the positive image of the USSR after the death of Roosevelt in conditions of growing US-Soviet tension. The author concluded that this was one of the main reasons for the collapse of his political career and the formation of a generally negative image of H.Wallace in American political history.

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AbstractDuring the First World War, civil society groups across the North Atlantic put forward an array of plans for recasting international society. The most prominent ones sought to build on the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 by developing international legal codes and, in a drastic innovation, obligating and militarily enforcing the judicial settlement of disputes. Their ideal was a world governed by law, which they opposed to politics. This idea was championed by the largest groups in the United States and France in favour of international organizations, and they had likeminded counterparts in Britain. The Anglo-American architects of the League of Nations, however, defined their vision against legalism. Their declaratory design sought to ensure that artificial machinery never stifled the growth of common consciousness. Paradoxically, the bold new experiment in international organization was forged from an anti-formalistic ethos – one that slowed the momentum of international law and portended the rise of global governance.

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Josiah Tucker, who was the Anglican dean of Gloucester from 1758 until his death in 1799, is best known today as a controversialist, a political economist and a lesser contemporary of Adam Smith. Little attention has been paid, however, to the important relationship between his religious writings and his wider economic thought. This article addresses this lack of attention in two ways: first by demonstrating the link between Tucker's conception of civil and religious liberty and his “science” of political economy, and second by drawing sustained attention to his economic adaptation and reformulation of the moral philosophy of Bishop Joseph Butler, Tucker's ecclesiastical mentor from 1739 to 1752. Emphasizing Butler and Tucker's views on the traditional Christian virtue of charity, and the moral duty of the rich towards the poor, the article suggests that both clergymen were proponents of a sociability-based, neo-Stoic conception of human nature, which was not only compatible with, but also dependent upon, the established Anglican Church and state and the predominantly Whig commercial order. In consequence, Tucker's political economy was premised on the unavoidability of social subordination and economic inequality as necessary hallmarks of modern commercial society. Accordingly, the article closes with a brief discussion of Tucker's “Butlerian” assessment and rejection of the “anti-social” doctrine of individual natural rights, associated with the popular radicalism of the American and French Revolutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

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Lannea schweinfurthii is a valuable medicinal plant species among different ethnic groups in tropical Africa. The aim of the current study was to review existing literature on the ethnomedicinal uses, phytochemistry and pharmacological properties of L. schweinfurthii in an effort to evaluate the therapeutic potential of the species. The relevant information on the ethnomedicinal uses, phytochemistry and pharmacological properties of L. schweinfurthii was generated from several sources including books, book chapters, theses, scientific reports and journal articles obtained from the library and internet sources such as SciFinder, Wiley, Web of Science, American Chemical Society publications, PubMed, BMC, Elsevier, Science Direct, Scielo and Scopus. Traditionally, L. schweinfurthii is used against reproductive system disorders, respiratory disorders, injuries, headache, blood system disorders, infections or infestations and gastro-intestinal disorders. The phytochemical compounds that have been isolated from L. schweinfurthii include alkaloids, anthocyanins, flavonoids, glycosides, phenols, saponins, steroids, tannins and terpenoids. The in vitro and animal studies carried out so far from the crude extracts and compounds isolated from the species exhibited acetylcholinesterase inhibitory, anti-apoptotic, antibacterial, antiviral, anti-giardial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antiplasmodial, antitrypanosomal, hepatoprotective, larvicidal and cytotoxicity activities. Detailed ethnopharmacological studies emphasizing clinical and toxicological evaluations are needed to assess efficacy and safety of the species as herbal medicine.

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The nuclear source term, defined as the quantity, timing, and characteristic of the release of radioactive material to the environment following a core-melt accident, was thoroughly debated in 1985. This debate, summarized here, turns on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) source term for radioactive iodine, which is postulated as potentially the most life-threatening radionuclide that might escape in a nuclear power-plant accident. A generic radioiodine source term has been used by NRC as the surrogate for all others; thus, it has become one of the bases on which nuclear-safety regulations are founded. Following the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident, from which only traces of radioiodine escaped, scientists began arguing that nuclear regulations based on source-term calculations are erroneous and should be modified. The American Nuclear Society (ANS) and industry researchers have concluded that warranted reductions in the NRC source terms could range from a factor of ten to several factors of ten in most accident scenarios. The American Physical Society (APS), after agreeing with a large body of the conclusions from the other research groups, has told NRC that its source-term data base is still inadequate because of the existence of a number of uncertainties it found therein. Although APS presented no such conclusion, its findings made clear to NRC that an early reduction of all source terms is not warranted. The anti-nuclear lobby agrees with APS. The NRC has taken a cautious, conservative approach to the revision of its regulations based on new source-term data, although it too concedes that its old methodologies and conclusions must be revised and ultimately superceded.

Abstract:

INTRODUÇÃO: A polifarmácia e a prescrição de medicamentos inapropriados para idosos podem causar uma série de efeitos indesejados, comprometendo sua capacidade funcional. OBJETIVO: Verificação da presença de prescrição de medicamentos inapropriados em um grupo de idosos vinculados a um plano de saúde privado com cobertura na cidade de São Paulo-SP. METODOLOGIA: Estudo realizado mediante a análise de prescrições feitas a um grupo de idosos vinculados a um plano de saúde privado, todos portadores de doenças crônico-degenerativas e acompanhados por médicos de especialidades diversas, na capital do estado de São Paulo, durante os anos de 2012 e 2013. Os medicamentos foram examinados segundo os Critérios de Beers revisados pela American Geriatrics Society em 2012. RESULTADOS: Foram observadas prescrições feitas a 2.500 idosos com um total de 8.760 medicamentos. Destes, 2.926 33,4% foram considerados inapropriados para uso em idosos. Os fármacos mais prescritos foram os anti-inflamatórios não esteroides, seguidos por medicamentos cardiovasculares e de ação central. A maioria desses idosos não possui médico de referência, sendo acompanhados, em média, por quatro médicos de especialidades diferentes. CONCLUSÃO: O grupo pesquisado apresenta um número elevado de prescrições de medicamentos inapropriados para uso em idosos, os quais, somados às características próprias, fazem com que esse grupo se torne de alto risco para o aparecimento de iatrogenias. Utilizar critérios de fácil memorização para identificação desses medicamentos e, principalmente, rever a forma como o setor de saúde suplementar brasileiro atende a este segmento etário é de suma importância, a fim de preservar a qualidade de vida desses idosos.

Abstract:

Confusion, or passing off, is a typical unfair practice recognized internationally, but national laws still differ from each other. Although the Chinese Anti-Unfair Competition Law of 1993 provided a narrow rule on passing off, a rich amount of case law has considerably enlarged its scope of application. The reform of the passing off regime in 2017 was essentially based on case law. This reform consists of four main aspects: expansion of the scope of protectable commercial signs: clarification of the applicability of the passing off rule to registered and unregistered trademarks; the adjustment of fame as a qualifying condition of passing off; and the adoption of a general rule prohibiting confusion. This reform has not only consolidated the case law and approach developed by the courts, but also bestowed an open and flexible spirit in the passing off regime which will enhance its efficiency in the fight against unfair imitation. *PhD (University of Paris I – Pantheon Sorbonne), LLM (Renmin University of China), LLB (Shandong University), Director of the Innovation & Competition Law Center, Former Vice-President of the Trademark & Unfair Competition Committee of the IP Case Law Center (Beijing) of the Chinese Supreme People's Court, Vice President of the Beijing IP Judicial Protection Association, Expert Council Member of China Trademark Association, Co-Chair of American Society of International Law Intellectual Property Interest Group, Visiting Professor or Research Fellow (University of Milan, University of Toulouse I, University of Paris I, University of Paris XI, Max Plank Institute for Procedural Law and Strasbourg University CEIPI). The author is thankful to Miss Kristina DaCosta (LLM graduate of Tsinghua University), Miss Ling Zhang (PhD candidate of Tsinghua University) and Mr Yu Huang (LLM graduate of Tsinghua University) for their valuable assistance in this research. This research is part of the project 20BFX142 of the National Social Science Fund of China.

Abstract:

BACKGROUND Inguinal hernia is a frequently encountered surgical problem. General anaesthesia carries the risk of possible airway complications. Regional blocks improve acute post-operative pain, decrease post-operative visual analogue scale (VAS) score and patient can mobilise early. The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of transversus abdominis plane (TAP) block vs. paravertebral (PVB) block for post-operative analgeia in inguinal hernia surgeries. METHODS We conducted a research on 64 patients of age > 18 years with American society of Anaesthesiologists (ASA I – III) to undergo unilateral inguinal herniorrhaphy. Patients were randomized into two groups. Group T received TAP block in which 20 ml of 0.25 % bupivacaine was injected and Group P underwent PVB in which 5 ml of bupivacaine (0.25 %) at each segment from T10-L1 was injected slowly (total dose of 20 ml). Post-operative VAS score, time for first rescue analgesia, total diclofenac requirement, total anti-emetic requirement and complications if any was noted. RESULTS The demographic data of both the groups were comparable. Also, pre and postoperative heart rate, blood pressure, IV fluids, ephedrine use, operative time and complications were statistically insignificant. As compared to group T, group P had lower VAS score from 2nd – 12th hour which was statistically significant (P < 0.05). Although more time is required to perform paravertebral block but the time for request of first rescue analgesia was quite prolonged in paravertebral block. Time of ambulation in group P was significantly lower than group T. CONCLUSIONS PVB requires more time to perform due to multiple site of injection, the comparison of both techniques in the present study revealed that PVB showed relatively higher efficacy in the management of post-operative pain, early ambulation and had significant reduction in dose requirement of additional analgesia (diclofenac) and antiemetics (ondansetron) over tap block. KEYWORDS Paravertebral Block, Transversus Abdominis Block, Inguinal Hernia

Abstract:

In my postgraduate formation during the last years of the 80’s, we had close to thirty hospital beds in a pavilion called “sépticas” (1). In Colombia, where abortion was completely penalized, the pavilion was mostly filled with women with insecure, complicated abortions. The focus we received was technical: management of intensive care; performance of hysterectomies, colostomies, bowel resection, etc. In those times, some nurses were nuns and limited themselves to interrogating the patients to get them to “confess” what they had done to themselves in order to abort. It always disturbed me that the women who left alive, left without any advice or contraceptive method. Having asked a professor of mine, he responded with disdain: “This is a third level hospital, those things are done by nurses of the first level”. Seeing so much pain and death, I decided to talk to patients, and I began to understand their decision. I still remember so many deaths with sadness, but one case in particular pains me: it was a woman close to being fifty who arrived with a uterine perforation in a state of advanced sepsis. Despite the surgery and the intensive care, she passed away. I had talked to her, and she told me she was a widow, had two adult kids and had aborted because of “embarrassment towards them” because they were going to find out that she had an active sexual life. A few days after her passing, the pathology professor called me, surprised, to tell me that the uterus we had sent for pathological examination showed no pregnancy. She was a woman in a perimenopausal state with a pregnancy exam that gave a false positive due to the high levels of FSH/LH typical of her age. SHE WAS NOT PREGNANT!!! She didn’t have menstruation because she was premenopausal and a false positive led her to an unsafe abortion. Of course, the injuries caused in the attempted abortion caused the fatal conclusion, but the real underlying cause was the social taboo in respect to sexuality. I had to watch many adolescents and young women leave the hospital alive, but without a uterus, sometime without ovaries and with colostomies, to be looked down on by a society that blamed them for deciding to not be mothers. I had to see situation of women that arrived with their intestines protruding from their vagin*s because of unsafe abortions. I saw women, who in their despair, self-inflicted injuries attempting to abort with elements such as stick, branches, onion wedges, alum bars and clothing hooks among others. Among so many deaths, it was hard not having at least one woman per day in the morgue due to an unsafe abortion. During those time, healthcare was not handled from the biopsychosocial, but only from the technical (2); nonetheless, in the academic evaluations that were performed, when asked about the definition of health, we had to recite the text from the International Organization of Health that included these three aspects. How contradictory! To give response to the health need of women and guarantee their right when I was already a professor, I began an obstetric contraceptive service in that third level hospital. There was resistance from the directors, but fortunately I was able to acquire international donations for the institution, which facilitated its acceptance. I decided to undertake a teaching career with the hope of being able to sensitize health professionals towards an integral focus of health and illness. When the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo in 1994, I had already spent various years in teaching, and when I read their Action Program, I found a name for what I was working on: Sexual and Reproductive Rights. I began to incorporate the tools given by this document into my professional and teaching life. I was able to sensitize people at my countries Health Ministry, and we worked together moving it to an approach of human rights in areas of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This new viewpoint, in addition to being integral, sought to give answers to old problems like maternal mortality, adolescent pregnancy, low contraceptive prevalence, unplanned or unwanted pregnancy or violence against women. With other sensitized people, we began with these SRH issues to permeate the Colombian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, some universities, and university hospitals. We are still fighting in a country that despite many difficulties has improved its indicators of SRH. With the experience of having labored in all sphere of these topics, we manage to create, with a handful of colleagues and friend at the Universidad El Bosque, a Master’s Program in Sexual and Reproductive Health, open to all professions, in which we broke several paradigms. A program was initiated in which the qualitative and quantitative investigation had the same weight, and some alumni of the program are now in positions of leadership in governmental and international institutions, replicating integral models. In the Latin American Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FLASOG, English acronym) and in the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO), I was able to apply my experience for many years in the SRH committees of these association to benefit women and girls in the regional and global environments. When I think of who has inspired me in these fights, I should highlight the great feminist who have taught me and been with me in so many fights. I cannot mention them all, but I have admired the story of the life of Margaret Sanger with her persistence and visionary outlook. She fought throughout her whole life to help the women of the 20th century to be able to obtain the right to decide when and whether or not they wanted to have children (3). Of current feminist, I have had the privilege of sharing experiences with Carmen Barroso, Giselle Carino, Debora Diniz and Alejandra Meglioli, leaders of the International Planned Parenthood Federation – Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF-RHO). From my country, I want to mention my countrywoman Florence Thomas, psychologist, columnist, writer and Colombo-French feminist. She is one of the most influential and important voices in the movement for women rights in Colombia and the region. She arrived from France in the 1960’s, in the years of counterculture, the Beatles, hippies, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a time in which capitalism and consumer culture began to be criticized (4). It was then when they began to talk about the female body, female sexuality and when the contraceptive pill arrived like a total revolution for women. Upon its arrival in 1967, she experimented a shock because she had just assisted in a revolution and only found a country of mothers, not women (5). That was the only destiny for a woman, to be quiet and submissive. Then she realized that this could not continue, speaking of “revolutionary vanguards” in such a patriarchal environment. In 1986 with the North American and European feminism waves and with her academic team, they created the group “Mujer y Sociedad de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia”, incubator of great initiatives and achievements for the country (6). She has led great changes with her courage, the strength of her arguments, and a simultaneously passionate and agreeable discourse. Among her multiple books, I highlight “Conversaciones con Violeta” (7), motivated by the disdain towards feminism of some young women. She writes it as a dialogue with an imaginary daughter in which, in an intimate manner, she reconstructs the history of women throughout the centuries and gives new light of the fundamental role of feminism in the life of modern women. Another book that shows her bravery is “Había que decirlo” (8), in which she narrates the experience of her own abortion at age twenty-two in sixty’s France. My work experience in the IPPF-RHO has allowed me to meet leaders of all ages in diverse countries of the region, who with great mysticism and dedication, voluntarily, work to achieve a more equal and just society. I have been particularly impressed by the appropriation of the concept of sexual and reproductive rights by young people, and this has given me great hope for the future of the planet. We continue to have an incomplete agenda of the action plan of the ICPD of Cairo but seeing how the youth bravely confront the challenges motivates me to continue ahead and give my years of experience in an intergenerational work. In their policies and programs, the IPPF-RHO evidences great commitment for the rights and the SRH of adolescent, that are consistent with what the organization promotes, for example, 20% of the places for decision making are in hands of the young. Member organizations, that base their labor on volunteers, are true incubators of youth that will make that unassailable and necessary change of generations. In contrast to what many of us experienced, working in this complicated agenda of sexual and reproductive health without theoretical bases, today we see committed people with a solid formation to replace us. In the college of medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the College of Nursing at the Universidad El Bosque, the new generations are more motivated and empowered, with great desire to change the strict underlying structures. Our great worry is the onslaught of the ultra-right, a lot of times better organized than us who do support rights, that supports anti-rights group and are truly pro-life (9). Faced with this scenario, we should organize ourselves better, giving battle to guarantee the rights of women in the local, regional, and global level, aggregating the efforts of all pro-right organizations. We are now committed to the Objectives of Sustainable Development (10), understood as those that satisfy the necessities of the current generation without jeopardizing the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own necessities. This new agenda is based on: - The unfinished work of the Millennium Development Goals - Pending commitments (international environmental conventions) - The emergent topics of the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. We now have 17 objectives of sustainable development and 169 goals (11). These goals mention “universal access to reproductive health” many times. In objective 3 of this list is included guaranteeing, before the year 2030, “universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including those of family planning, information, and education.” Likewise, objective 5, “obtain gender equality and empower all women and girls”, establishes the goal of “assuring the universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in conformity with the action program of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Action Platform of Beijing”. It cannot be forgotten that the term universal access to sexual and reproductive health includes universal access to abortion and contraception. Currently, 830 women die every day through preventable maternal causes; of these deaths, 99% occur in developing countries, more than half in fragile environments and in humanitarian contexts (12). 216 million women cannot access modern contraception methods and the majority live in the nine poorest countries in the world and in a cultural environment proper to the decades of the seventies (13). This number only includes women from 15 to 49 years in any marital state, that is to say, the number that takes all women into account is much greater. Achieving the proposed objectives would entail preventing 67 million unwanted pregnancies and reducing maternal deaths by two thirds. We currently have a high, unsatisfied demand for modern contraceptives, with extremely low use of reversible, long term methods (intrauterine devices and subdermal implants) which are the most effect ones with best adherence (14). There is not a single objective among the 17 Objectives of Sustainable Development where contraception does not have a prominent role: from the first one that refers to ending poverty, going through the fifth one about gender equality, the tenth of inequality reduction among countries and within the same country, until the sixteenth related with peace and justice. If we want to change the world, we should procure universal access to contraception without myths or barriers. We have the moral obligation of achieving the irradiation of extreme poverty and advancing the construction of more equal, just, and happy societies. In emergency contraception (EC), we are very far from reaching expectations. If in reversible, long-term methods we have low prevalence, in EC the situation gets worse. Not all faculties in the region look at this topic, and where it is looked at, there is no hom*ogeneity in content, not even within the same country. There are still myths about their real action mechanisms. There are countries, like Honduras, where it is prohibited and there is no specific medicine, the same case as in Haiti. Where it is available, access is dismal, particularly among girls, adolescents, youth, migrants, afro-descendent, and indigenous. The multiple barriers for the effective use of emergency contraceptives must be knocked down, and to work toward that we have to destroy myths and erroneous perceptions, taboos and cultural norms; achieve changes in laws and restrictive rules within countries, achieve access without barriers to the EC; work in union with other sectors; train health personnel and the community. It is necessary to transform the attitude of health personal to a service above personal opinion. Reflecting on what has occurred after the ICPD in Cairo, their Action Program changed how we look at the dynamics of population from an emphasis on demographics to a focus on the people and human rights. The governments agreed that, in this new focus, success was the empowerment of women and the possibility of choice through expanded access to education, health, services, and employment among others. Nonetheless, there have been unequal advances and inequality persists in our region, all the goals were not met, the sexual and reproductive goals continue beyond the reach of many women (15). There is a long road ahead until women and girls of the world can claim their rights and liberty of deciding. Globally, maternal deaths have been reduced, there is more qualified assistance of births, more contraception prevalence, integral sexuality education, and access to SRH services for adolescents are now recognized rights with great advances, and additionally there have been concrete gains in terms of more favorable legal frameworks, particularly in our region; nonetheless, although it’s true that the access condition have improved, the restrictive laws of the region expose the most vulnerable women to insecure abortions. There are great challenges for governments to recognize SRH and the DSR as integral parts of health systems, there is an ample agenda against women. In that sense, access to SRH is threatened and oppressed, it requires multi-sector mobilization and litigation strategies, investigation and support for the support of women’s rights as a multi-sector agenda. Looking forward, we must make an effort to work more with youth to advance not only the Action Program of the ICPD, but also all social movements. They are one of the most vulnerable groups, and the biggest catalyzers for change. The young population still faces many challenges, especially women and girls; young girls are in particularly high risk due to lack of friendly and confidential services related with sexual and reproductive health, gender violence, and lack of access to services. In addition, access to abortion must be improved; it is the responsibility of states to guarantee the quality and security of this access. In our region there still exist countries with completely restrictive frameworks. New technologies facilitate self-care (16), which will allow expansion of universal access, but governments cannot detach themselves from their responsibility. Self-care is expanding in the world and can be strategic for reaching the most vulnerable populations. There are new challenges for the same problems, that require a re-interpretation of the measures necessary to guaranty the DSR of all people, in particular women, girls, and in general, marginalized and vulnerable populations. It is necessary to take into account migrations, climate change, the impact of digital media, the resurgence of hate discourse, oppression, violence, xenophobia, hom*o/transphobia, and other emergent problems, as SRH should be seen within a framework of justice, not isolated. We should demand accountability of the 179 governments that participate in the ICPD 25 years ago and the 193 countries that signed the Sustainable Development Objectives. They should reaffirm their commitments and expand their agenda to topics not considered at that time. Our region has given the world an example with the Agreement of Montevideo, that becomes a blueprint for achieving the action plan of the CIPD and we should not allow retreat. This agreement puts people at the center, especially women, and includes the topic of abortion, inviting the state to consider the possibility of legalizing it, which opens the doors for all governments of the world to recognize that women have the right to choose on maternity. This agreement is much more inclusive: Considering that the gaps in health continue to abound in the region and the average statistics hide the high levels of maternal mortality, of sexually transmitted diseases, of infection by HIV/AIDS, and the unsatisfied demand for contraception in the population that lives in poverty and rural areas, among indigenous communities, and afro-descendants and groups in conditions of vulnerability like women, adolescents and incapacitated people, it is agreed: 33- To promote, protect, and guarantee the health and the sexual and reproductive rights that contribute to the complete fulfillment of people and social justice in a society free of any form of discrimination and violence. 37- Guarantee universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health services, taking into consideration the specific needs of men and women, adolescents and young, LGBT people, older people and people with incapacity, paying particular attention to people in a condition of vulnerability and people who live in rural and remote zone, promoting citizen participation in the completing of these commitments. 42- To guarantee, in cases in which abortion is legal or decriminalized in the national legislation, the existence of safe and quality abortion for non-desired or non-accepted pregnancies and instigate the other States to consider the possibility of modifying public laws, norms, strategies, and public policy on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy to save the life and health of pregnant adolescent women, improving their quality of life and decreasing the number of abortions (17).

Abstract:

BACKGROUND Dexamethasone (DES) is a very potent anti-inflammatory and analgesic glucocorticoid with very strong activity. The current study is randomised to determine the onset time, duration, and analgesic potency of bupivacaine (BUC) 0.5 percent, relative to BUC 0.5 percent and DES 8 mg by supraclavicular approach for brachial plexus block. METHODS In patients posted for upper limb surgery under a supraclavicular block, a prospective, randomised, double-blinded study was conducted. 60 Class I and II American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) patients were randomly divided into two classes. Group A received 0.5 percent of 30 ml BUS and group B received 0.5 percent of 28 ml BUS and 8 mg of 2 ml DES combined. For a single shot blockade of the supraclavicular brachial plexus, 30 ml of a solution was required. RESULTS The mean age of patients who received BUS was 36.9 ± 10.4 years and those who received BUS + DES was 34.7 ± 7.1 years (P = 0.328), there was no statistically significant difference between the mean ages of two groups (P > 0.05). The mean time of onset of sensory block in the BUS group was 8.6 ± 1.2 minutes and 5.6 ± 0.7 minutes in the BUS + DES group. There was a statistically significant difference between the onset of motor block in minutes among BUS and BUS + DES groups, there was a statistically significant difference between the mean ages of the two groups (P < 0.001). There was no statistically meaningful difference between the BUS and BUS + DES classes at various time intervals in the mean heart rate, difference in systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure, and oxygen saturation. CONCLUSIONS The start of sensory and motor blockade also prolongs the length of DES 8 mg to BUS 0.5 percent speeds, thereby supplying improved analgesia and reducing the rescue analgesic requirements. KEYWORDS Bupivacaine, Dexamethasone, Brachial Plexus, Supraclavicular, Sensory Block

Abstract:

Abstract Abstract 4638 According to the CDC the incidence of HIV-infection in women of child bearing age continues to increase in the era of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART). In 1992, women accounted for 14% of all adults and adolescents living with HIV/AIDS, but by the end of 2005 women accounted for 23% of all HIV/AIDS cases [1]. As Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) is the most common non-AIDS defining malignancy, we anticipate that the number of cases of HIV-associated Hodgkin lymphoma (HIV-HL) in pregnant women will increase in the near future. Herein, we describe the case of a pregnant 30-year-old HIV-infected Ethiopian woman with a CD4+ count of 254 cells/μ;L and an HIV viral load of 1200 copies/mL who presented to medical attention with progressive neck adenopathy and fatigue, but no fevers, night sweats, or significant weight loss. An incisional biopsy of a cervical lymph node revealed Reed-Sternberg cells (CD30+, CD15+, CD20-, CD3-) and an absence of sclerosis consistent with Classical Hodgkin Lymphoma, mixed cellularity subtype. A subsequent unilateral posterior iliac crest bone marrow aspirate and biopsy was unremarkable with normal trilineage hematopoiesis. Following a spontaneous miscarriage ten weeks into her pregnancy, a 18F-fluorodeoxy-D-glucose PET and fusion CT scan demonstrated disease above and below the diaphragm, establishing stage IIIA HL. The patient subsequently began HAART consisting of a co-formulation of emtricitabine and tenofovir (Truvada®) and nevirapine, in conjunction with chemotherapy (AVD x 8 cycles). Thirty three months post-completion of chemotherapy, the patient remains disease free without evidence of recurrent HL. Through a literature search, we identified only two additional case reports describing HIV, HL, and pregnancy. One patient received three cycles of chemotherapy, refused further treatment, delivered a HIV-positive girl, and died shortly after from complications of presumed pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia [2]. The second patient received both active antiretroviral therapy and chemotherapy, delivered a HIV-negative boy, and remained without evidence of HL at nine months follow-up [3]. The paucity of reported cases in the medical literature precludes any evidence based recommendations for the care of pregnant patients with HIV-HL. However, we recommend that medical providers use the same precautions to ensure the safety of both the mother and the child as recommended for pregnant HIV-negative patients with HL. Pregnant patients with HL should not be staged with imaging techniques that require significant radiation exposure including plain radiographs, CT, and PET scans. The extent of substantial mediastinal and pulmonary disease can be safely determined with a postero-anterior radiograph of the chest with proper shielding of the abdomen. Abdominal ultrasounds and magnetic resonance imaging may provide adequate information for the management of disease without placing the fetus at risk [4]. We also suggest controlling the underlying HIV infection when initiating HL treatment as using HAART in parallel with chemotherapy has been correlated with a dramatically improved prognosis for HIV-HL patients [5]. In the hopes of developing more specific management guidelines, we encourage other clinicians to publish their experiences with HIV-HL in pregnant patients.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HIV/AIDS Among Youth–United States, 2008. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/Factsheets/youth.htmOkechukwu CN, Ross J. Hodgkin's Lymphoma in a Pregnant Patient with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. J Clin Oncol 1998; 10:410-411.Kelpfish A, Schattner A, Shtalrid M,et al. Advanced Hodgkin's Disease in a Pregnant, HIV Seropositive Woman: Favorable Mother and Baby Outcome Following Combined Anticancer and Antiretroviral Therapy. Am J Hematol 2000; 63:57-58.Connors, Joseph. “Challenging Problems: Coicident Pregnancy, HIV infection, and Older Age.” In: Hematology 2008: American Society of Hematology Education Program Book. Gewirtz AM, Muchmore EA, Burns LJ, editors. Washington, D.C.: American Society of Hematology; 2008. p. 334-39.5.Tirelli U, Errante D, Dolcetti R, et al. Hodgkin's Disease and Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection: Clinicopatholgic and Virologic Features of 114 Patients From the Italian Cooperative Group on AIDS and Tumors. J Clin Oncol 1995; 13:1758-67. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract:

This paper provides the historical, cultural, and clinical context for the relationship between Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) and Rudolf Ekstein (1912–2005). Both were Viennese-born and trained intellectuals who received doctorates in the human sciences from the University of Vienna in 1937. Both were deeply identified with lay analysis, emphasizing that for psychoanalysis to perpetuate itself it needed to promote serious and rigorous forms of research. Because Bettelheim was the better known of the two, this introduction focuses on Ekstein's family history, with special emphasis on his experience of loss and trauma and his capacity to recover from personal and educational obstacles. It argues that Ekstein was a representative product of Austro-Marxism in the period between the wars, embracing the ethical brand of democratic socialism and group solidarity that was integral to the theory and practice of Austrian Social Democracy. It discusses Ekstein's training with Moritz Schlick in philosophy and his immersion in the Vienna Circle of logical positivism. From Schlick, Ekstein evolved into a philosophical thinker who learned how to think his own thoughts. Ekstein joined the circle of psychoanalytic pedagogues who clustered around the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, under the tutelage of Willi Hoffer,August Aichhorn and, above all, Anna Freud. The clinical component of psychoanalysis emanated from his commitment to understanding the inner world of the child. Bettelheim and Ekstein first became aware of each other from reading the analytic literature and finally met in America in the 1950s. They shared a professional interest in conducting research and doing clinical work on severely disturbed children and adolescents, including those with psychotic, borderline and autistic diagnoses. They debated the value of milieu therapy versus psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy on such children. As their relationship evolved, the two collaborated and began a fascinating correspondence that gradually evolved into an intimate friendship. They both engaged in a polemic with Bernard Rimland, who was massively critical of their clinical work and a hostile critic of psychoanalytic approaches to the treatment of disturbed children. Rimland was an advocate of a neurological approach to mental illness, with an emphasis on biology and psychopharmacology. The 22 letters that constitute the Bettelheim-Ekstein exchange began with clinical concerns, including the varieties of solitude, isolation and countertransference disruptions that may trouble the psychoanalytic researcher and clinician in dealing with primitively disordered children. It moves to other issues, including mutual support during the Rimland Affair. As the two became more friendly, a pattern of good-natured competition and envy appeared. The two engaged in a heated exchange on the question of whether contemporary Vienna remained as anti-Semitic as it had been in their respective youths: Bettelheim, the concentration camp survivor, argued that nothing had changed and that most Austrians remained viscerally anti-Semitic; Ekstein, the Austro-Marxist, contended that one could not blame a generation born after World War II, holding that in his experience many Austrians had examined their consciences and held distinctly different opinions from their parents or grandparents. Toward the end of their correspondence, we encounter Ekstein's tender sensitivity to Bettelheim's descent into depression as a result of the death of his wife, Trude, leading eventually to recurrent episodes of suicidal ideation and plans for his own suicide. The letters testify to a unique friendship with a somewhat old-world quality.

Abstract:

Background:The Assessment of SpondyloArthritis international Society (ASAS) has defined separate core sets for: i) symptom-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (SM-ARD), ii) clinical record keeping, and iii) disease-controlling anti-rheumatic therapy (DC-ART). These all include the following domains: ‘physical function’, ‘pain’, ‘spinal mobility’, ‘spinal stiffness’ and ‘patient global assessment’ (PGA). The core set for clinical record keeping further includes the domains ‘peripheral joints’ and ‘acute phase reactants’, and the core set for DC-ART further includes the domains ‘fatigue’, ‘spine/hip radiographs’.Objectives:To assess the effect of interventions for each of the 9 axSpA core domains.Methods:We investigated the efficacy across all interventions included in Cochrane reviews according to the core outcome set for axSpA, as reported in these eligible axSpA trials. We combined data using the standardized mean difference (SMD) to meta-analyze outcomes involving similar constructs. By meta-regression analysis, we examined the effect for each of the nine separate SMD measures on the primary endpoint across all trials.Results:Among 85 articles screened, we included 43 trials with 63 randomized comparisons. Mean (SD) number of core outcomes domains measured for SM-ARD trials was 4.2 (1.7). 6 trials assessed all 5 proposed domains. Mean (SD) for number of core outcome domains for DC-ART trials was 5.8 (1.7). Unfortunately, no trials assessed all 9 domains. 8 trials were judged to have high risk of selective outcome reporting. The most responsible core domains for achieving success in meeting the primary objective per trial were pain; OR (95% CI) 5.19 (2.28, 11.77) and PGA; OR (95% CI) 1.87 (1.14, 3.07).Conclusion:Overall outcome reporting was good for SM-ARD trials, and poor for DC-ART trials. None of the DC-ART trials assessed all 9 domains. Outcome-reporting bias and ‘missing data’ should be reduced by implementing the endorsed ASAS/OMERACT outcome domains in all clinical trials. Our findings suggest that PGA and pain likely provide a holistic assessment of disease beyond “objective measures” of spinal inflammation.Disclosure of Interests:Rikke Asmussen Andreasen: None declared, Lars Erik Kristensen Consultant of: UCB Pharma (Advisory Board), Sannofi (Advisory Board), Abbvie (Advisory Board), Biogen (Advisory Board), Speakers bureau: AbbVie, Amgen, Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb,Celgene, Eli Lilly, Gilead, Forward Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, and UCB Pharma, Xenofon Baraliakos Grant/research support from: Grant/research support from: AbbVie, BMS, Celgene, Chugai, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, UCB and Werfen, Consultant of: AbbVie, BMS, Celgene, Chugai, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, UCB and Werfen, Speakers bureau: AbbVie, BMS, Celgene, Chugai, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, UCB and Werfen, Vibeke Strand Consultant of: AbbVie, Amgen, Biogen, Celltrion, Consortium of Rheumatology Researchers of North America, Crescendo Bioscience, Eli Lilly, Genentech/Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, Hospira, Janssen, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Sanofi, UCB, Philip J Mease Grant/research support from: Abbott, Amgen, Biogen Idec, BMS, Celgene Corporation, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Sun Pharmaceutical, UCB – grant/research support, Consultant of: Abbott, Amgen, Biogen Idec, BMS, Celgene Corporation, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Sun Pharmaceutical, UCB – consultant, Speakers bureau: Abbott, Amgen, Biogen Idec, BMS, Eli Lilly, Genentech, Janssen, Pfizer, UCB – speakers bureau, Maarten de Wit Grant/research support from: Dr. de Wit reports personal fees from Ely Lilly, 2019, personal fees from Celgene, 2019, personal fees from Pfizer, 2019, personal fees from Janssen-Cilag, 2017, outside the submitted work., Consultant of: Dr. de Wit reports personal fees from Ely Lilly, 2019, personal fees from Celgene, 2019, personal fees from Pfizer, 2019, personal fees from Janssen-Cilag, 2017, outside the submitted work., Speakers bureau: Dr. de Wit reports personal fees from Ely Lilly, 2019, personal fees from Celgene, 2019, personal fees from Pfizer, 2019, personal fees from Janssen-Cilag, 2017, outside the submitted work., Torkell Ellingsen: None declared, Inger Marie Jensen Hansen: None declared, Jamie Kirkham: None declared, George Wells: None declared, Peter Tugwell: None declared, Lara Maxwell: None declared, Maarten Boers: None declared, Kenneth Egstrup: None declared, Robin Christensen Grant/research support from: Dr. Christensen reports non-financial support from Board membership, grants from Consultancy (AbbVie, Amgen, Axellus A/S, Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Hospira, MSD, Norpharma, Novartis, Orkla Health, Pfizer, Roche, Sobi, Takeda), personal fees from Employment (Research Unit for Musculoskeletal Function and Physiotherapy, Institute of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark), non-financial support from Expert testimony, grants from Grants/grants pending (Axellus A/S, AbbVie, Cambridge Weight Plan, Janssen, MSD, Mundipharma, Novartis, and Roche), grants from Payment for lectures including service on speakers bureaus (Abbott, Amgen, Axellus, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, Biogen Idec, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Ipsen, Janssen, Laboratoires Expanscience, MSD, Mundipharma, Norpharma, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Rottapharm-Madaus, Sobi, and Wyeth), grants from Payment for manuscript preparation (Axellus, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Cambridge Weight Plan, Aleris-Hamlet (via Norpharma)), non-financial support from Patents (planned, pending or issued), non-financial support from Royalties, grants from Payment for development of educational presentations (Bristol-Myers Squibb, MSD, Pfizer), non-financial support from Stock/stock options, grants from Travel/accommodations/meeting expenses unrelated to activities listed (Abbott, AbbVie, Axellus, Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Celgene, Laboratoires Expanscience, Norpharma, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Rottapharm-Madaus, and Wyeth), non-financial support from Other (err on the side of full disclosure), outside the submitted work; and I am involved in many health-care initiatives and research that could benefit from wide uptake of this publication (including Cochrane, OMERACT, IDEOM, RADS, and the GRADE Working Group).Musculoskeletal Statistics Unit, The Parker Institute is grateful for the financial support received from public and private foundations, companies and private individuals over the years. The Parker Institute is supported by a core grant from the Oak Foundation; The Oak Foundation is a group of philanthropic organizations that, since its establishment in 1983, has given grants to not-for-profit organizations around the world.., Consultant of: Dr. Christensen reports non-financial support from Board membership, grants from Consultancy (AbbVie, Amgen, Axellus A/S, Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Hospira, MSD, Norpharma, Novartis, Orkla Health, Pfizer, Roche, Sobi, Takeda), personal fees from Employment (Research Unit for Musculoskeletal Function and Physiotherapy, Institute of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark), non-financial support from Expert testimony, grants from Grants/grants pending (Axellus A/S, AbbVie, Cambridge Weight Plan, Janssen, MSD, Mundipharma, Novartis, and Roche), grants from Payment for lectures including service on speakers bureaus (Abbott, Amgen, Axellus, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, Biogen Idec, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Ipsen, Janssen, Laboratoires Expanscience, MSD, Mundipharma, Norpharma, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Rottapharm-Madaus, Sobi, and Wyeth), grants from Payment for manuscript preparation (Axellus, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Cambridge Weight Plan, Aleris-Hamlet (via Norpharma)), non-financial support from Patents (planned, pending or issued), non-financial support from Royalties, grants from Payment for development of educational presentations (Bristol-Myers Squibb, MSD, Pfizer), non-financial support from Stock/stock options, grants from Travel/accommodations/meeting expenses unrelated to activities listed (Abbott, AbbVie, Axellus, Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Celgene, Laboratoires Expanscience, Norpharma, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Rottapharm-Madaus, and Wyeth), non-financial support from Other (err on the side of full disclosure), outside the submitted work; and I am involved in many health-care initiatives and research that could benefit from wide uptake of this publication (including Cochrane, OMERACT, IDEOM, RADS, and the GRADE Working Group).Musculoskeletal Statistics Unit, The Parker Institute is grateful for the financial support received from public and private foundations, companies and private individuals over the years. The Parker Institute is supported by a core grant from the Oak Foundation; The Oak Foundation is a group of philanthropic organizations that, since its establishment in 1983, has given grants to not-for-profit organizations around the world.., Speakers bureau: Dr. Christensen reports non-financial support from Board membership, grants from Consultancy (AbbVie, Amgen, Axellus A/S, Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Hospira, MSD, Norpharma, Novartis, Orkla Health, Pfizer, Roche, Sobi, Takeda), personal fees from Employment (Research Unit for Musculoskeletal Function and Physiotherapy, Institute of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark), non-financial support from Expert testimony, grants from Grants/grants pending (Axellus A/S, AbbVie, Cambridge Weight Plan, Janssen, MSD, Mundipharma, Novartis, and Roche), grants from Payment for lectures including service on speakers bureaus (Abbott, Amgen, Axellus, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, Biogen Idec, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Ipsen, Janssen, Laboratoires Expanscience, MSD, Mundipharma, Norpharma, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Rottapharm-Madaus, Sobi, and Wyeth), grants from Payment for manuscript preparation (Axellus, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Cambridge Weight Plan, Aleris-Hamlet (via Norpharma)), non-financial support from Patents (planned, pending or issued), non-financial support from Royalties, grants from Payment for development of educational presentations (Bristol-Myers Squibb, MSD, Pfizer), non-financial support from Stock/stock options, grants from Travel/accommodations/meeting expenses unrelated to activities listed (Abbott, AbbVie, Axellus, Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cambridge Weight Plan, Celgene, Laboratoires Expanscience, Norpharma, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Rottapharm-Madaus, and Wyeth), non-financial support from Other (err on the side of full disclosure), outside the submitted work; and I am involved in many health-care initiatives and research that could benefit from wide uptake of this publication (including Cochrane, OMERACT, IDEOM, RADS, and the GRADE Working Group).Musculoskeletal Statistics Unit, The Parker Institute is grateful for the financial support received from public and private foundations, companies and private individuals over the years. The Parker Institute is supported by a core grant from the Oak Foundation; The Oak Foundation is a group of philanthropic organizations that, since its establishment in 1983, has given grants to not-for-profit organizations around the world.

Abstract:

This book is a collection of essays written by a variety of experts on Turkey and social movements and provides a critical analysis of the role of the Gülen Movement (GM)—or Hizmet (“service”), as it is referred to by its adherents—in the coup attempt which was undertaken by one or more factions of the Turkish armed forces in July 2016. Edited and contributed to by M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci, this work began at a conference in October of 2016, where these experts gathered to discuss the coup itself as well as its implications and ramifications. The chapters in the book all build off of each other to some degree, with earlier chapters covering the history of the GM and the ways in which it has acquired influence both in Turkey and abroad; the coup and structural factors both within Turkish society; and the GM alliance with the Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current president of Turkey. Later chapters expand in scope, covering the foreign policy implications of the coup both for Turkey and the United States, where Fethullah Gülen, the eponymous leader of the movement, resides today. Several chapters engage the state of the scholarship on the GM itself, effectively unpacking the ways in which the organization has actively co-opted academia by offering paid trips to Turkey, publishing non-peer-reviewed material, and funding conferences which avoid critical analysis of the GM. In the introduction Balci and Yavuz discuss the history of the Turkish state, giving particular focus to the place of religion under Kemal Atatürk; the pair discusses how the Turkish concept of secularism hews much more closely to the Jacobin tradition than the Anglo-American understanding. This is quite important as the alliance between the AKP and the GM (following Turkish elections in 2002 wherein the AKP swept to power) rested on a shared desire to overthrow the Kemalist conception of secularism, which seeks to dominate religion and prevent its expression in the public sphere. The book’s first chapter, written by Yavuz, charts the GM’s development over time, enumerating three key stages in its history. The first was that of a loosely bound religious network, encouraged by their leader to do good works; the second marked the expansion of the GM both within and outside of Turkey as an education-providing and media powerhouse; the third saw the GM create a parallel state structure in Turkey, which was mobilized to further increase the movement’s power throughout the 2000s and this current decade, most famously during the coup itself, though a variety of other incidents are discussed here and throughout the book. The next chapter details the coup itself, giving background which is necessary to understand the rest of the work and underlining four key junctures which put Turkey on the path to the July 15th event. The chapter’s author, Mujeeb R. Khan, notes that the structure of Turkish institutions (particularly its version of secularism), the continued domination of the Turkish deep state following the introduction of multi-party elections several decades ago, the neo-liberal opening Turkey experienced in the 1980s, and the rise of the AKP in the early 2000s all played integral roles in the rise of the GM and, eventually, the coup. Yavuz collaborated with Rasim Koç to write the third chapter, which examines the relationship between the GM and Erdoğan’s AKP (beginning with the unspoken alliance between the two which started after AKP’s 2002 electoral victory and whose disintegration led to the coup) as well as foreign policy consequences it had for Turkey. Chapters 4 and 5, written by Michael A. Reynolds and Kiliç Kanat, examine the coup, including the factors and events which led to both its occurrence and its failure. Kanat’s examination of why the coup failed is particularly interesting; he compares and contrasts the failure with previous successful coups which occurred in Turkey during the mid- to late-twentieth century. The next chapter, written by Caroline Tee, returns specifically to the topic of the AKP-GM relationship, digging deeply into the events which caused what on the surface seemed like a natural alliance to fracture and, during 2016, turn upon itself. Sabine Dreher’s chapter follows Tee’s, and is one of the most theoretical in the book, as it places the GM in the contexts of neoliberal and globalist theory, and notes internal contradictions within the movement itself. She considers how the global goals of the organization—the eradication of ignorance through educational work, the alleviation of poverty through private enterprise run by movement members, and the hosting of intercultural and interfaith dialogue— stand at odds with the nationalist project of the GM in Turkey, where movement members attempted to seize control of the state they had been infiltrating for some time as opposed to working outside of it. Balci wrote the eighth chapter, which deals with the GM movement’s presence in former Soviet satellites, namely Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Following the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government pressured all of these states to shut down any GM movement activities within their countries, which was difficult as the GM provided excellent education to the children of elites in these nations. He then charts the differing reactions of the states mentioned above. The ninth chapter, by David Tittensor, turns to the structure of the GM and how secrecy and hierarchy play crucial roles in it, a reality which is often denied by the majority of scholarship—though he and other contributors to the work might dispute the use of the term “scholarship”, or at least qualify it. He does end his chapter with a criticism of the theory that GM members were key leaders of the coup, a conclusion which is at odds with that of most other contributors to the volume. The tenth chapter, by Yavuz Çobanoĝlu, provides insight into the role of women in the GM, criticizing some of Gülen’s writings and detailing the experiences of female students living in GM dormitories in Turkey, an experience that many of the women surveyed found to be repressive. Kristina Dohrn’s contribution outlines the activities and role of the GM movement in Tanzania, which, similar to Balci’s chapter, deals with repercussions of the coup and examines potential paths forward for the GM outside of Turkey. The work’s final chapter, written by Joshua Hendrick, is about how the GM presented itself as a “good” Islam in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, during a period in which the West writ large was searching for a “modern” version of the religion which it could champion in opposition to extremism. He effectively critiques the idea that religion itself can be good or bad, and rightly puts the onus on the actors themselves. The book ends with a postscript which examines the four major theories about how the coup may have come to pass, and comes to the conclusion that GM members were central and sole actors in the coup, which was in all likelihood approved by Gülen himself. This work does an excellent job of unpacking the GM and its various religious and political facets, even for the relatively uninitiated reader, and pushes back strongly against what it identifies as the prevailing anti-Erdoĝan Western narratives about the coup, which try to shift blame away from the GM and onto the shoulders of other actors, including the AKP leader. Particularly interesting is the book’s criticism of GM-sponsored scholarship, which is cited as one of the primary ways in which the GM has ingratiated itself worldwide, as it frames the group as “good” Islam. The work refrains from being speculative but does examine possible futures for the GM, mostly outside of Turkey, as the country’s government has gone to extreme lengths to uproot the movement in its homeland—lengths that the authors do rightly criticize as going too far, if somewhat tepidly at times. The US-Turkey relationship as it relates to the GM issue, specifically hisresidence in the US, is also examined in some depth and leads a student of either Islam in the US or the country’s politics to wonder if the GM has successfully insinuated itself into any institutions here, as it has done in Turkey. The author of this review once believed that Erdoĝan may have permitted or even been behind the coup attempt as a vehicle to consolidate power, but the evidence and arguments presented by the authors of this work have swayed his point of view; the GM was almost certainly responsible for the coup attempt, and it seems likely that Gülen himself gave his blessing to the members of his movement who carried it out. Grant MarthinsenMA, Center for Contemporary Arab StudiesGeorgetown University

Abstract:

Both at the federal and state levels, tax credits have proved effective policy instruments to combat poverty, and they are at the heart of President Biden's massive initiative on childhood poverty. However, about one of every five children suffering poverty in the United States has an unauthorized immigrant parent and thus little or no access to tax credits. That is nearly two million children, and 85 percent of them are US citizens. Achieving historic reductions in childhood poverty thus will be impossible without remedying the eligibility exclusions and bureaucratic impediments that unauthorized immigrants face in the US tax system. All individuals who make money and reside in the United States are obliged to pay federal income taxes via a return filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). For unauthorized immigrants and others who do not qualify for a Social Security Number (SSN) that requires an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN). In this two-tier system, ITIN filers have the same income tax due as Social Security filers, but they do not receive the same credits. ITIN filers have never been eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and some of their children were excluded from the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in the Trump administration's 2017 tax bill. Both credits are highly effective anti-poverty programs, providing immediate relief while also incentivizing work and earnings. The tax credits are the critical policy tool in Biden's American Plan for reducing child poverty, and they would be funded through the budget reconicilation legislation devised by Congressional Democrats in the summer of 2021. As summer drew to a close, ITIN inclusion was beginning to enter the discussion among advocates and legislators about the bill's detailed provisions. But eligibility is not the only barrier. Internal government monitors have repeatedly criticized the IRS for heavy-handed and inefficient practices that have placed undue burdens on ITIN taxpayers and that have hindered compliance with the law. The use of ITINs has plummeted in recent years from a high of 4.6 million returns in 2014 to 2.5 million in 2020. Prompted by the economic losses and the medical toll suffered by unauthorized immigrants during the pandemic and by their newly valued roles as “essential workers,” the federal government and several state governments have taken important steps to lessen the exclusion of ITIN taxpayers. The first federal stimulus package excluded not only ITIN holders but also their family members with SSNs. Congress extended eligibility to members of ITIN households with SSNs for the second and third stimulus checks. Meanwhile, California, Colorado, Maryland, New Mexico, Washington, Maine, and Oregon broke with the federal government and made ITIN filers fully eligible for their state EITCs, and as of July 2021 similar measures were under consideration in four other states. Early evidence from California and Colorado suggests that ITIN inclusion could prove a highly effective means of reaching poor children with the benefits of a state EITC. Child poverty can only be attacked successfully if ITIN households receive equal access to federal and state tax credit programs. This can be accomplished if: Congress and state legislatures permit full eligibility for all EITC and CTC programs. Congress mandates reforms to the procedures for getting and keeping an ITIN that have been proposed in multiple reports to Congress by the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an internal monitor at the IRS. Immigrants’ rights advocates and other civil society organizations, with government support, undertake a multi-year campaign to encourage ITIN application and use. The IRS receives funding to support a greatly expanded ITIN program.

Abstract:

This paper examines the geo-political reaction to President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Inaugural Address, wherein he catalyzed post-war global development in the form of his Point Four program. Truman proposed sharing American scientific and technical expertise, ostensibly aimed at reducing or eliminating poverty in the developing world. Newspaper accounts and analysis of internal CIA documents reveal domestic and international responses to the policy initiative. Predictably, these responses mostly varied along early Cold War ideological lines. Examining Truman’s plan and other anti-communist American policies in the late 1940s reveals that although global development may have been a laudable effect of the plan, the primary aim was to prevent communism from spreading to countries viewed as vulnerable to subversion. The Cold War imperatives behind the plan seem to have been either implicitly assumed or ignored in the historiography. A brief sampling of Cold War historians shows a lack of explicit attention to Truman’s initiative.

Abstract:

Plant (vegetable) oils are renewable fluids. They have been developed to replace mineral-based fluids. Due to their distinguished features including eco-friendly properties and possibility of reducing the hydrocarbon and carbon dioxide emission when being used in the industrial processes or internal combustion (IC) engines, they are considered a sustainable source of biodegradable fluids. In this work, non-edible sunflower oil is investigated as a bio hydraulic fluid under various normal loads utilizing the four-ball tribotester. Considering the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM 4172-B) standard, all the experiments are conducted for different loads from 45 kg to 70 kg, the balk temperature was increased until 75°C, rotational speed to 1200 rpm and every experiment was run for one hour. Compared with the mineral-based fluid sample, the outcomes shown that the sunflower oil possesses sufficient properties (anti-wear and anti-friction) especially under lower than 60 kg as a normal load. The results also shown that the sunflower oil is capable to be utilized as a hydraulic fluid.

Abstract:

In 1996, the iconoclastic economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a manifesto, The Good Society, that elaborated his vision for what societal excellence and goodness should amount to. Though nearly 96, Galbraith was still a rabble-rouser, and he castigated the powers that be in the United States for propping up a “democracy of the fortunate” (8). To Galbraith, those who engaged in electoral politics, win or lose on any specific issue, tended to have all the social and economic advantages, while the less well off were deliberately marginalised by ‘the system.’ He lamented that “money, voice and political activism are now extensively controlled by the affluent, very affluent, and business interests" (140), making of the political sphere an "unequal contest" (8).To make democracy American style more inclusive, Galbraith called for “a coalition of the concerned and the compassionate and those now outside the political system” (143), so that all citizens had optimal prospects for enjoying “personal liberty, basic well-being, social and ethnic equality, the opportunity for a rewarding life" (4). Have inroads been made, in the nearly 15 years since first publication of The Good Society, in making come true Galbraith’s version of a good society? If not, how might such a coalition be achieved? What would it look like? Who among Americans would constitute the concerned, compassionate outsiders that would make such a coalition authentically ‘Galbraithian’? A Coalition on the MoveWhat about MoveOn.org? A progressive public advocacy group founded in 1998, MoveOn.org, according to Lelia Green in The Internet, is “an important indicator of the potential for bringing together communities of like-minded individuals” (139). Green singles out MoveOn.org as particularly pivotal in galvanising support for Barack Obama’s presidency (139). The New York Times describes MoveOn.org as “a bottom-up organization that has inserted itself into the political process in ways large and small” (Janofsky and Lee). Indeed, it represents “the next evolutionary change in American politics, a move away from one-way tools of influence like television commercials and talk radio to interactive dialogue, offering everyday people a voice in a process that once seemed beyond their reach.” MoveOn.org has expertly utilised the Internet to mobilise its members “to sign online petitions, organize street demonstrations and donate money to run political advertisem*nts”. Green considers MoveOn.org one of today’s standout “coalitions of interests and political agendas”, “extraordinary” in its ability to “use websites and email lists to build communities around a shared passion” (139). In 2008, its 4.2 million members were at the vortex of a “dynamic that tipped the balance in favour of a more radical agenda with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008” (139). Galbraith, for one, would certainly agree with MoveOn.org’s politics, and likely would claim that their radical agenda is a compassionate and encompassing one that effectively addresses the concerns of everyday citizens. Yet the fact is that millions of disaffected Americans are not liberals, and so are not in sync with MoveOn.org’s interests and agendas, such as its firm insistence that a ‘public option’ is the best way to bring about meaningful health care reform, and its demand that all U.S. troops be immediately withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. Tea Anyone?Another sort of coalition filled the void created by MoveOn.org. Enter the Tea Party. A movement that has been every bit as effective in its way in inspiring once-jaded ordinary citizens to coalesce around a set of interests and agendas – albeit, at least in principal if not necessarily in actual practice, of a professed libertarian strain – the Tea Party got underway in the waning days of the second presidential term of George W. Bush. It started out as a one-issue protest group voicing umbrage over the proposed economic stimulus plan, which it considered an unconstitutional subsidy. After Barack Obama became president, the Tea Party burgeoned into a much more influential movement that now professes to be a grassroots citizens’ watchdog for all unconstitutional activities (or what it deems to be such) on the part of the federal government. A New York Times article notes that many of its members are victims of the economic downturn; they “had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government” (Zernike). Its members are akin to the millions of middle class Americans who lost their livelihoods during the Great Depression of the 1930s, an unparalleled economic downturn that eventually “mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times” to join forces in order to have an effective political voice. But those during the Great Depression who were aroused to political consciousness “tended to push for more government involvement”; in contrast, the Tea Party is a coalition that “vehemently wants less”. While Galbraith depicted the Republican Party of his time as “avowedly on the side of the fortunate” (141), the majority of today’s Tea Party members align themselves with the Republican Party, yet they are by no means principally made up of "the fortunate." Erick Erickson, a prominent Tea Party spokesman and a television commentator for the CNN news channel, blogs on Redstate.com that the Tea Party “has gotten a lot of people off the sidelines and into the political arena...” Erickson further contends that the Tea Party has “brought together a lot of likeminded citizens who thought they were alone in the world. They realized that not only were they not alone, but there were millions of others just as concerned.” Galbraithian Coalitions?Do MoveOn.org and Tea Party constitute Galbraithian-type coalitions, each in its own right? Both have inspired millions of once-disenchanted common citizens to come together around common political concerns and become a force to be reckoned with in electoral politics. As such, each has served as an effective counterweight against the money, voice and political activism of the very affluent. While Galbraith would probably have as much disdain for the Tea Party as he would have praise for MoveOn.org, the fact is that both groups have seen to it that an increasing number of regular Americans whose concerns had been ignored in the political arena now have to be reckoned with. But this is by no means where their commonality ends. Above and beyond the fact that both are comprised of millions who had been political outsiders, each has a decided anti-establishmentarian strain, along with a professed sense of alienation from and disdain for "politics as usual" and an impassioned belief in the right to self-government (though they differ on what this right amounts to). Moreover, both consider themselves grassroots-driven, and harbor anathema for professional lobbying organisations, which both regularly criticize for their undue political influence. Even though the two groups usually differ to the nth degree when it comes to those solutions they believe would effectively remedy the most pressing public problems in the U.S., they nonetheless share the conviction that one must initially focus one’s efforts at the local level if one is eventually to have the greatest impact on political decision-making on a national scale. The two groups came of age during the Internet revolution – indeed, it would have been impossible for their like-minded members to have found one another and coalesced so quickly and in such great numbers without the Internet – and they utilise the Internet as the principal tool for spurring concerted activism at the local level among their members. One can consider their shared approach Deweyan, in that Dewey maintained that genuinely democratic community, “in its deepest and richest sense, must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse” (367). Yet the two groups’ legion differences prevent them from engaging in meaningful face-to-face exchanges with one another. While the prospect of cultivating linkages between Tea Party and MoveOn.org are remote for the foreseeable future, it might nonetheless be seen as a promising development that some rank and file Tea Party acolytes do at least recognise that they must not identify solely with the Republican Party, lest they discourage potential recruits from rallying around their cause. For instance, one warns fellow members on the Redstate.com blog to be wary of casting their lot with Republicans, “because it would drive away the Democrats and Independents”. He actually uses Galbraith’s coinage in describing the Tea Party: “This movement is a coalition of the concerned, not a Republican outreach program.” Indeed, contrary to popular belief, the Tea Party is not, as a whole, on the conservative fringe (though it does often seem that those members who are given the most attention by the mainstream media are the fringe element, particularly the breakaway Tea Party Express). A Gallup Poll reveals that fully 17 percent of all Americans of voting age identify themselves as affiliated with the Tea Party; and while a majority have Republican leanings, fully 45 percent of all Tea Party members claimed they were either Democrats (17 percent) or independents (28 percent). To Tea Party leader Erick Erickson, the paramount challenge today for the Tea Party is for it to transform itself into a greater umbrella coalition, since the “issues and advocacy within the tea party movement are issues that resonate with the majority of Americans.” After all, he asserts, the Tea Party’s is “a very American cause — the first amendment right to protest, petition, and speak up.” While an expansion of its coalition does not in any way make it incumbent for the Tea Party to find common cause with MoveOn.org, can the claim nonetheless be legitimately made – utilising Erickson’s own criteria – that MoveOn.org’s is equally a very American cause? Christopher Hayes points out in an essay in The Nation that most of MoveOn.org’s members, as with the Tea Party’s, are “not inclined to protest,” but their “rising unease with the direction of the country has led to a new political consciousness.” Hayes could just as well be speaking of the Tea Party when he describes MoveOn.org’s members as made up mostly of “citizens angered, upset and disappointed with their government but [who were] unsure how to channel those sentiments.” For such citizens, MoveOn.org “provides simple, discrete actions: sign this petition, donate money to run this ad, show up at this vigil.” This is convincing evidence that MoveOn.org’s is also “a very American cause”, by the very benchmarks set forth by Erickson. A ‘Higher Coalition’?But is this in any way akin to a demonstrable sign that these unlikeliest of political bedfellows might be inspired at some future point to see themselves as part of a ‘higher coalition’ — one of the unlikeminded, that celebrates difference? Might a critical mass in both movements ever deem it a boon to coalesce around the cause of democratic pluralism? As things stand, neither side embraces such pluralism. Rather, one other attribute they share pervasively is dogmatism: both are convinced that their respective political sensibilities are beyond reproach. As a consequence, over the shorter term, neither group is likely to shed its brand of dogmatism and supplant it with an openness or receptivity to new, much less opposing, points of view. So, for instance, even as the Tea Party seeks to expand its fold, it is no more inclined to change its ideology-based stances on the issues than is MoveOn.org. For the time being, each group not only is entrenched in its own collective political mindset, but each coalesces around a demonstrated antipathy towards alternative approaches to public problem-solving. Is there any remotely plausible scenario by which the members of MoveOn.org and Tea Party might eventually come not just to tolerate their differences but to extol them? One other key Galbraithian element that those comprising an ideal coalition in a democracy must possess is compassion. For members of any coalition to cultivate compassion, they must first, or concomitantly, inculcate empathy, which is typically considered either a precursor to compassion or, along with understanding, a vital component of it. Henning Melber, Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, and Reinhard Kössler maintain that “(w)hile empathy does not automatically translate into solidarity (nor into ethical behaviour), it can serve as a compass” for doing so, and can lead to a Galbraithian “coalition of the concerned and aware”(37). Such empathy is “a prerequisite for the ability to listen to one another and for permissiveness and openness towards ‘otherness’, and further, can only be born out of a sense of shared suffering” (37). To the authors, it isn’t just that “(s)uffering in its variety of forms requires empathy and solidarity by all,” but that it necessarily “transcends a politically correct ideology” (37). Millions in both the Tea Party and MoveOn.org long suffered from being a mere afterthought to the political establishment, both of them impacted by policies that they are convinced exacerbated rather than ameliorated their woes. But they have shown few if any indications of a willingness to transcend a politically correct ideology. For this to come about, it would, as Melber and Kössler maintain, require “hard, sustained, and imaginative work” (33). How might this come to pass? Greg Anderson, in The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C., points to ancient Athens as a paradigmatic example of a society that undertook the hard imaginative work needed to develop the types of mediated connections that over time created a sense of shared belonging to a democratic community. “The process of transformation” in Attica, he argues, is “best understood as a bold exercise in social engineering, an experiment designed to bring together the diverse and far-flung inhabitants of an entire region and forge them into a single, self-governing political community of like-minded individuals” (5). While those males of sufficient socioeconomic distinction who were privileged enough to be citizens in the West’s first experiment in democracy were indeed like-minded, prising a self-governing political community, they were not single-minded; rather, those in the twelve dispersed tribes throughout Attica who coalesced to form a self-governing community apparently thrived on the free exchange and consideration of a wide range of ideas. They held that greater insights emerged only when a variety of views were subjected to scrutiny in the public sphere. Paul Woodruff notes in First Democracy that each Athenian was “given a share of the ability to be citizens, and that ability is understood both as a pair of virtues and as a kind of citizen wisdom.” Governing in this way was based on the shared view that “it is a natural part of being human to know enough to help govern your community” (149). Neither Tea Party nor MoveOn.org followers at present have this shared view on any semblance of a broad scale; rather, each betrays the sensibility that each ‘knows better’. As a consequence, any efforts at expanding their respective folds clearly do not include making overtures (or even extending olive branches) to one another. Even so, as impossibly optimistic as it might seem under current circ*mstances, I believe eventually they might come to see themselves as part of a greater or higher coalition – one serving the overriding cause of democracy itself – over the much longer term. But for this to become a reality, each group will first have to suffer some more. One other commonality they demonstrate is the power of grassroots activism – and the decided limitations. My hunch is that just as MoveOn.org’s progressives came to feel betrayed when Obama abandoned the liberal agenda of his presidential campaign to engage in political compromise and accommodation, Tea Party activists will come to find that their own expectations for political change will be equally stymied. In the 2010 elections, the Tea Party was a kingmaker in electoral politics, giving Republicans a decisive majority in Congress in the 2010 elections. But I suspect that those candidates the Tea Party supported will eventually resort to the practice of “politics as usual,” largely departing from the Tea Party agenda, in order to accomplish anything in Washington or become irrelevant in the existing system – a system long dominated by two political parties interested above and beyond all else in perpetuating their shared stranglehold on political power, and each equally beholden to corporate America for the contributions to their coffers that enable them to sustain this. If this scenario plays out, then at least some Tea Party activists might plausibly arrive at the unsettling conclusion that their suffering in the political arena is remarkably similar to that experienced by MoveOn.org’s cadre of concerned citizens who catapulted Obama into the office in the land, only to have most of their principal concerns neglected or dismissed, lost in the seamy world of back-room political deal-making. There is another possible scenario: What if either MoveOn.org or Tea Party becomes such an overwhelming force in politics that the other is attenuated, its members relegated once again to the fringe? If this occurred, the public sphere in the United States would be missing a vital dimension that has been part of its makeup since its founding days. For as Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, points out: the achievement of the revolutionary generation was a collective enterprise that succeeded because of the diversity of personalities and ideologies present in the mix. Their interactions and juxtapositions generated a dynamic form of balance and equilibrium, not because any of them was perfect or infallible, but because their mutual imperfections and fallibilities, as well as their eccentricities and excesses, checked each other… . (17) At the United States’s beginnings, the ties that bound those who revolted against Britain were forged despite their unbridgeable chasms of ideology; their “differing postures toward the twin goals of freedom and equality” were “not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity” (16). Even or especially as irreconcilable differences prompted early Americans to continue waging a battle of ideas in the political trenches, Thomas Jefferson, for one, believed they were all (or nearly all) “constitutionally and conscientiously democrats” (185). Extrapolating from this, one can posit that MoveOn.org and Tea Party, regardless of whether they choose to acknowledge it, are in tandem a modern-day manifestation of the original American coalition. If they could be inspired to see that each is an important player in furthering the democratic experiment as singularly practiced in the U.S., they just might come to care more for one another. Out of such caring, they might realise that neither has a monopoly on political wisdom, and as a result coalesce around the cause of promoting a less hostile body politic. AcknowledgementsThe author is grateful to the two blind peer reviewers for their most helpful suggestions. ReferencesAnderson, Greg. The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Dewey, John. In J. Boydston (Ed.) John Dewey, Volume 2: 1925-1927. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 1984. Ellis, Joseph. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York, NY: Vintage. 2002. Erickson, Erick. “Tea Party Movement 2.0: Moving beyond Protesting to Fighting in Primaries, Ballot Boxes, and Becoming More Effective Activists.” 14 April 2010. 28 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/04/14/tea-party-movement-20/>.Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Good Society: The Humane Agenda. New York: Mariner Books, 1997. Green, Lelia. The Internet: An Introduction to New Media. Oxford: Berg, 2010.Hayes, Christopher. “MoveOn.org Is Not as Radical as Conservatives Think." The Nation. 16 July 2008. 28 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.thenation.com/article/moveonorg-not-radical-conservatives-think>. Janofsky, Michael, Jennifer B. Lee. “Net Group Tries to Click Democrats to Power”. New York Times, 18 Nov 2003. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/us/net-group-tries-to-click- democrats-to-power.html?scp=1&sq=%22bottom-up%20organization%22&st=cse>. Jefferson, Thomas. In M. Peterson, ed. The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Kossler, Reinhart, and Hening Melber. “International Civil Society and the Challenge for Global Solidarity.” Development Dialogue 49 (Oct. 2007): 29-39. Malcolm, Andrew. “Myth-Busting Polls: Tea Party Members Are Average Americans, 41% Are Democrats, Independents.” Los Angeles Times, 5 April 2010 ‹http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/04/tea-party-obama.html>.MoveOn.org. n.d. 27 Sep. 2010 ‹http://moveon.org>. Tea Party. n.d. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://teaparty.freedomworks.org>.Tea Party Express. n.d. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.teapartyexpress.org>. Woodruff, Paul. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Zernike, Kate. “With No Jobs, Plenty of Time for Tea Party.” New York Times, 27 Mar. 2010. 29 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/politics/28teaparty.html?scp=1&sq=%22watched%20their%20homes%20plummet%20in%20value%22&st=cse>.

Abstract:

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

Abstract:

Introduction The scientific validity of climate change claims, how to intervene (if at all) in environmental, economic, political and social consequences of climate change, and the adaptation and mitigation needed with any given climate change scenario, are contested areas of public, policy and academic discourses. For marginalised populations, the climate discourses around adaptation, mitigation, vulnerability and resilience are of particular importance. This paper considers the silence around disabled people in these discourses. Marci Roth of the Spinal Cord Injury Association testified before Congress in regards to the Katrina disaster: [On August 29] Susan Daniels called me to enlist my help because her sister in-law, a quadriplegic woman in New Orleans, had been unsuccessfully trying to evacuate to the Superdome for two days. […] It was clear that this woman, Benilda Caixetta, was not being evacuated. I stayed on the phone with Benilda, for the most part of the day. […] She kept telling me she’d been calling for a ride to the Superdome since Saturday; but, despite promises, no one came. The very same paratransit system that people can’t rely on in good weather is what was being relied on in the evacuation. […] I was on the phone with Benilda when she told me, with panic in her voice “the water is rushing in.” And then her phone went dead. We learned five days later that she had been found in her apartment dead, floating next to her wheelchair. […] Benilda did not have to drown. (National Council on Disability, emphasis added) According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), adaptation is the “Adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities” (IPCC, Climate Change 2007). Adaptations can be anticipatory or reactive, and depending on their degree of spontaneity they can be autonomous or planned (IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report). Adaptations can be private or public (IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report), technological, behavioural, managerial and structural (National Research Council of Canada). Adaptation, in the context of human dimensions of global change, usually refers to a process, action or outcome in a system (household, community, group, sector, region, country) in order for that system to better cope with, manage or adjust to some changing condition, stress, hazard, risk or opportunity (Smit and Wandel). Adaptation can encompass national or regional strategies as well as practical steps taken at the community level or by individuals. According to Smit et al, a framework for systematically defining adaptations is based on three questions: (i) adaptation to what; (ii) who or what adapts; and (iii) how does adaptation occur? These are essential questions that have to be looked at from many angles including cultural and anthropological lenses as well as lenses of marginalised and highly vulnerable populations. Mitigation (to reduce or prevent changes in the climate system), vulnerability (the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, the adverse effects of climate change), and resilience (the amount of change a system can undergo without changing state), are other important concepts within the climate change discourse. Non-climate stresses can increase vulnerability to climate change by reducing resilience and can also reduce adaptive capacity because of resource deployment to competing needs. Extending this to the context of disabled people, ableism (sentiment to expect certain abilities within humans) (Wolbring, “Is there an end to out-able?”) and disablism (the unwillingness to accommodate different needs) (Miller, Parker and Gillinson) are two concepts that will thus play themselves out in climate discourses. The “Summary for Policymakers” of the IPCC 2007 report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, states: “Poor communities can be especially vulnerable, in particular those concentrated in high-risk areas. They tend to have more limited adaptive capacities, and are more dependent on climate-sensitive resources such as local water and food supplies.” From this quote one can conclude that disabled people are particularly impacted, as the majority of disabled people live in poverty (Elwan). For instance, CARE International, a humanitarian organisation fighting global poverty, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Maplecroft, a company that specialises in the calculation, analysis and visualisation of global risks, conclude: “The degree of vulnerability is determined by underlying natural, human, social, physical and financial factors and is a major reason why poor people—especially those in marginalised social groups like women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities—are most affected by disasters” (CARE International). The purpose of this paper is to expose the reader to (a) how disabled people are situated in the culture of the climate, adaptation, mitigation and resilience discourse; (b) how one would answer the three questions, (i) adaptation to what, (ii) who or what adapts, and (iii) how does adaptation occur (Smit et al), using a disabled people lens; and (c) what that reality of the involvement of disabled people within the climate change discourse might herald for other groups in the future. The paper contends that there is a pressing need for the climate discourse to be more inclusive and to develop a new social contract to modify existing dynamics of ableism and disablism so as to avoid the uneven distribution of evident burdens already linked to climate change. A Culture of Neglect: The Situation of Disabled People As climates changes, environmental events that are classified as natural disasters are expected to be more frequent. In the face of recent disaster responses, how effective have these efforts been as they relate to the needs and challenges faced by disabled people? Almost immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the National Council on Disability (NCD) in the United States estimated that 155,000 people with disabilities lived in the three cities hardest hit by the hurricane (about 25 per cent of the cities’ populations). The NCD urged emergency managers and government officials to recognise that the need for basic necessities by hurricane survivors with disabilities was “compounded by chronic health conditions and functional impairments … [which include] people who are blind, people who are deaf, people who use wheelchairs, canes, walkers, crutches, people with service animals, and people with mental health needs.” The NCD estimated that a disproportionate number of fatalities were people with disabilities. They cited one statistic from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP): “73 per cent of Hurricane Katrina-related deaths in New Orleans area were among persons age 60 and over, although they comprised only 15 per cent of the population in New Orleans.” As the NCD stated, “most of those individuals had medical conditions and functional or sensory disabilities that made them more vulnerable. Many more people with disabilities under the age of 60 died or were otherwise impacted by the hurricanes.” As these numbers are very likely linked to the impaired status of the elderly, it seems reasonable to assume similar numbers for non-elderly disabled people. Hurricane Katrina is but one example of how disabled people are neglected in a disaster (Hemingway and Priestley; Fjord and Manderson). Disabled people were also disproportionately impacted in other disasters, such as the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan (Nakamura) or the 2003 heatwave in France, where 63 per cent of heat-related deaths occurred in institutions, with a quarter of these in nursing homes (Holstein et al.). A review of 18 US heatwave response plans revealed that although people with mental or chronic illnesses and the homeless constitute a significant proportion of the victims in recent heatwaves, only one plan emphasised outreach to disabled persons, and only two addressed the shelter and water needs of the homeless (Ebi and Meehl; Bernhard and McGeehin). Presence of Disabled People in Climate Discourse Although climate change will disproportionately impact disabled people, despite the less than stellar record of disaster adaptation and mitigation efforts towards disabled people, and despite the fact that other social groups (such as women, children, ‘the poor’, indigenous people, farmers and displaced people) are mentioned in climate-related reports such as the IPCC reports and the Human Development Report 2007/2008, the same reports do not mention disabled people. Even worse, the majority of the material generated by, and physically set up for, discourses on climate, is inaccessible for many disabled people (Australian Human Rights Commission). For instance, the IPCC report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, contains Box 8.2: Gender and natural disasters, makes the following points: (a) “men and women are affected differently in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception; to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response; physical, psychological, social and economic impacts; emergency response; and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction”; (b) “natural disasters have been shown to result in increased domestic violence against, and post-traumatic stress disorders in, women”; and (c) “women make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery.” The content of Box 8.2 acknowledges the existence of different perspectives and contributions to the climate discourse, and that it is beneficial to explore these differences. It seems reasonable to assume that differences in perspectives, contributions and impact may well also exist between people with and without disabilities, and that it may be likewise beneficial to explore these differences. Disabled people are differently affected in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception; to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response; physical, psychological, social and economic impacts; emergency response; and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction. Disabled people could also make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery, important as distributors of relief efforts and in reconstruction design. The Bonn Declaration from the 2007 international conference, Disasters are always Inclusive: Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Emergency Situations, highlighted many problems disabled people are facing and gives recommendations for inclusive disaster preparedness planning, for inclusive response in acute emergency situations and immediate rehabilitation measures, and for inclusive post-disaster reconstruction and development measures. Many workshops were initiated by disabled people groups, such as Rehabilitation International. However, the disabled people disaster adaptation and mitigation discourse is not mainstreamed. Advocacy by people with disability for accessible transport and universal or “life-cycle” housing (among other things) shows how they can contribute significantly to more effective social systems and public facilities. These benefit everyone and help to shift public expectations towards accessible and flexible amenities and services—for example, emergency response and evacuation procedures are much easier for all if such facilities are universally accessible. Most suggestions by disabled people for a more integrative, accessible physical environment and societal attitude benefit everyone, and gain special importance with the ever-increasing proportion of elderly people in society. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is intended to be a balanced assessment of current knowledge on climate change mitigation. However, none of the 2007 IPCC reports mention disabled people. Does that mean that disabled people are not impacted by, or impact, climate change? Does no knowledge of adaptation, mitigation and adaptation capacity from a disabled people lens exist, or does the knowledge not reach the IPCC, or does the IPCC judge this knowledge as irrelevant? This culture of neglect and unbalanced assessment of knowledge evident in the IPCC reports was recognised before for rise of a ‘global’ climate discourse. For instance, a 2001 Canadian government document asked that research agendas be developed with the involvement of, among others, disabled people (Health Canada). The 2009 Nairobi Declaration on Africa’s response to climate change (paragraph 36) also asks for the involvement of disabled people (African Ministerial Conference on the Environment). However, so far nothing has trickled up to the international bodies, like the IPCC, or leading conferences such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009. Where Will It End? In his essay, “We do not need climate change apartheid in adaptation”, in the Human Development Report 2007/2008, Archbishop Desmond Tutu suggests that we are drifting into a situation of global adaptation apartheid—that adaptation becomes a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale (United Nations Development Programme). He uses the term “adaptation apartheid” to highlight the inequality of support for adaptation capacity between high and low income countries: “Inequality in capacity to adapt to climate change is emerging as a potential driver of wider disparities in wealth, security and opportunities for human development”. I submit that “adaptation apartheid” also exists in regard to disabled people, with the invisibility of disabled people in the climate discourse being just one facet. The unwillingness to accommodate, to help the “other,” is nothing new for disabled people. The ableism that favours species-typical bodily functioning (Wolbring, “Is there an end to out-able?”; Wolbring, “Why NBIC?”) and disablism (Miller, Parker, and Gillinson)—the lack of accommodation enthusiasm for the needs of people with ‘below’ species-typical body abilities and the unwillingness to adapt to the needs of “others”—is a form of “adaptation apartheid,” of accommodation apartheid, of adaptation disablism that has been battled by disabled people for a long time. In a 2009 online survey of 2000 British people, 38 per cent believed that most people in British society see disabled people as a “drain on resources” (Scope). A majority of human geneticist concluded in a survey in 1999 that disabled people will never be given the support they need (Nippert and Wolff). Adaptation disablism is visible in the literature and studies around other disasters. The 1988 British Medical Association discussion document, Selection of casualties for treatment after nuclear attack, stated “casualties whose injuries were likely to lead to a permanent disability would receive lower priority than those expected to fully recover” (Sunday Morning Herald). Famine is seen to lead to increased infanticide, increased competitiveness and decreased collaboration (Participants of the Nuclear Winter: The Anthropology of Human Survival Session). Ableism and disablism notions experienced by disabled people can now be extended to include those challenges expected to arise from the need to adapt to climate change. It is reasonable to expect that ableism will prevail, expecting people to cope with certain forms of climate change, and that disablism will be extended, with the ones less affected being unwilling to accommodate the ones more affected beyond a certain point. This ableism/disablism will not only play itself out between high and low income countries, as Desmond Tutu described, but also within high income countries, as not every need will be accommodated. The disaster experience of disabled people is just one example. And there might be climate change consequences that one can only mitigate through high tech bodily adaptations that will not be available to many of the ones who are so far accommodated in high income countries. Desmond Tutu submits that adaptation apartheid might work for the fortunate ones in the short term, but will be destructive for them in the long term (United Nations Development Programme). Disability studies scholar Erik Leipoldt proposed that the disability perspective of interdependence is a practical guide from the margins for making new choices that may lead to a just and sustainable world—a concept that reduces the distance between each other and our environment (Leipoldt). This perspective rejects ableism and disablism as it plays itself out today, including adaptation apartheid. Planned adaptation involves four basic steps: information development and awareness-raising; planning and design; implementation; and monitoring and evaluation (Smit et al). Disabled people have important knowledge to contribute to these four basic steps that goes far beyond their community. Their understanding and acceptance of, for example, the concept of interdependence, is just one major contribution. Including the concept of interdependence within the set of tools that inform the four basic steps of adaptation and other facets of climate discourse has the potential to lead to a decrease of adaptation apartheid, and to increase the utility of the climate discourse for the global community as a whole. References African Ministerial Conference on the Environment. Nairobi Declaration on the African Process for Combating Climate Change. 2009. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.unep.org/roa/Amcen/Amcen_Events/3rd_ss/Docs/nairobi-Decration-2009.pdf ›. American Association of Retired Persons. We Can Do Better: Lessons Learned for Protecting Older Persons in Disasters. 2009. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://assets.aarp.org/rgcenter/il/better.pdf ›. Australian Human Rights Commission. “Climate Change Secretariat Excludes People with Disabilities.” 2008. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about/media/media_releases/2008/95_08.html ›. Bernhard, S., and M. McGeehin. “Municipal Heatwave Response Plans.” American Journal of Public Health 94 (2004): 1520-21. CARE International, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Maplecroft. Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change: Mapping Emerging Trends and Risk Hotspots for Humanitarian Actors. CARE International, 2008. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.careclimatechange.org/files/reports/Human_Implications_PolicyBrief.pdf ›, ‹ http://www.careclimatechange.org/files/reports/CARE_Human_Implications.pdf ›. "Disasters Are Always Inclusive: Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Emergency Situations." Bonn Declaration from the International Conference: Disasters Are Always Inclusive: Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Emergency Situations. 2007. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.disabilityfunders.org/webfm_send/6, http://www.disabilityfunders.org/emergency_preparedness ›, ‹ http://bezev.de/bezev/aktuelles/index.htm ›. Ebi, K., and G. Meehl. Heatwaves and Global Climate Change: The Heat Is On: Climate Change and Heatwaves in the Midwest. 2007. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Regional-Impacts-Midwest.pdf ›. Elwan, A. Poverty and Disability: A Survey of the Literature. Worldbank, Social Protection Discussion Paper Series (1999): 9932. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DISABILITY/Resources/Poverty/Poverty_and_Disability_A_Survey_of_the_Literature.pdf ›. Fjord, L., and L. Manderson. “Anthropological Perspectives on Disasters and Disability: An Introduction.” Human Organisation 68.1 (2009): 64-72. Health Canada. First Annual National Health and Climate Change Science and Policy Research Consensus Conference: How Will Climate Change Affect Priorities for Your Health Science and Policy Research? Health Canada, 2001. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ewh-semt/pubs/climat/research-agenda-recherche/population-eng.php ›. Hemingway, L., and M. Priestley. “Natural Hazards, Human Vulnerability and Disabling Societies: A Disaster for Disabled People?” The Review of Disability Studies (2006). 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.rds.hawaii.edu/counter/count.php?id=13 ›. Holstein, J., et al. “Were Less Disabled Patients the Most Affected by the 2003 Heatwave in Nursing Homes in Paris, France?” Journal of Public Health Advance 27.4 (2005): 359-65. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. 2007. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_wg2_report_impacts_adaptation_and_vulnerability.htm ›. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Summary for Policymakers.” Eds. O. F. Canziani, J. P. Palutikof, P. J. van der Linden, C. E. Hanson, and M.L.Parry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 7-22. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-spm.pdf ›. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group III Report: Mitigation of Climate Change Glossary. 2007. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg3.htm, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-annex1.pdf ›. Leipoldt, E. “Disability Experience: A Contribution from the Margins. Towards a Sustainable Future.” Journal of Futures Studies 10 (2006): 3-15. Miller, P., S. Parker and S. Gillinson. “Disablism: How to Tackle the Last Prejudice.” Demos, 2004. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.demos.co.uk/files/disablism.pdf ›. Nakamura, K. “Disability, Destitution, and Disaster: Surviving the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan.” Human Organisation 68.1 (2009): 82-88. National Council on Disability, National Council on Independent Living, National Organization on Disability, and National Spinal Cord Injury Association and the Paralyzed Veterans of America. Emergency Management and People with Disabilities: before, during and after Congressional Briefing, 10 November 2005. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/2005/transcript_emergencymgt.htm ›. National Council on Disability. National Council on Disability on Hurricane Katrina Affected Areas. 2005. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/2005/katrina2.htm ›. National Research Council of Canada. From Impacts to Adaptation: Canada in a Changing Climate 2007. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/assess/2007/pdf/full-complet_e.pdf ›. Nippert, I. and G. Wolff. “Ethik und Genetik: Ergebnisse der Umfrage zu Problemaspekten angewandter Humangenetik 1994-1996, 37 Länder.” Medgen 11 (1999): 53-61. Participants of the Nuclear Winter: The Anthropology of Human Survival Session. Proceedings of the 84th American Anthropological Association's Annual Meeting. Washington, D.C., 6 Dec. 1985. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00173165.pdf ›. Scope. “Most Britons Think Others View Disabled People ‘As Inferior’.” 2009. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.scope.org.uk/cgi-bin/np/viewnews.cgi?id=1244379033, http://www.comres.co.uk/resources/7/Social%20Polls/Scope%20PublicPoll%20Results%20May09.pdf ›. Smit, B., et al. “The Science of Adaptation: A Framework for Assessment.” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 4 (1999): 199-213. Smit, B., and J. Wandel. “Adaptation, Adaptive Capacity and Vulnerability.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 282-92. Sunday Morning Herald. “Who Lives and Dies in Britain after the Bomb.” Sunday Morning Herald 1988. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19880511&id=wFYVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kOQDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3909,113100 ›. United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change – Human Solidarity in a Divided World. 2008. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_EN_Complete.pdf ›. Wolbring, Gregor. “Is There an End to Out-Able? Is There an End to the Rat Race for Abilities?” M/C Journal 11.3 (2008). 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/57 ›. Wolbring, Gregor. “Why NBIC? Why Human Performance Enhancement?” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 21.1 (2008): 25-40.

Abstract:

The main sources of Estonian history are predominantly stored in the Estonian archives, yet it is also impossible to ignore archival sources located in the archives of Russia when it comes to studying most topics of importance, particularly as regards the periods of the Russian Empire and the Estonian SSR. This article is concerned with the closed letter of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of July 16, 1947 regarding the accusations against Nina Klyueva and Grigorij Roskin that served as an excuse for Joseph Stalin to initiate a massive anti-Western campaign directed and to establish an official Soviet patriotism in society. The closed letter of 1947 is one of the key documents that enables us to understand the circ*mstances of the internal politics of the late Stalinist USSR in the context of the developments leading to a confrontation of superpowers – the Cold War. The organisational format of launching the campaign consisted in the so-called Courts of Honour that had been created upon the decree of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) from March 28, 1947 and tasked with revealing “antipatriotic” transgressions and deeds “directed against state and society” and with public condemnation of “those found guilty”. The Soviet Court of Honour was designed as a form of instructing society, a new means of restraining the growing dissent; it was to meant to discipline the officials of the Party and state apparatuses and particularly to keep the intellectuals within the required ideological limits. The first who were picked by Stalin as a warning example to be given a public condemnation were Professors Klyueva and Roskin, a married couple who already before the war had developed the so-called Preparation KR that was considered a promising cure for cancer. In 1946, the manuscript of a recently finalised monograph by Klyueva and Roskin on the topic of Preparation KR and a vial of the medicine were given to Americans under the auspices of scientific information exchange. This had been sanctioned by the authorities, but at the beginning of 1947 Stalin decided that it should be treated as betrayal of a state secret. Thus, an excuse, as well as the first “culprits” of a suitable category, was found to initiate a campaign against “those grovelling before the West“. It was launched on a broader scale with the help of the closed letter. The closed letter – an informative and instructive letter sent to the Party organisations by the Party’s Central Committee explained topical issues of internal and external politics and, if necessary, also provided concrete guidelines for action for the Party apparatus – was an important control mechanism for the Soviet leadership and remained a weapon in the arsenal of the Party apparatus until the Communist Party’s withdrawal from the limelight in 1990. The closed letter was a means for the Kremlin to implement a new policy at speed, mobilise the society, or exert an ideological influence on it, if required. Also in 1947, the closed letter proved a suitable means for Stalin to forward orders and information to guarantee the successful implementation of the anti-Western campaign. Preparations for the letter had been started by the apparatus of the Central Committee of the UCP(b) in May 1947, but the final polishes were given to it by Stalin who signed the document on July 16, 1947. After that, the letter was copied and sent to government institutions, party organisations of the Soviet republics, oblasts and krais according to a detailed plan of dissemination drawn up by the Central Committee of the UCP(b) – 9,500 numbered copies all in all. It was strictly forbidden to make additional copies of the letter; the existing copies were to be sent back to the Central Committee by a certain date upon which they were destroyed. The discussion of the closed letter in the republics, oblasts, krais and relevant institutions followed a pattern established in Moscow lasting mostly during the period from July to October 1947. The public was not informed about the closed letter, but keywords of the letter that were highlighted in the discussions – blabbers, grovelers, anti-patriotism, etc. – started to appear in the media. In this way, an ideological background was created for the social processes that would follow in the coming years and peak in the Estonian SSR in the year 1950. The campaign against “the grovelers before the West” resulted in a voluntary isolation of the Soviet Union from the rest of the world and seclusion behind the Iron Curtain. Its most disastrous results concerned research contacts that were virtually abolished on all levels. Research was even more clearly subjugated to the controlling political power, academic scholarly discussion was eliminated and the researchers endorsed by the Kremlin had a chance to crush their opponents. The secrecy in society increased to a considerable extent. Naturally, all these processes did not fail to influence the Sovietisation of the research and cultural life in the post-war Estonian SSR. Awareness of the closed letter, as well as the more general effect and backstage circ*mstances of the anti-Western campaign conducted by the Kremlin, is certainly necessary when studying Sovietisation in the Estonian SSR as it highlights new facets in the power balance of the centre and the Republic, while facilitating the understanding of Moscow’s activities in the subjugation and directing of the fields of research and culture in the republic. Hitherto, the studies of the effect of the closed letter of 1947 on these processes have remained modest in specialised literature.

Abstract:

Introduction The counterculture that arose during the 1960s and 1970s left lasting social and political reverberations in developed nations. This was a time of increasing affluence and liberalisation which opened up remarkable political opportunities for social change. Within this context, an array of new social movements were a vital ingredient of the ferment that saw existing norms challenged and the establishment of new rights for many oppressed groups. An expanding arena of concerns included the environmental damage caused by 200 years of industrial capitalism. This article examines one aspect of a current environment movement in Australia, the anti-Coal Seam Gas (CSG) movement, and the part played by participants. In particular, the focus is upon one action that emerged during the recent Bentley Blockade, which was a regional mobilisation against proposed unconventional gas mining (UGM) near Lismore, NSW. Over the course of the blockade, the conventional ritual of waving at passers-by was transformed into a mechanism for garnering broad community support. Arguably, this was a crucial factor in the eventual outcome. In this case, we contend that the wave, rather than a countercultural artefact being appropriated by the mainstream, represents an everyday behaviour that builds social solidarity, which is subverted to become an effective part of the repertoire of the movement. At a more general level, this article examines how counterculture and mainstream interact via the subversion of “ordinary” citizens and the role of certain cultural understandings for that purpose. We will begin by examining the nature of the counterculture and its relationship to social movements before discussing the character of the anti-CSG movement in general and the Bentley Blockade in particular, using the personal experience of one of the writers. We will then be able to explore our thesis in detail and make some concluding remarks. The Counterculture and Social Movements In this article, we follow Cox’s understanding of the counterculture as a kind of meta-movement within which specific social movements are situated. For Cox (105), the counterculture that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s was an overarching movement in which existing social relations—in particular the family—were rejected by a younger generation, who succeeded in effectively fusing previously separate political and cultural spheres of dissent into one. Cox (103-04) points out that the precondition for such a phenomenon is “free space”—conditions under which counter-hegemonic activity can occur—for example, being liberated from the constraints of working to subsist, something which the unprecedented prosperity of the post WWII years allowed. Hence, in the 1960s and 1970s, as the counterculture emerged, a wave of activism arose in the western world which later came to be referred to as new social movements. These included the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, pacifism and the anti-nuclear and environment movements. The new movements rejected established power and organisational structures and tended, some scholars argued, to cross class lines, basing their claims on non-material issues. Della Porta and Diani claim this wave of movements is characterised by: a critical ideology in relation to modernism and progress; decentralized and participatory organizational structures; defense of interpersonal solidarity against the great bureaucracies; and the reclamation of autonomous spaces, rather than material advantages. (9) This depiction clearly announces the countercultural nature of the new social movements. As Carter (91) avers, these movements attempted to bypass the state and instead mobilise civil society, employing a range of innovative tactics and strategies—the repertoire of action—which may involve breaking laws. It should be noted that over time, some of these movements did shift towards accommodation of existing power structures and became more reformist in nature, to the point of forming political parties in the case of the Greens. However, inasmuch as the counterculture represented a merging of distinctively non-mainstream ways of life with the practice of actively challenging social arrangements at a political level (Cox 18–19; Grossberg 15–18;), the tactic of mobilising civil society to join social movements demonstrates in fact a reverse direction: large numbers of people are transfigured in radical ways by their involvement in social movements. One important principle underlying much of the repertoire of action of these new movements was non-violence. Again, this signals countercultural norms of the period. As Sharp (583–86) wrote at the time, non-violence is crucial in that it denies the aggressor their rationale for violent repression. This principle is founded on the liberal notion, whose legacy goes back to Locke, that the legitimacy of the government rests upon the consent of the governed—that is, the people can withdraw their consent (Locke in Ball & Dagger 92). Ghandi also relied upon this idea when formulating his non-violent approach to conflict, satyagraha (Sharp 83–84). Thus an idea that upholds the modern state is adopted by the counterculture in order to undermine it (the state), again demonstrating an instance of counterflow from the mainstream. Non-violence does not mean non-resistance. In fact, it usually involves non-compliance with a government or other authority and when practised in large numbers, can be very effective, as Ghandi and those in the civil rights movement showed. The result will be either that the government enters into negotiation with the protestors, or they can engage in violence to suppress them, which generally alienates the wider population, leading to a loss of support (Finley & Soifer 104–105). Tarrow (88) makes the important point that the less threatening an action, the harder it is to repress. As a result, democratic states have generally modified their response towards the “strategic weapon of nonviolent protest and even moved towards accommodation and recognition of this tactic as legitimate” (Tarrow 172). Nevertheless, the potential for state violence remains, and the freedom to protest is proscribed by various laws. One of the key figures to emerge from the new social movements that formed an integral part of the counterculture was Bill Moyer, who, in conjunction with colleagues produced a seminal text for theorising and organising social movements (Moyer et al.). Many contemporary social movements have been significantly influenced by Moyer’s Movement Action Plan (MAP), which describes not only key theoretical concepts but is also a practical guide to movement building and achieving aims. Moyer’s model was utilised in training the Northern Rivers community in the anti-CSG movement in conjunction with the non-violent direct action (NVDA) model developed by the North-East Forest Alliance (NEFA) that resisted logging in the forests of north-eastern NSW during the late 1980s and 1990s (Ricketts 138–40). Indeed, the Northern Rivers region of NSW—dubbed the Rainbow Region—is celebrated, as a “‘meeting place’ of countercultures and for the articulation of social and environmental ideals that challenge mainstream practice” (Ward and van Vuuren 63). As Bible (6–7) outlines, the Northern Rivers’ place in countercultural history is cemented by the holding of the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973 and the consequent decision of many attendees to stay on and settle in the region. They formed new kinds of communities based on an alternative ethics that eschewed a consumerist, individualist agenda in favour of modes of existence that emphasised living in harmony with the environment. The Terania Creek campaign of the late 1970s made the region famous for its environmental activism, when the new settlers resisted the logging of Nightcap National Park using nonviolent methods (Bible 5). It was also instrumental in developing an array of ingenious actions that were used in subsequent campaigns such as the Franklin Dam blockade in Tasmania in the early 1980s (Kelly 116). Indeed, many of these earlier activists were key figures in the anti-CSG movement that has developed in the Rainbow Region over the last few years. The Anti-CSG Movement Despite opposition to other forms of UGM, such as tight sands and shale oil extraction techniques, the term anti-CSG is used here, as it still seems to attract wide recognition. Unconventional gas extraction usually involves a process called fracking, which is the injection at high pressure of water, sand and a number of highly toxic chemicals underground to release the gas that is trapped in rock formations. Among the risks attributed to fracking are contamination of aquifers, air pollution from fugitive emissions and exposure to radioactive particles with resultant threats to human and animal health, as well as an increased risk of earthquakes (Ellsworth; Hand 13; Sovacool 254–260). Additionally, the vast amount of water that is extracted in the fracking process is saline and may contain residues of the fracking chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive matter. This produced water must either be stored or treated (Howarth 273–73; Sovacool 255). Further, there is potential for accidents and incidents and there are many reports—particularly in the United States where the practice is well established—of adverse events such as compressors exploding, leaks and spills, and water from taps catching fire (Sovacool 255–257). Despite an abundance of anecdotal evidence, until recently authorities and academics believed there was not enough “rigorous evidence” to make a definitive judgment of harm to animal and human health as a result of fracking (Mitka 2135). For example, in Australia, the Queensland Government was unable to find a clear link between fracking and health complaints in the Tara gasfield (Thompson 56), even though it is known that there are fugitive emissions from these gasfields (Tait et al. 3099-103). It is within this context that grassroots opposition to UGM began in Australia. The largest and most sustained challenge has come from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, where a company called Metgasco has been attempting to engage in UGM for a number of years. Stiff community opposition has developed over this time, with activists training, co-ordinating and organising using the principles of Moyer’s MAP and NEFA’s NVDA. Numerous community and affinity groups opposing UGM sprang up including the Lock the Gate Alliance (LTG), a grassroots organisation opposing coal and gas mining, which formed in 2010 (Lock the Gate Alliance online). The movement put up sustained resistance to Metgasco’s attempts to establish wells at Glenugie, near Grafton and Doubtful Creek, near Kyogle in 2012 and 2013, despite the use of a substantial police presence at both locations. In the event, neither site was used for production despite exploratory wells being sunk (ABC News; Dobney). Metgasco announced it would be withdrawing its operations following new Federal and State government regulations at the time of the Doubtful Creek blockade. However it returned to the fray with a formal announcement in February 2014 (Metgasco), that it would drill at Bentley, 12 kilometres west of Lismore. It was widely believed this would occur with a view to production on an industrial scale should initial exploration prove fruitful. The Bentley Blockade It was known well before the formal announcement that Metgasco planned to drill at Bentley and community actions such as flash mobs, media releases and planning meetings were part of the build-up to direct action at the site. One of the authors of this article was actively involved in the movement and participated in a variety of these actions. By the end of January 2014 it was decided to hold an ongoing vigil at the site, which was still entirely undeveloped. Participants, including one author, volunteered for four-hour shifts which began at 5 a.m. each day and before long, were lasting into the night. The purpose of a vigil is to bear witness, maintain a presence and express a point of view. It thus accords well with the principle of non-violence. Eventually the site mushroomed into a tent village with three gates being blockaded. The main gate, Gate A, sprouted a variety of poles, tripods and other installations together with colourful tents and shelters, peopled by protesters on a 24-hour basis. The vigils persisted on all three gates for the duration of the blockade. As the number of blockaders swelled, popular support grew, lending weight to the notion that countercultural ideas and practices were spreading throughout the community. In response, Metgasco called on the State Government to provide police to coincide with the arrival of equipment. It was rumoured that 200 police would be drafted to defend the site in late April. When alerts were sent out to the community warning of imminent police action, an estimated crowd of 2000 people attended in the early hours of the morning and the police called off their operation (Feliu). As the weeks wore on, training was stepped up, attendees were educated in non-violent resistance and protestors willing to act as police liaison persons were placed on a rotating roster. In May, the State Government was preparing to send up to 800 police and the Riot Squad to break the blockade (NSW Hansard in Buckingham). Local farmers (now a part of the movement) and activist leaders had gone to Sydney in an effort to find a political solution in order to avoid what threatened to be a clash that would involve police violence. A confluence of events, such as: the sudden resignation of the Premier; revelations via the Independent Commission against Corruption about nefarious dealings and undue influence of the coal industry upon the government; a radio interview with locals by a popular broadcaster in Sydney; and the reputed hesitation of the police themselves in engaging with a group of possibly 7,000 to 10,000 protestors, resulted in the Office for Coal Seam Gas suspending Metgasco’s drilling licence on 15 May (NSW Department of Resources & Energy). The grounds were that the company had not adequately fulfilled its obligations to consult with the community. At the date of writing, the suspension still holds. The Wave The repertoire of contention at the Bentley Blockade was expansive, comprising most of the standard actions and strategies developed in earlier environmental struggles. These included direct blocking tactics in addition to the use of more carnivalesque actions like music and theatre, as well as the use of various media to reach a broader public. Non-violence was at the core of all actions, but we would tentatively suggest that Bentley may have provided a novel addition to the repertoire, stemming originally from the vigil, which brought the first protestors to the site. At the beginning of the vigil, which was initially held near the entrance to the proposed drilling site atop a cutting, occupants of passing vehicles below would demonstrate their support by sounding their horns and/or waving to the vigil-keepers, who at first were few in number. There was a precedent for this behaviour in the campaign leading up to the blockade. Activist groups such as the Knitting Nannas against Gas had encouraged vehicles to show support by sounding their horns. So when the motorists tooted spontaneously at Bentley, we waved back. Occupants of other vehicles would show disapproval by means of rude gestures and/or yelling and we would wave to them as well. After some weeks, as a presence began to be established at the site, it became routine for vigil keepers to smile and wave at all passing vehicles. This often elicited a positive response. After the first mass call-out discussed above, a number of us migrated to another gate, where numbers were much sparser and there was a perceived need for a greater presence. At this point, the participating writer had begun to act as a police liaison person, but the practice of waving routinely was continued. Those protecting this gate usually included protestors ready to block access, the police liaison person, a legal observer, vigil-keepers and a passing parade of visitors. Because this location was directly on the road, it was possible to see the drivers of vehicles and make eye contact more easily. Certain vehicles became familiar, passing at regular times, on the way to work or school, for example. As time passed, most of those protecting the gate also joined the waving ritual to the point where it became like a game to try to prise a signal of acknowledgement from the passing motorists, or even to win over a disapprover. Police vehicles, some of which passed at set intervals, were included in this game. Mostly they waved cheerfully. There were some we never managed to win over, but waving and making direct eye contact with regular motorists over time created a sense of community and an acknowledgement of the work we were doing, as they increasingly responded in kind. Motorists could hardly feel threatened when they encountered smiling, waving protestors. By including the disapprovers, we acted inclusively and our determined good humour seemed to de-escalate demonstrated hostility. Locals who did not want drilling to go ahead but who were nevertheless unwilling to join a direct action were thus able to participate in the resistance in a way that may have felt safe for them. Some of them even stopped and visited the site, voicing their support. Standing on the side of the road and waving to passers-by may seem peripheral to the “real” action, even trivial. But we would argue it is a valuable adjunct to a blockade (which is situated near a road) when one of the strategies of the overall campaign is to win popular backing. Hence waving, whilst not a completely new part of the repertoire, constitutes what Tilly (41–45) would call innovation at the margins, something he asserts is necessary to maintain the effectiveness and vitality of contentious action. In this case, it is arguable that the sheer size of community support probably helped to concentrate the minds of the state government politicians in Sydney, particularly as they contemplated initiating a massive, taxpayer-funded police action against the people for the benefit of a commercial operation. Waving is a symbolic gesture indicating acknowledgement and goodwill. It fits well within a repertoire based on the principle of non-violence. Moreover, it is a conventional social norm and everyday behaviour that is so innocuous that it is difficult to see how it could be suppressed by police or other authorities. Therein lies its subversiveness. For in communicating our common humanity in a spirit of friendliness, we drew attention to the fact that we were without rancour and tacitly invited others to join us and to explore our concerns. In this way, the counterculture drew upon a mainstream custom to develop and extend upon a new form of dissent. This constitutes a reversal of the more usual phenomenon of countercultural artefacts—such as “hippie clothing”—being appropriated or co-opted by the prevailing culture (see Reading). But it also fits with the more general phenomenon that we have argued was occurring; that of enticing ordinary residents into joining together in countercultural activity, via the pathway of a social movement. Conclusion The anti-CSG movement in the Northern Rivers was developed and organised by countercultural participants of previous contentious challenges. It was highly effective in building popular support whilst at the same time forging a loose coalition of various activist groups. We have surveyed one practice—the wave—that evolved out of mainstream culture over the course of the Bentley Blockade and suggested it may come to be seen as part of the repertoire of actions that can be beneficially employed under suitable conditions. Waving to passers-by invites them to become part of the movement in a non-threatening and inclusive way. It thus envelops supporters and non-supporters alike, and its very innocuousness makes it difficult to suppress. We have argued that this instance can be referenced to a similar reverse movement at a broader level—that of co-opting liberal notions and involving the general populace in new practices and activities that undermine the status quo. The ability of the counterculture in general and environment movements in particular to innovate in the quest to challenge and change what it perceives as damaging or unethical practices demonstrates its ingenuity and spirit. This movement is testament to its dynamic nature. References ABC News. Metgasco Has No CSG Extraction Plans for Glenugie. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-22/metgasco-says-no-csg-extraction-planned-for-glenugie/4477652›. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Thesis, University of New England, 2010. 4 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/terania/Vanessa%27s%20Terania%20Thesis2.pdf›. Buckingham, Jeremy. Hansard of Bentley Blockade Motion 15/05/2014. 16 May 2014. 30 July 2014 ‹http://jeremybuckingham.org/2014/05/16/hansard-of-bentley-blockade-motion-moved-by-david-shoebridge-15052014/›. Carter, Neil. The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Cox, Laurence. Building Counter Culture: The Radical Praxis of Social Movement Milieu. Helsinki: Into-ebooks 2011. 23 July 2014 ‹http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/building_counter_culture/›. Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. Social Movements: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Dobney, Chris. “Drill Rig Heads to Doubtful Creek.” Echo Netdaily Feb. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.echo.net.au/2013/02/drill-rig-heads-to-doubtful-creek/›. Ellsworth, William. “Injection-Induced Earthquakes”. Science 341.6142 (2013). DOI: 10.1126/science.1225942. 10 July 2014 ‹http://www.sciencemag.org.ezproxy.scu.edu.au/content/341/6142/1225942.full?sid=b4679ca5-0992-4ad3-aa3e-1ac6356f10da›. Feliu, Luis. “Battle for Bentley: 2,000 Protectors on Site.” Echo Netdaily Mar. 2013. 4 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.echo.net.au/2014/03/battle-bentley-2000-protectors-site/›. Finley, Mary Lou, and Steven Soifer. “Social Movement Theories and Map.” Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. Eds. Bill Moyer, Johann McAllister, Mary Lou Finley, and Steven Soifer. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Some Preliminary Conjunctural Thoughts on Countercultures”. Journal of Gender and Power 1.1 (2014). Hand, Eric. “Injection Wells Blamed in Oklahoma Earthquakes.” Science 345.6192 (2014): 13–14. Howarth, Terry. “Should Fracking Stop?” Nature 477 (2011): 271–73. Kelly, Russell. “The Mediated Forest: Who Speaks for the Trees?” Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Ed. Helen Wilson. Lismore: Southern Cross UP, 2003. 101–20. Lock the Gate Alliance. 2014. 15 July 2014 ‹http://www.lockthegate.org.au/history›. Locke, John. “Toleration and Government.” Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader. Eds. Terence Ball & Richard Dagger. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004 (1823). 79–93. Metgasco. Rosella E01 Environment Approval Received 2104. 4 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.metgasco.com.au/asx-announcements/rosella-e01-environment-approval-received›. Mitka, Mike. “Rigorous Evidence Slim for Determining Health Risks from Natural Gas Fracking.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 307.20 (2012): 2135–36. Moyer, Bill. “The Movement Action Plan.” Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. Eds. Bill Moyer, Johann McAllister, Mary Lou Finley, and Steven Soifer. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001. NSW Department of Resources & Energy. “Metgasco Drilling Approval Suspended.” Media Release, 15 May 2014. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/516749/Metgasco-Drilling-Approval-Suspended.pdf›. Reading, Tracey. “Hip versus Square: 1960s Advertising and Clothing Industries and the Counterculture”. Research Papers 2013. 15 July 2014 ‹http://opensuic.lib.siu.edu/gs_rp/396›. Ricketts, Aiden. “The North East Forest Alliance’s Old-Growth Forest Campaign.” Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Ed. Helen Wilson. Lismore: Southern Cross UP. 2003. 121–148. Sharp, Gene. The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Power and Struggle. Boston, Mass.: Porter Sargent, 1973. Sovacool, Benjamin K. “Cornucopia or Curse? Reviewing the Costs and Benefits of Shale Gas Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking).” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (2014): 249–64. Tait, Douglas, Isaac Santos, Damien Maher, Tyler Cyronak, and Rachael Davis. “Enrichment of Radon and Carbon Dioxide in the Open Atmosphere of an Australian Coal Seam Gas Field.” Environmental Science & Technology 47 (2013): 3099–3104. Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Thompson, Chuck. “The Fracking Feud.” Medicus 53.8 (2013): 56–57. Tilly, Charles. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: UCP, 2006. Ward, Susan, and Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63–79.

Abstract:

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … p*rnography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer p*rn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a p*rnographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, p*rnographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of p*rnographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how p*rnography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of p*rnographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “p*rnography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer p*rn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

Abstract:

This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, hom*ogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisem*nt plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.

Abstract:

Photo by Alex Guillaume on Unsplash Introduction The problem of climate change raises some important philosophical, existential questions. I propose a radical solution designed to provoke reflection on the role of humans in climate change. To push the theoretical limits of what measures people are willing to accept to combat it, an extreme population control tool is proposed: allowing people to reproduce only if they make a financial commitment guaranteeing a carbon-neutral upbringing. Solving the problem of climate change in the long run by halting the procreation of human beings is controversial. In the absence of human beings and consequent climate change, other animals and plant species would benefit from an atmosphere more conducive to prolonging their existence and even improving their ability to thrive. If someone were to invent something to reverse the effects of climate change and improve animals’ lives, then human beings’ presence would be justified by the invention. Whether the propagation of the human species is beneficial to anyone or anything but human beings themselves is difficult to answer. Perhaps human beings are unfit to tackle this issue, being unable to judge it objectively. Managing Procreation: An alternative to Piecemeal Approaches Measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gases by nudging individuals and corporations may have a positive effect, but if their behavior is not climate neutral, they continue to contribute to climate change. Consequently, as long as the number of people increases, reducing greenhouse gases is at best a mitigation tool. If humans could rely solely on renewable energy, decreasing the population arguably would not be necessary. Significantly reducing the number of people appears to provide a solution to both problems: people who do not exist do not contribute to climate change, and renewable energy could meet the demand of a smaller population. One option is to let only those who produce the problem pay for its solution. One could determine the expected annual emission of greenhouse gases per person, assuming an average life expectancy, and calculate the costs to compensate them by, e.g., installing extra solar panels. Those expected costs could then be paid by the parents of each new person annually over the first eighteen years of that person’s life by dividing the total expected costs by eighteen. There are also practical difficulties. It would be difficult to determine the payment necessary. What should be done if a child has been born whose parents cannot afford to pay? In addition, child benefits could be canceled, contrary to recent incentives for child births instated in Italy,[1] where additional benefits will be made available to pay for childcare, and Hungary,[2] where women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax. A transition period could exist once the policy has been adopted, since it would be unreasonable to confront those who are already pregnant with costs they could not reasonably have expected. While the analysis is both hypothetical and theoretical, the impracticality is a noteworthy obstacle. There are several practical issues that cannot be addressed here, like the difficulty of calculating the added negative effects of each new individual and the unlikelihood that many citizens will support politicians who propose adopting policies that discourage having children. The upshot of what I have proposed is that climate change can be solved in the long run without financial costs to society as a whole, notwithstanding the transitional measures that would bring costs with them. Managing Procreation to Reduce Suffering Should this be deemed too harsh a stance, it is important to consider the basic issue of whether it is justified to introduce measures to reduce the number of people in an already overpopulated world, especially if climate change leads to additional suffering. One need not agree with Benatar, but his perspective must at least be taken seriously: It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.[3] Benatar argues that non-existence is preferable to existence,[4] which raises the question why new people should be created at all. Those who question whether this planet will be habitable for future generations presuppose that such generations will exist. If people are not brought into existence, they may be said to be deprived of what life has to offer, but life must not be presupposed to be something positive. Whether this is the case in fact merits an inquiry of its own. A solution to the problem of climate change despite an increased population does not equate to a positive outcome since it merely means that something negative is removed. After all, solving the problem is not a means to an end, but a means to a means, the latter means being a means to a happy life, which does not automatically ensue from a solution to the problem. Benatar, as an anti-natalist, argues that procreation is morally wrong. His basic idea is that there is an asymmetry between pleasure and pain and that the pleasure that is not experienced by someone because that person does not exist is not something bad whereas the absence of pain that is not experienced – for the same reason – is something good.[5] Accordingly, “The reason why we do not lament our failure to bring somebody into existence is because absent pleasures are not bad.”[6] One may question whether such a perspective suffices to prove that coming into existence is always a harm, but the assertion that coming into existence exposes a new being to potential harm is clear. Objections A drawback of the proposed radical solution, placing the financial impediment on procreation, is that it will not solve climate change in the short run. A significant drop in the number of people (if that were achieved) may have a positive effect in the long run, but for now the behavior of the people in existence is the problem. Other climate change mitigation policies would necessarily continue. Additionally, there are important practical reasons to continue to procreate. The benefits for the elderly are paid for by the labor force. It is a problem that new generations are created as mere means to benefit older people. Perhaps more troubling, a pyramid scheme is created: by the time those people have themselves become old, a new labor force must have been brought into existence, a process that must presumably continue. If a consideration for people in developing countries to have children is that they cannot provide for themselves at an advanced age, while benefits are either lacking or insufficient, developed countries could collectively fund a pension scheme.[7] This may be low-cost if it is tailored to the living standard in the countries in question and given the life expectancy. Such a pension scheme should be predicated on the countries’ efforts in reducing the birth rate. If the labor force decreases, the economy may suffer. The focus on economic growth is arguably one of the causes of climate change, but if the number of people is reduced, the living standard does not have to be compromised, since the economy can then still grow. If fewer people began to use natural resources and nonrenewable energy at higher per capita rates, then the procreation might not be beneficial to the climate. It would need to be accompanied by regulations on use. One may also object that only wealthy people will be able to afford children. This is correct, but there is no right to have a child one cannot afford. The right to procreate does not entail the right to have as many children as one wants.[8] Yet in many countries, like the United States, it is a fundamental right that is constitutionally protected. There are numerous social, emotional, and even biological reasons why people choose to procreate. These may include the joy of having a family, the hope that children may bring in society, and the intergenerational transference of knowledge. People may have a strong desire to raise children or even a religious duty. If someone procures a sports car that is highly polluting, it would be justifiable to impose a tax in such a case (also discouraging future buyers). Many taxes and fines are imposed on corporate polluters. Procreation is significantly different but if the issue is regarded with some distance, then a climate change prevention tax could be appropriate. Some may argue that raising children is expensive already, which nonetheless does not deter people from having children. The tax I propose would be additional and specifically dedicated to carbon neutrality, but it would be difficult to predict whether it would discourage procreation. One last objection may be that for those now dedicated to sustainability for preserving the earth for the sake of future generations, there would be little or no incentive to continue any climate change mitigation efforts at all. If they sense they cannot afford to procreate, they may simply use every natural resource rather than save the earth for animals or for next generations. In a democracy, this problem does not exist if the majority can afford to procreate and agree with legislation on the basis of which such behavior is discouraged or punished. CONCLUSION Prior to their existence, there is no obligation to bequeath the earth to next generations. Such generations will only exist if they are actually created, and there is no obligation to create them. The lack of existence should not be confused with harm. Climate change provides an important reason to stem overpopulation. Ironically, fast rates of procreation may lead to the earth becoming uninhabitable for humans altogether. The radical solution that has been proposed here is an unrealistic scenario. For now, the average global birth rate is just over 18 per thousand people, but there is a need to ensure that the number of people is not greater than the planet can endure. While it is better to prevent problems than to solve them, the interest in procreation and its associated joys, usefulness, and cultural value make mass reduction in the population unlikely. Some countries have smaller average family size than others and can act as models for reducing population in a less radical way. The need to continue efforts to reduce climate change persists. Whether it would curb population growth or not, an additional financial burden applied to neutralizing each person’s offspring’s carbon footprint provides a meaningful thought exercise that could help alleviate the pressure on current climate mitigation strategies. [1] The Local Italy, How Italy’s new ‘Family Act’ aims to increase the plunging birthrate (2020), https://www.thelocal.it/20200612/what-you-need-to-know-about-italys-new-family-act/. [2] BBC, Hungary tries for baby boom with tax breaks and loan forgiveness (2019), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612. [3] David Benatar, Better never to have been (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 6. [4] David Benatar, Better never to have been (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 44, 58. [5] David Benatar, Better never to have been (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 14, 30, 38. [6] David Benatar, Better never to have been (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 35. [7] Alastair Leithead, “Can Niger break out of its cycle of poverty?” (BBC, 2017), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-41018081; Sebastien Malo, “Fewer children, fewer climate risks? Niger ponders a controversial option” (Reuters, 2019), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-niger-climate-change-familyplanning-idUSKBN1WM11E. [8] Sarah Conly, “The Right to Procreation: Merits and Limits,” American Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (2005): 105-115, 105, 106.

Abstract:

“I’m fat–and it’s okay! It doesn’t mean I’m stupid, or ugly, or lazy, or selfish. I’m fat!” so proclaims Joy Nash in her YouTube video, A Fat Rant. “Fat! It’s three little letters–what are you afraid of?!” This is the question I pose to my class on day one of Fat Studies. Sadly, many college students do fear fat, and negative attitudes toward fat people are quite prevalent in this population (Ambwani et al. 366). As I teach it, Fat Studies is cross-listed between Psychology and Gender Studies. However, most students who enrol have majors in Psychology or other behavioural health science fields in which weight bias is particularly pronounced (Watkins and Concepcion 159). Upon finding stronger bias among third- versus first-year Physical Education students, O’Brien, Hunter, and Banks (308) speculated that the weight-centric curriculum that typifies this field actively engenders anti-fat attitudes. Based on their exploration of textbook content, McHugh and Kasardo (621) contend that Psychology too is complicit in propagating weight bias by espousing weight-centric messages throughout the curriculum. Such messages include the concepts that higher body weight invariably leads to poor health, weight control is simply a matter of individual choice, and dieting is an effective means of losing weight and improving health (Tylka et al.). These weight-centric tenets are, however, highly contested. For instance, there exists a body of research so vast that it has its own name, the “obesity paradox” literature. This literature (McAuley and Blair 773) entails studies that show that “obese” persons with chronic disease have relatively better survival rates and that a substantial portion of “overweight” and “obese” individuals have levels of metabolic health similar to or better than “normal” weight individuals (e.g., Flegal et al. 71). Finally, the “obesity paradox” literature includes studies showing that cardiovascular fitness is a far better predictor of mortality than weight. In other words, individuals may be both fit and fat, or conversely, unfit and thin (Barry et al. 382). In addition, Tylka et al. review literature attesting to the complex causes of weight status that extend beyond individual behaviour, ranging from genetic predispositions to sociocultural factors beyond personal control. Lastly, reviews of research on dieting interventions show that these are overwhelmingly ineffective in producing lasting weight loss or actual improvements in health and may in fact lead to disordered eating and other unanticipated adverse consequences (e.g., Bacon and Aphramor; Mann et al. 220; Salas e79; Tylka et al.).The newfound, interdisciplinary field of scholarship known as Fat Studies aims to debunk weight-centric misconceptions by elucidating findings that counter these mainstream suppositions. Health At Every Size® (HAES), a weight-neutral approach to holistic well-being, is an important facet of Fat Studies. The HAES paradigm advocates intuitive eating and pleasurable physical activity for health rather than restrictive dieting and regimented exercise for weight loss. HAES further encourages body acceptance of self and others regardless of size. Empirical evidence shows that HAES-based interventions improve physical and psychological health without harmful side-effects or high dropout rates associated with weight loss interventions (Bacon and Aphramor; Clifford et al. “Impact of Non-Diet Approaches” 143). HAES, like the broader field of Fat Studies, seeks to eradicate weight-based discrimination, positioning weight bias as a social justice issue that intersects with oppression based on other areas of difference such as gender, race, and social class. Much like Queer Studies, Fat Studies seeks to reclaim the word, fat, thus stripping it of its pejorative connotations. As Nash asserts in her video, “Fat is a descriptive physical characteristic. It’s not an insult, or an obscenity, or a death sentence!” As an academic discipline, Fat Studies is expanding its visibility and reach. The Fat Studies Reader, the primary source of reading for my course, provides a comprehensive overview of the field (Rothblum and Solovay 1). This interdisciplinary anthology addresses fat history and activism, fat as social inequality, fat in healthcare, and fat in popular culture. Ward (937) reviews this and other recently-released fat-friendly texts. The field features its own journal, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, which publishes original research, overview articles, and reviews of assorted media. Both the Popular Culture Association and National Women’s Studies Association have special interest groups devoted to Fat Studies, and the American Psychological Association’s Division on the Psychology of Women has recently formed a task force on sizism (Bergen and Carrizales 22). Furthermore, Fat Studies conferences have been held in Australia and New Zealand, and the third annual Weight Stigma Conference will occur in Iceland, September 2015. Although the latter conference is not necessarily limited to those who align themselves with Fat Studies, keynote speakers include Ragen Chastain, a well-known member of the fat acceptance movement largely via her blog, Dances with Fat. The theme of this year’s conference, “Institutionalised Weightism: How to Challenge Oppressive Systems,” is consistent with Fat Studies precepts:This year’s theme focuses on the larger social hierarchies that favour thinness and reject fatness within western culture and how these systems have dictated the framing of fatness within the media, medicine, academia and our own identities. What can be done to oppose systemised oppression? What can be learned from the fight for social justice and equality within other arenas? Can research and activism be united to challenge prevailing ideas about fat bodies?Concomitantly, Fat Studies courses have begun to appear on college campuses. Watkins, Farrell, and Doyle-Hugmeyer (180) identified and described four Fat Studies and two HAES courses that were being taught in the U.S. and abroad as of 2012. Since then, a Fat Studies course has been taught online at West Virginia University and another will soon be offered at Washington State University. Additionally, a new HAES class has been taught at Saint Mary’s College of California during the last two academic years. Cameron (“Toward a Fat Pedagogy” 28) describes ways in which nearly 30 instructors from five different countries have incorporated fat studies pedagogy into university courses across an array of academic areas. This growing trend is manifested in The Fat Pedagogy Reader (Russell and Cameron) due out later this year. In this article, I describe content and pedagogical strategies that I use in my Fat Studies course. I then share students’ qualitative reactions, drawing upon excerpts from written assignments. During the term reported here, the class was comprised of 17 undergraduate and 5 graduate students. Undergraduate majors included 47% in Psychology, 24% in Women Studies, 24% in various other College of Liberal Arts fields, and 6% in the College of Public Health. Graduate majors included 40% in the College of Public Health and 60% in the College of Education. Following submission of final grades, students provided consent via email allowing written responses on assignments to be anonymously incorporated into research reports. Assignments drawn upon for this report include weekly reading reactions to specific journal articles in which students were to summarise the main points, identify and discuss a specific quote or passage that stood out to them, and consider and discuss applicability of the information in the article. This report also utilises responses to a final assignment in which students were to articulate take-home lessons from the course.Despite the catalogue description, many students enter Fat Studies with a misunderstanding of what the course entails. Some admitted that they thought the course was about reducing obesity and the presumed health risks associated with this alleged pathological condition (Watkins). Others understood, but were somewhat dubious, at least at the outset, “Before I began this class, I admit that I was skeptical of what Fat Studies meant.” Another student experienced “a severe cognitive dissonance” between the Fat Studies curriculum and that of a previous behavioural health class:My professor spent the entire quarter spouting off statistics, such as the next generation of children will be the first generation to have a lower life expectancy than their parents and the ever increasing obesity rates that are putting such a tax on our health care system, and I took her words to heart. I was scared for myself and for the populations I would soon be working with. I was worried that I was destined to a chronic disease and bothered that my BMI was two points above ‘normal.’ I believed everything my professor alluded to on the danger of obesity because it was things I had heard in the media and was led to believe all my life.Yet another related, “At first, I will be honest, it was hard for me to accept a lot of this information, but throughout the term every class changed my mind about my view of fat people.” A few students have voiced even greater initial resistance. During a past term, one student lamented that the material represented an attack on her intended behavioural health profession. Cameron (“Learning to Teach Everybody”) describes comparable reactions among students in her Critical Obesity course taught within a behavioural health science unit. Ward (937) attests that, even in Gender Studies, fat is the topic that creates the most controversy. Similarly, she describes students’ immense discomfort when asked to entertain perspectives that challenge deeply engrained ideas inculcated by our culture’s “obesity epidemic.” Discomfort, however, is not necessarily antithetical to learning. In prompting students to unlearn “the biomedically-informed truth of obesity, namely that fat people are unfit, unhealthy, and in need of ‘saving’ through expert interventions,” Moola at al. recommend equipping them with an “ethics of discomfort” (217). No easy task, “It requires courage to ask our students to forgo the security of prescriptive health messaging in favour of confusion and uncertainty” (221). I encourage students to entertain conflicting perspectives by assigning empirically-based articles emanating from peer-reviewed journals in their own disciplines that challenge mainstream discourses on obesity (e.g., Aphramor; Bombak e60; Tomiyama, Ahlstrom, and Mann 861). Students whose training is steeped in the scientific method seem to appreciate having quantitative data at their disposal to convince themselves–and their peers and professors–that widely held weight-centric beliefs and practices may not be valid. One student remarked, “Since I have taken this course, I feel like I am prepared to discuss the fallacy of the weight-health relationship,” citing specific articles that would aid in the effort. Likewise, Cameron’s (“Learning to Teach Everybody”) students reported a need to read research reports in order to begin questioning long-held beliefs.In addition, I assign readings that provide students with the opportunity to hear the voices of fat people themselves, a cornerstone of Fat Studies. Besides chapters in The Fat Studies Reader authored by scholars and activists who identify as fat, I assign qualitative articles (e.g., Lewis et al.) and narrative reports (e.g., Pause 42) in which fat people describe their experiences with weight and weight bias. Additionally, I provide positive images of fat people via films and websites (Clifford et al. HAES®; Watkins; Watkins and Doyle-Hugmeyer 177) in order to counteract the preponderance of negative, dehumanising portrayals in popular media (e.g., Ata and Thompson 41). In response, a student stated:One of the biggest things I took away from this term was the confidence I found in fat women through films and stories. They had more confidence than I have seen in any tiny girl and owned the body they were given.I introduce “normal” weight allies as well, most especially Linda Bacon whose treatise on thin privilege tends to set the stage for viewing weight bias as a form of oppression (Bacon). One student observed, “It was a relief to be able to read and talk about weight oppression in a classroom setting for once.” Another appreciated that “The class did a great job at analysing fat as oppression and not like a secondhand oppression as I have seen in my past classes.” Typically, fat students were already aware of weight-based privilege and oppression, often painfully so. Thinner students, however, were often astonished by this concept, several describing Bacon’s article as “eye-opening.” In reaction, many vowed to act as allies:This class has really opened my eyes and prepared me to be an ally to fat people. It will be difficult for some time while I try to get others to understand my point of view on fat people but I believe once there are enough allies, people’s minds will really start changing and it will benefit everyone for the better.Pedagogically, I choose to share my own experiences as they relate to course content and encourage students, at least in their written assignments, to do the same. Other instructors refrain from this practice for fear of reinforcing traditional discourses or eliciting detrimental reactions from students (Watkins, Farrell, and Doyle-Hugmeyer 191). Nevertheless, this tack seems to work well in my course, with many students opting to disclose their relevant circ*mstances during classroom discussions: Throughout the term I very much valued and appreciated when classmates would share their experiences. I love listening and hearing to others experiences and I think that is a great way to understand the material and learn from one another.It really helped to read different articles and hear classmates discuss and share stories that I was able to relate to. The idea of hearing people talk about issues that I thought I was the only one who dealt with was so refreshing and enlightening.The structure of this class allowed me to learn how this information is applicable to my life and made it deeper than just memorising information.Thus far, across three terms, no student has described iatrogenic effects from this process. In fact, most attribute positive transformations to the class. These include enhanced body acceptance of self and others: This class decreased my fat phobia towards others and gave me a better understanding about the intersectionality of one’s weight. For example, I now feel that I no longer view my family in a fat phobic way and I also feel responsible for educating my brother and helping him develop a strong self-esteem regardless of his size.I never thought this class would change my life, almost save my life. Through studies shown in class and real life people following their dreams, it made my mind completely change about how I view my body and myself.I can only hope that in the future, I will be more forgiving, tolerant, and above all accepting of myself, much less others. Regardless of a person’s shape and size, we are all beautiful, and while I’m just beginning to understand this, it can only get better from here.Students also reported becoming more savvy consumers of weight-centric media messages as well as realigning their eating and exercise behaviour in accordance with HAES: I find myself disgusted at the television now, especially with the amount of diet ads, fitness club ads, and exercise equipment ads all aimed at making a ‘better you.’ I now know that I would never be better off with a SlimFast shake, P90X, or a Total Gym. I would be better off eating when I’m hungry, working out because it is fun, and still eating Thin Mints when I want to. Prior to this class, I would work out rigorously, running seven miles a day. Now I realise why at times I dreaded to work out, it was simply a mathematical system to burn the energy that I had acquired earlier in the day. Instead what I realise I should do is something I enjoy, that way I will never get tired of whatever I am doing. While I do enjoy running, other activities would bring more joy while engaging in a healthy lifestyle like hiking or mountain biking.I will never go on another diet. I will stop choosing exercises I don’t love to do. I will not weigh myself every single day hoping for the number on the scale to change.A reduction in self-weighing was perhaps the most frequent behaviour change that students expressed. This is particularly valuable in that frequent self-weighing is associated with disordered eating and unhealthy weight control behaviours (Neumark-Sztainer et al. 811):I have realised that the number on the scale is simply a number on the scale. That number does not define who you are. I have stopped weighing myself every morning. I put the scale in the storage closet so I don’t have to look at it. I even encouraged my roommate to stop weighing herself too. What has been most beneficial for me to take away from this class is the notion that the number on the scale has so much less to do with fitness levels than most people understand. Coming from a numbers obsessed person like myself, this class has actually gotten me to leave the scales behind. I used to weigh myself every single day and my self-confidence reflected whether I was up or down in weight from the day before. It seems so silly to me now. From this class, I take away a new outlook on body diversity. I will evaluate who I am for what I do and not represent myself with a number. I’m going to have my cake this time, and actually eat it too!Finally, students described ways in which they might carry the concepts from Fat Studies into their future professions: I want to go to law school. This model is something I will work toward in the fight for social justice.As a teacher and teacher of teachers, I plan to incorporate discussions on size diversity and how this should be addressed within the field of adapted physical education.I do not know how I would have gone forward if I had never taken this class. I probably would have continued to use weight loss as an effective measure of success for both nutrition and physical activity interventions. I will never be able to think about the obesity prevention movement in the same way.Since I am working toward being a clinical psychologist, I don’t want to have a client who is pursuing weight loss and then blindly believe that they need to lose weight. I’d rather be of the mindset that every person is unique, and that there are other markers of health at every size.Jones and Hughes-Decatur (59) call for increased scholarship illustrating and evaluating critical body pedagogies so that teachers might provide students with tools to critique dominant discourses, helping them forge healthy relationships with their own bodies in the process. As such, this paper describes elements of a Fat Studies class that other instructors may choose to adopt. It additionally presents qualitative data suggesting that students came to think about fat and fat people in new and divergent ways. Qualitative responses also suggest that students developed better body image and more adaptive eating and exercise behaviours throughout the term. Although no students have yet described lasting adverse effects from the class, one stated that she would have preferred less of a focus on health and more of a focus on issues such as fat fashion. Indeed, some Fat Studies scholars (e.g., Lee) advocate separating discussions of weight bias from discussions of health status to avoid stigmatising fat people who do experience health problems. While concerns about fostering healthism within the fat acceptance movement are valid, as a behavioural health professional with an audience of students training in these fields, I have chosen to devote three weeks of our ten week term to this subject matter. Depending on their academic background, others who teach Fat Studies may choose to emphasise different aspects such as media representations or historical connotations of fat.Nevertheless, the preponderance of positive comments evidenced throughout students’ assignments may certainly be a function of social desirability. Although I explicitly invite critique, and in fact assign readings (e.g., Welsh 33) and present media that question HAES and Fat Studies concepts, students may still feel obliged to articulate acceptance of and transformations consistent with the principles of these movements. As a more objective assessment of student outcomes, I am currently conducting a quantitative evaluation, in which I remain blind to students’ identities, of this year’s Fat Studies course compared to other upper division/graduate Psychology courses, examining potential changes in weight bias, body image and dieting behaviour, adherence to appearance-related media messages, and obligatory exercise behaviour. I postulate results akin to those of Humphrey, Clifford, and Neyman Morris (143) who found reductions in weight bias, improved body image, and improved eating behaviour among college students as a function of their HAES course. As Fat Studies pedagogy proliferates, instructors are called upon to share their teaching strategies, document the effects, and communicate these results within and outside of academic spheres.ReferencesAmbwani, Suman, Katherine M. Thomas, Christopher J. Hopwood, Sara A. Moss, and Carlos M. Grilo. “Obesity Stigmatization as the Status Quo: Structural Considerations and Prevalence among Young Adults in the U.S.” Eating Behaviors 15.3 (2014): 366-370. Aphramor, Lucy. “Validity of Claims Made in Weight Management Research: A Narrative Review of Dietetic Articles.” Nutrition Journal 9 (2010): n. pag. 15 May 2015 ‹http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/30›.Ata, Rheanna M., and J. Kevin Thompson. “Weight Bias in the Media: A Review of Recent Research.” Obesity Facts 3.1 (2010): 41-46.Bacon, Linda. “Reflections on Fat Acceptance: Lessons Learned from Thin Privilege.” 2009. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.lindabacon.org/Bacon_ThinPrivilege080109.pdf›.Bacon, Linda, and Lucy Aphramor. “Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift.” Nutrition Journal 10 (2011). 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.nutritionj.com/content/10/1/9›.Barry, Vaughn W., Meghan Baruth, Michael W. Beets, J. Larry Durstine, Jihong Liu, and Steven N. Blair. “Fitness vs. Fatness on All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases 56.4 (2014): 382-390.Bergen, Martha, and Sonia Carrizales. “New Task Force Focused on Size.” The Feminist Psychologist 42.1 (2015): 22.Bombak, Andrea. “Obesity, Health at Every Size, and Public Health Policy.” American Journal of Public Health 104.2 (2014): e60-e67.Cameron, Erin. “Learning to Teach Everybody: Exploring the Emergence of an ‘Obesity” Pedagogy’.” The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. Eds. Erin Cameron and Connie Russell. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press.Cameron, Erin. “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A Study of Pedagogical Approaches Aimed at Challenging Obesity Discourses in Post-Secondary Education.” Fat Studies 4.1 (2015): 28-45.Chastain, Ragen. Dances with Fat. 15 May 2015 ‹https://danceswithfat.wordpress.com/blog/›.Clifford, Dawn, Amy Ozier, Joanna Bundros, Jeffrey Moore, Anna Kreiser, and Michele Neyman Morris. “Impact of Non-Diet Approaches on Attitudes, Behaviors, and Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 47.2 (2015): 143-155.Clifford, Dawn, Patti Lou Watkins, and Rebecca Y. Concepcion. “HAES® University: Bringing a Weight Neutral Message to Campus.” Association for Size Diversity and Health, 2015. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹https://www.sizediversityandhealth.org/content.asp?id=258›.Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ufts20/current#.VShpqdhFDBC›.Flegal, Katherine M., Brian K. Kit, Heather Orpana, and Barry L. Graubard. “Association of All-Cause Mortality with Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index Categories: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of the American Medical Association 309.1 (2013): 71-82.Humphrey, Lauren, Dawn Clifford, and Michelle Neyman Morris. “Health At Every Size College Course Reduces Dieting Behaviors and Improves Intuitive Eating, Body Esteem, and Anti-Fat Attitudes.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, in press.Jones, Stephanie, and Hilary Hughes-Decatur. “Speaking of Bodies in Justice-Oriented Feminist Teacher Education.” Journal of Teacher Education 63.1 (2012): 51-61.Lee, Jenny. Embodying Stereotypes: Memoir, Fat and Health. Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections, July 2012, Wellington, NZ. Unpublished conference paper.Lewis, Sophie, Samantha L. Thomas, Jim Hyde, David Castle, R. Warwick Blood, and Paul A. Komesaroff. “’I Don't Eat a Hamburger and Large Chips Every Day!’ A Qualitative Study of the Impact of Public Health Messages about Obesity on Obese Adults.” BMC Public Health 10.309 (2010). 23 Apr 2015 ‹http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/309›.Mann, Traci, A. Janet Tomiyama, Erika Westling, Ann-Marie Lew, Barbara Samuels, and Jason Chatman. “Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not the Answer.” American Psychologist 62.3 (2007): 220-233.McAuley, Paul A., and Steven N. Blair. “Obesity Paradoxes.” Journal of Sports Sciences 29.8 (2011): 773-782. McHugh, Maureen C., and Ashley E. Kasardo. “Anti-Fat Prejudice: The Role of Psychology in Explication, Education and Eradication.” Sex Roles 66.9-10 (2012): 617-627.Moola, Fiona J., Moss E. Norman, LeAnne Petherick, and Shaelyn Strachan. “Teaching across the Lines of Fault in Psychology and Sociology: Health, Obesity and Physical Activity in the Canadian Context.” Sociology of Sport Journal 31.2 (2014): 202-227.Nash, Joy. “A Fat Rant.” YouTube, 17 Mar. 2007. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUTJQIBI1oA›.Neumark-Sztainer, Dianne, Patricia van den Berg, Peter J. Hannan, and Mary Story. “Self-Weighing in Adolescents: Helpful or Harmful? Longitudinal Associations with Body Weight Changes and Disordered Eating.” Journal of Adolescent Health 39.6 (2006): 811–818.O’Brien, K.S., J.A. Hunter, and M. Banks. “Implicit Anti-Fat Bias in Physical Educators: Physical Attributes, Ideology, and Socialization.” International Journal of Obesity 31.2 (2007): 308-314.Pause, Cat. “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat.” Somatechnics 2.1 (2012): 42-56.Rothblum, Esther, and Sondra Solovay, eds. The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Russell, Connie, and Erin Cameron, eds. The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press. Salas, Ximena Ramos. “The Ineffectiveness and Unintended Consequences of the Public Health War on Obesity.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 106.2 (2015): e79-e81. Tomiyama, A. Janet, Britt Ahlstrom, and Traci Mann. “Long-Term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7.12 (2013): 861-877.Tylka, Tracy L., Rachel A. Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrun Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, and Rachel M. Calogero. “The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss.” Journal of Obesity (2014). 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2014/983495/›.Ward, Anna E. “The Future of Fat.” American Quarterly 65.4 (2013): 937-947.Watkins, Patti Lou. “Inclusion of Fat Studies in a Difference, Power, and Discrimination Curriculum.” The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. Eds. Erin Cameron and Connie Russell. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press. Watkins, Patti Lou, and Rebecca Y. Concepcion. “Teaching HAES to Health Care Students and Professionals.” Wellness Not Weight: Motivational Interviewing and a Non-Diet Approach. Ed. Ellen Glovsky. San Diego: Cognella Academic Publishing, 2014: 159-169. Watkins, Patti Lou, and Andrea Doyle-Hugmeyer. “Teaching about Eating Disorders from a Fat Studies Perspective. Transformations 23.2 (2013): 147-158. Watkins, Patti Lou, Amy E. Farrell, and Andrea Doyle Hugmeyer. “Teaching Fat Studies: From Conception to Reception. Fat Studies 1.2 (2012): 180-194. Welsh, Taila L. “Healthism and the Bodies of Women: Pleasure and Discipline in the War against Obesity.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 1 (2011): 33-48. Weight Stigma Conference. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://stigmaconference.com/›.

Abstract:

If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and hom*ogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circ*mstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circ*mstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisem*nt, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. Dempsey, J.M. “McCartney at 60: A Body of Work Celebrating Home and Hearth.” Popular Music and Society 27.1 (Feb. 2004): 27-40. Eva, Phil. “Home Sweet Home? The Culture of ‘Exile’ in Mid-Victorian Popular Song.” Popular Music 16.2 (May 1997): 131-150. Hochschild, Arlie. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1997. Mallett, Sonia. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-89. Mechem, Kirke, “The Story of ‘Home on the Range’.” Reprint from the Kansas Historical Quarterly (Nov. 1949). Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society. 28 May 2007 http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/nov2003.html>. Mundey, Jack. Green Bans and Beyond. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Nelson-Burns, Lesley. Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America. 29 May 2007 http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/tho*rin.html>. Summers, Anne. Damned whor*s and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.

Abstract:

According to media conglomerate CNN, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s peace crusade began in 1971. CNN’s on-line news group Showbiz on June 22, 1997 frames John and Yoko’s campaign for peace: “Former Beatle John Lennon was honoured posthumously Friday for his contributions to world peace at a star-studded ceremony in London for the 22nd Silver Clef awards. Lennon’s song “Imagine” has been a leading anthem for the peace movement”. This is a rather limited selection that overlooks a number of earlier (and more radical) possibilities in the Lennon-Ono musical arsenal. A 1969 article in Newsweek entitled “The Peace Anthem” records the phenomenal success of “Give Peace a Chance” in mobilizing the protesting masses against the war in Vietnam. Newsweek relates how “Chance” became the chant for anti-war protestors in Washington on November 15, 1969. On that day, 250,000 marchers demonstrated at the American nation’s capitol for a Moratorium to stop the fighting in Vietnam. Led by folk singer Pete Seeger, the crowd was swept up in the endless repetition of the Lennon dictum, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” When Lennon tuned into the signals from Washington, he dubbed it one of the “biggest moments of my life” (Wiener 97). Dodging the immigration authorities that would not let John and Yoko physically into the United States, John and Yoko’s anti-war signals had been transmitted over the border from the “Bed-in” in Montreal where the song originated, to rally the masses marching on the mall in Washington. The story concluded: “The peace movement had found an anthem” (Newsweek 102). “Give Peace a Chance”—and the Vietnam War against which it raised its voice—have been deleted from CNN’s selective memory. Its brand of political dissent and anti-war activism does not fit the rubric of a 90’s Showbiz column. Yet, this is how the avant-garde performance artist and the hippie rock and roller conceived their peacemaking efforts—as the invasion and intervention of “showbiz” and media hype into the space of mass politics. In their fight for peace, the newly wed John and Yoko staged a series of art and media events in the form of interviews, songs, ads, concerts, demonstrations and happenings. Many of these media-savvy events took place in Canada in 1969. For example, John and Yoko’s The Plastic Ono Band played Varsity Stadium in Toronto in September at the concert known as “Live Peace” which included performances of “Give Peace a Chance” and Yoko’s intense lament “John, John (Let’s Hope for Peace).” With these events, Yoko’s avant-garde strategies of Fluxus and Conceptual art combined forces with John’s energies of rock and roll rebellion to forge a program of media activism and political dissent. Biographer Jon Wiener recalls that John and Yoko’s anti-war campaign represented a new chapter in New Left politics and its relation to mass media. Rather than reject newspapers and TV as “exclusively instruments of corporate domination,” John and Yoko sought “to work within the mass media, to use them, briefly and sporadically, against the system in which they functioned” (89). Umberto Eco pointed to this in his 1967 essay “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” suggesting that “the universe of Technological Communication” (i.e., mass media) be patrolled by “groups of communications guerrillas” who would engage in “future communications guerrilla warfare” to restore a critical dimension involving “the constant correction of perspectives, the checking of codes, and the ever renewed interpretation of mass messages” (143-144). Eco’s formulation provides a possible frame of reference for John and Yoko’s media war and their series of events countering, checking and, to quote Yoko, “criticizing the establishment” and its pro-war propaganda (Giulano 71). The 1969 “Bed-Ins” were media events that used the publicity around John and Yoko’s honeymoon as a lure for the press to report on their anti-war campaign. The first took place in Amsterdam in late March and John and Yoko staged a second honeymoon in Montreal in late May. As non-stop salespeople for their peace product, John and Yoko gave ten hours of press interviews every day invoking the media maxim that repetition induces belief. Blurring art and life, the “Bed-Ins” illustrate the strategies of happenings and Fluxus performance at the heart of Yoko’s aesthetic. At the Amsterdam press conference, Yoko framed their work as an avant-garde performance piece electrified by mass communications media. “Everything we do is a happening. All of our events are directly connected with society. We would like to communicate with the world. This event is called the ““Bed Peace”, and it’s not p-i-e-c-e, it’s p-e-a-c-e. Let’s just stay in bed and grow hair instead of being violent” (Giulano 46). The word plays of “Bed Peace” and “Hair Peace” pasted above their nuptial bed appealed to both Yoko and John’s punster sensibilities, their express aim being to play the world’s clowns for peace and mobilize the subversive power of laughter. The “Bed-Ins” must be situated against the background of the sit-ins on American college campuses at that time of anti-Vietnam war protests. Indeed, John referred to the event as “the bed sit-in” showing that this connection was in his mind. The direct links to the student revolt were further underscored in the telephone exchange between John and Yoko in Montreal and the rioters in People’s Park in Berkeley when Lennon played peace guru, encouraging the demonstrators to avoid violence at all costs (Wiener 92-93). Around the same time, John and Yoko also began their playfully named “Nuts for Peace” campaign by sending acorns to fifty heads of state and asking them to plant them as a symbolic gesture for peace. Another John and Yoko media blitz took over billboards as the sites to wage communications guerrilla warfare. When asked at a press conference to explain the “War is Over Poster Campaign”, the peace PR man stated: “It’s part of our advertising campaign for peace” (Giulano 83). This particular aspect of the media war recalls the international dissemination of the poster “War is Over! If You Want It. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko” in twelve urban centres. Since the mid-sixties, Beatle John had been delivering promotional peace and good will messages on vinyl to his fans at Christmas. In 1969, he and his new partner in art prepared a visual Christmas card using public space to blur the boundaries between art, activism, and advertising. The glaring headline stated the fantasy as if already fulfilled (War is Over!). This was followed by the empowering call to mass action reminding the viewer of what was needed to attain the goal (If You Want It). To kick off the campaign, the international peace politicos gave a “Christmas for Peace” charity concert in London for the United Nations Children’s Fund. When asked about the costs of the poster, Lennon sidestepped the issue, saying he didn’t want to think about it, but joking, “I’ll have to write a song or two to earn me money back” (Giulano 83). The critics attacked this statement as evasive and not willing to own up to how the promoters were direct beneficiaries of the marketing of peace. Rather than focusing on how this campaign would afford free publicity to John and Yoko and promote further demand for their products, Lennon focused on extensive outlays of capital. This recalls another rather hostile exchange at a November 1969 press conference having the look of an all-out media war on the occasion of Lennon returning his M.B.E. Medal of Honour to the Queen. Lennon’s letter read in part: “Your Majesty, I am returning this M.B.E. in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts” (Wiener 106). Numerous critics sought to deflate Lennon’s claim that this was an act of political protest in the fight for peace, characterising it as a mere self-serving publicity stunt for his latest single. John: “Well, we use advertising.” Reporter: “You’re an advertisem*nt.” John: “Will you shut up a minute!” (Giulano 109) In the heat of exchange, Lennon breaks his cool at the reporter who underscores that there is no way to differentiate between the use of advertising to promote peace and to promote John and Yoko. This concurs with Graeme Turner’s argument in Fame Games that “the celebrity’s ultimate power is to sell the commodity that is themselves” (Turner 12). At the point that would convert this speaking subject into a walking advertisem*nt, the hippie peacenik snaps and reveals a violent temper not befitting someone who would follow Gandhi’s way of non-violence. Engaging with the mass media, John and Yoko’s media war packaged and promoted their peace product as art and advertising, as information and entertainment, as a discourse of political dissent and of self-promotion. With a slogan like “War is Over! If You Want It,” these two media warriors supplied youth culture at the end of the 60’s with the peace product and process that was lacking. Their consuming images and anthems anticipated the “collusional critique” of eighties art and its appropriation of media images that function as “both critical manifesto and the very commodity it critiques” (Sussman 15). In this case, John and Yoko’s media war provided a critique of the official war program while capitalizing upon the very commodity against which war had been declared. For if John seriously wanted to “make peace big business for everybody” (Newsweek 102), this could be achieved only in a parasitic relationship with a war economy making John and Yoko both peace prophets and profiteers. But even if one acknowledges the profit motive in the peace campaign—and this assumes that John was not misappropriated as a “peace capitalist” by the establishment press—there was something else fluxing up the media machine and the war program. John and Yoko understood how their star power and international celebrity gave them a privileged and almost unlimited access to a mass media that wanted to soak up their Pop star aura to satisfy its own instrumentalist agenda. The press and the public wanted John and Yoko, and these two media stars fed this desire and then some. They complied with the pop star demand, but spiked it with the dangerous supplements of political dissent and subversive humour. They fed this desire with a feedback loop and interventionist strategy, with an anti-war army surplus provided at no extra charge. The year 1969 concluded with another savvy media event that lent John and Yoko’s media war more political credibility and gave the American establishment something they had not bargained for: a photo-op and peace dialogue with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada. Once again, John and Yoko’s media war had added an extra twist and an extra shout that the war programmers would have preferred not to hear, the message “War is Over (If You Want It!)” and “War is Over” whether they wanted it or not. Imagine that. Works Cited “The Peace Anthem,” Newsweek, December 1, 1969. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Giulano, Geoffrey and Brenda. The Lost Lennon Interviews, Holbrook, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 1996. Sussman, Elizabeth. On the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment of Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972, Boston: M.I.T. Press and Institute of Contemporary Art, 1989. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner and David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Wiener, Jon. Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (New York: Random House, 1984). Links http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9706/21/lennon.award Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Kaplan, Louis. "“War is Over! If You Want It”" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/06-warisover.php>. APA Style Kaplan, L., (2003, Feb 26). “War is Over! If You Want It”. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/06-warisover.html

Abstract:

Phillip Noyce is one of Australia’s most prominent film makers—a successful feature film director with both iconic Australian narratives and many a Hollywood blockbuster under his belt. Still, his beginnings were quite humble and far from his role today when he grew up in the midst of the counterculture of the late sixties. Millions of young people his age joined the various ‘movements’ of the day after experiences that changed their lives—mostly music but also drugs or fashion. The counterculture was a turbulent time in Sydney artistic circles as elsewhere. Everything looked possible, you simply had to “Do It!”—and Noyce did. He dived head-on into these times and with a voracious appetite for its many aspects—film, theatre, rallies, music, art and politics in general. In fact he often was the driving force behind such activities. Noyce described his personal epiphany occurring in 1968: A few months before I was due to graduate from high school, […] I saw a poster on a telegraph pole advertising American 'underground' movies. There was a mesmerising, beautiful blue-coloured drawing on the poster that I later discovered had been designed by an Australian filmmaker called David Perry. The word 'underground' conjured up all sorts of delights to an eighteen-year-old in the late Sixties: in an era of censorship it promised erotica, perhaps; in an era of drug-taking it promised some clandestine place where marijuana, or even something stronger, might be consumed; in an era of confrontation between conservative parents and their affluent post-war baby-boomer children, it promised a place where one could get together with other like-minded youth and plan to undermine the establishment, which at that time seemed to be the aim of just about everyone aged under 30. (Petzke 8) What the poster referred to was a new, highly different type of film. In the US these films were usually called “underground”. This term originates from film critic Manny Farber who used it in his 1957 essay Underground Films. Farber used the label for films whose directors today would be associated with independent and art house feature films. More directly, film historian Lewis Jacobs referred to experimental films when he used the words “film which for most of its life has led an underground existence” (8). The term is used interchangeably with New American Cinema. It was based on a New York group—the Film-Makers’ Co-operative—that started in 1960 with mostly low-budget filmmakers under the guidance of Jonas Mekas. When in 1962 the group was formally organised as a means for new, improved ways of distributing their works, experimental filmmakers were the dominant faction. They were filmmakers working in a more artistic vein, slightly influenced by the European Avant-garde of the 1920s and by attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In film history, this era is also known as the Third Avant-garde. In their First Statement of the New American Cinema Group, the group drew connections to both the British Free Cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague. They also claimed that contemporary cinema was “morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring” (80). An all-encompassing definition of Underground Film never was available. Sheldon Renan lists some of the problems: There are underground films in which there is no movement and films in which there is nothing but movement. There are films about people and films about light. There are short, short underground films and long, long underground films. There are some that have been banned, and there is one that was nominated for an Academy Award. There are sexy films and sexless films, political films and poetical films, film epigrams and film epics … underground film is nothing less than an explosion of cinematic styles, forms and directions. (Renan 17) No wonder that propelled by frequent serious articles in the press—notably Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice—and regular screenings at other venues like the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque and the Gallery of Modern Art in New York, these films proved increasingly popular in the United States and almost immediately spread like bush fires around the world. So in early September 1968 Noyce joined a sold-out crowd at the Union Theatre in Sydney, watching 17 shorts assembled by Ubu Films, the premier experimental and underground film collective in 1960s Australia (Milesago). And on that night his whole attitude to art, his whole attitude to movies—in fact, his whole life—changed. He remembered: I left the cinema that night thinking, "I’m gonna make movies like that. I can do it." Here was a style of cinema that seemed to speak to me. It was immediate, it was direct, it was personal, and it wasn’t industrial. It was executed for personal expression, not for profit; it was individual as opposed to corporate, it was stylistically free; it seemed to require very little expenditure, innovation being the key note. It was a completely un-Hollywood-like aesthetic; it was operating on a visceral level that was often non-linear and was akin to the psychedelic images that were in vogue at the time—whether it was in music, in art or just in the patterns on your multi-coloured shirt. These movies spoke to me. (Petzke 9) Generally speaking, therefore, these films were the equivalent of counterculture in the area of film. Theodore Roszak railed against “technocracy” and underground films were just the opposite, often almost do-it-yourself in production and distribution. They were objecting to middle-class culture and values. And like counterculture they aimed at doing away with repression and to depict a utopian lifestyle feeling at ease with each imaginable form of liberality (Doggett 469). Underground films transgressed any Hollywood rule and convention in content, form and technique. Mobile hand-held cameras, narrow-gauge or outright home movies, shaky and wobbly, rapid cutting, out of focus, non-narrative, disparate continuity—you name it. This type of experimental film was used to express the individual consciousness of the “maker”—no longer calling themselves directors—a cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature. Just as in modern visual art, both the material and the process of making became part of these artworks. Music often was a dominant factor, particularly Eastern influences or the new Beat Music that was virtually non-existent in feature films. Drug experiences were reflected in imagery and structure. Some of the first comings-out of gay men can be found as well as films that were shown at the appropriately named “Wet Dreams Festival” in Amsterdam. Noyce commented: I worked out that the leading lights in this Ubu Films seemed to be three guys — Aggy Read, Albie Thoms and David Perry […They] all had beards and […] seemed to come from the basem*nt of a terrace house in Redfern. Watching those movies that night, picking up all this information, I was immediately seized by three great ambitions. First of all, I wanted to grow a beard; secondly, I wanted to live in a terrace house in the inner city; and thirdly, I wanted to be a filmmaker. (Ubu Films) Noyce soon discovered there were a lot of people like him who wanted to make short films for personal expression, but also as a form of nationalism. They wanted to make Australian movies. Noyce remembered: “Aggy, Albie and David encouraged everyone to go and make a film for themselves” (Petzke 11). This was easy enough to do as these films—not only in Australia—were often made for next to nothing and did not require any prior education or training. And the target audience group existed in a subculture of people willing to pay money even for extreme entertainment as long as it was advertised in an appealing way—which meant: in the way of the rampaging Zeitgeist. Noyce—smitten by the virus—would from then on regularly attend the weekly meetings organised by the young filmmakers. And in line with Jerry Rubin’s contemporary adage “Do it!” he would immediately embark on a string of films with enthusiasm and determination—qualities soon to become his trademark. All his films were experimental in nature, shot on 16mm and were so well received that Albie Thoms was convinced that Noyce had a great career ahead of him as an experimental filmmaker. Truly alternative was Noyce’s way to finally finance Better to Reign in Hell, his first film, made at age 18 and with a total budget of $600. Noyce said on reflection: I had approached some friends and told them that if they invested in my film, they could have an acting role. Unfortunately, the guy whose dad had the most money — he was a doctor’s son — was also maybe the worst actor that was ever put in front of a camera. But he had invested four hundred dollars, so I had to give him the lead. (Petzke 13) The title was taken from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost (“better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”). It was a film very much inspired by the images, montage and narrative techniques of the underground movies watched at Ubu. Essentially the film is about a young man’s obsession with a woman he sees repeatedly in advertising and the hallucinogenic dreams he has about her. Despite its later reputation, the film was relatively mundane. Being shot in black and white, it lacks the typical psychedelic ingredients of the time and is more reminiscent of the surrealistic precursors to underground film. Some contempt for the prevailing consumer society is thrown in for good measure. In the film, “A youth is persecuted by the haunting reappearance of a girl’s image in various commercial outlets. He finds escape from this commercial brainwashing only in his own confused sexual hallucinations” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). But despite this advertising, so convincingly capturing the “hint! hint!” mood of the time, Noyce’s first film isn’t really outstanding even in terms of experimental film. Noyce continued to make short experimental films. There was not even the pretence of a story in any of them. He was just experimenting with his gear and finding his own way to use the techniques of the underground cinema. Megan was made at Sydney University Law School to be projected as part of the law students’ revue. It was a three-minute silent film that featured a woman called Megan, who he had a crush on. Intersection was 2 minutes 44 seconds in length and shot in the middle of a five-way or four-way intersection in North Sydney. The camera was walked into the intersection and spun around in a continuous circle from the beginning of the roll of film to the end. It was an experiment with disorientation and possibly a comment about urban development. Memories was a seven-minute short in colour about childhood and the bush, accompanied by a smell-track created in the cinema by burning eucalyptus leaves. Sun lasted 90 seconds in colour and examined the pulsating winter sun by way of 100 single frame shots. And finally, Home was a one-and-a-half-minute single frame camera exploration of the filmmaker’s home, inside and out, including its inhabitants and pets. As a true experimental filmmaker, Noyce had a deep interest in technical aspects. It was recommended that Sun “be projected through a special five image lens”, Memories and Intersection with “an anamorphic lens” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). The double projection for Better to Reign in Hell and the two screens required for Good Afternoon, as well as the addition of the smell of burning leaves in Memories, were inroads into the subgenre of so-called Expanded Cinema. As filmmaking in those days was not an isolated enterprise but an integral part of the all-encompassing Counterculture, Noyce followed suit and became more and more involved and politiced. He started becoming a driving force of the movement. Besides selling Ubu News, he organised film screenings. He also wrote film articles for both Honi Soit and National U, the Sydney University and Canberra University newspapers—articles more opinionated than sophisticated. He was also involved in Ubu’s Underground Festival held in August and in other activities of the time, particularly anti-war protests. When Ubu Films went out of business after the lack of audience interest in Thoms’s long Marinetti film in 1969, Aggy Read suggested that Ubu be reinvented as a co-operative for tax reasons and because they might benefit from their stock of 250 Australian and foreign films. On 28 May 1970 the reinvention began at the first general meeting of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative where Noyce volunteered and was elected their part-time manager. He transferred the 250 prints to his parents’ home in Wahroonga where he was still living he said he “used to sit there day after day just screening those movies for myself” (Petzke 18). The Sydney University Film Society screened feature films to students at lunchtime. Noyce soon discovered they had money nobody was spending and equipment no one was using, which seemed to be made especially for him. In the university cinema he would often screen his own and other shorts from the Co-op’s library. The entry fee was 50 cents. He remembered: “If I handed out the leaflets in the morning, particularly concentrating on the fact that these films were uncensored and a little risqué, then usually there would be 600 people in the cinema […] One or two screenings per semester would usually give me all the pocket money I needed to live” (Petzke 19). Libertine and risqué films were obviously popular as they were hard to come by. Noyce said: We suffered the worst censorship of almost any Western country in the world, even worse than South Africa. Books would be seized by customs officers at the airports and when ships docked. Customs would be looking for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We were very censored in literature and films and plays, and my film [Better to Reign in Hell] was banned from export. I tried to send it to a film festival in Holland and it was denied an export permit, but because it had been shot in Australia, until someone in the audience complained it could still be screened locally. (Castaway's Choice) No wonder clashes with the law happened frequently and were worn like medals of honour in those days of fighting the system, proving that one was fighting in the front line against the conservative values of law and order. Noyce encountered three brushes with the law. The first occurred when selling Ubu Films’ alternative culture newspaper Ubu News, Australia’s first underground newspaper (Milesago). One of the issues contained an advertisem*nt—a small drawing—for Levi’s jeans, showing a guy trying to put his Levis on his head, so that his penis was showing. That was judged by the police to be obscene. Noyce was found guilty and given a suspended sentence for publishing an indecent publication. There had been another incident including Phil’s Pill, his own publication of six or eight issues. After one day reprinting some erotic poems from The Penguin Collection of Erotic Poetry he was found guilty and released on a good behaviour bond without a conviction being recorded. For the sake of historical truth it should be remembered, though, that provocation was a genuine part of the game. How else could one seriously advertise Better to Reign in Hell as “a sex-fantasy film which includes a daring rape scene”—and be surprised when the police came in after screening this “p*rnographic film” (Stratton 202) at the Newcastle Law Students Ball? The Newcastle incident also throws light on the fact that Noyce organised screenings wherever possible, constantly driving prints and projectors around in his Mini Minor. Likewise, he is remembered as having been extremely helpful in trying to encourage other people with their own ideas—anyone could make films and could make them about anything they liked. He helped Jan Chapman, a fellow student who became his (first) wife in December 1971, to shoot and edit Just a Little Note, a documentary about a moratorium march and a guerrilla theatre group run by their friend George Shevtsov. Noyce also helped on I Happened to Be a Girl, a documentary about four women, friends of Chapman. There is no denying that being a filmmaker was a hobby, a full-time job and an obsessive religion for Noyce. He was on the organising committee of the First Australian Filmmakers’ Festival in August 1971. He performed in the agit-prop acting troupe run by George Shevtsov (later depicted in Renegades) that featured prominently at one of Sydney’s rock festival that year. In the latter part of 1971 and early 1972 he worked on Good Afternoon, a documentary about the Combined Universities’ Aquarius Arts Festival in Canberra, which arguably was the first major manifestation of counterculture in Australia. For this the Aquarius Foundation—the cultural arm of the Australian Union of Students—had contracted him. This became a two-screen movie à la Woodstock. Together with Thoms, Read and Ian Stocks, in 1972 he participated in cataloguing the complete set of films in distribution by the Co-op (see Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative). As can be seen, Noyce was at home in many manifestations of the Sydney counterculture. His own films had slowly become more politicised and bent towards documentary. He even started a newsreel that he used to screen at the Filmmakers’ Cooperative Cinema with a live commentary. One in 1971, Springboks Protest, was about the demonstrations at the Sydney Cricket Ground against the South African rugby tour. There were more but Noyce doesn’t remember them and no prints seem to have survived. Renegades was a diary film; a combination of poetic images and reportage on the street demonstrations. Noyce’s experimental films had been met with interest in the—limited—audience and among publications. His more political films and particularly Good Afternoon, however, reached out to a much wider audience, now including even the undogmatic left and hard-core documentarists of the times. In exchange, and for the first time, there were opposing reactions—but as always a great discussion at the Filmmakers’ Cinema, the main venue for independent productions. This cinema began with those initial screenings at Sydney University in the union room next to the Union Theatre. But once the Experimental Film Fund started operating in 1970, more and more films were submitted for the screenings and consequently a new venue was needed. Albie Thoms started a forum in the Yellow House in Kings Cross in May 1970. Next came—at least briefly—a restaurant in Glebe before the Co-op took over a space on the top floor of the socialist Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street that was a firetrap. Bob Gould, the owner, was convinced that by first passing through his bookshop the audience would buy his books on the way upstairs. Sundays for him were otherwise dead from a commercial point of view. Noyce recollected that: The audience at this Filmmakers’ Cinema were mightily enthusiastic about seeing themselves up on the screen. And there was always a great discussion. So, generally the screenings were a huge success, with many full houses. The screenings grew from once a week, to three times on Sunday, to all weekend, and then seven days a week at several locations. One program could play in three different illegal cinemas around the city. (Petzke 26) A filmmakers’ cinema also started in Melbourne and the groups of filmmakers would visit each other and screen their respective films. But especially after the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 there was a shift in interest from risqué underground films to the concept of Australian Cinema. The audience started coming now for a dose of Australian culture. Funding of all kind was soon freely available and with such a fund the film co-op was able to set up a really good licensed cinema in St. Peters Lane in Darlinghurst, running seven days a week. But, Noyce said, “the move to St. Peters Lane was sort of the end of an era, because initially the cinema was self-funded, but once it became government sponsored everything changed” (Petzke 29). With money now readily available, egotism set in and the prevailing “we”-feeling rather quickly dissipated. But by the time of this move and the resulting developments, everything for Noyce had already changed again. He had been accepted into the first intake of the Interim Australian Film & TV School, another one of the nation-awareness-building projects of the Whitlam government. He was on his “long march through the institutions”—as this was frequently called throughout Europe—that would bring him to documentaries, TV and eventually even Hollywood (and return). Noyce didn’t linger once the alternative scene started fading away. Everything those few, wild years in the counterculture had taught him also put him right on track to become one of the major players in Hollywood. He never looked back—but he remembers fondly…References Castaway’s Choice. Radio broadcast by KCRW. 1990. Doggett, Peter. There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Farber, Manny. “Underground Films.” Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. Ed. Manny Farber. New York: Da Capo, 1998. 12–24. Jacobs, Lewis. “Morning for the Experimental Film”. Film Culture 19 (1959): 6–9. Milesago. “Ubu Films”. n.d. 26 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.milesago.com/visual/ubu.htm›. New American Cinema Group. “First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970. 73–75. Petzke, Ingo. Phillip Noyce: Backroads to Hollywood. Sydney: Pan McMillan, 2004. Renan, Sheldon. The Underground Film: An Introduction to Its Development in America. London: Studio Vista, 1968. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Stratton, David. The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative. Film Catalogue. Sydney: Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, 1972. Ubu Films. Unreleased five-minute video for the promotion of Mudie, Peter. Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies 1965-1970. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1997.

Abstract:

Red bayberry (Myrica rubra (Lour.) Siebold & Zucc.), small trees, evergreen, dioecious, natively grows in evergreen broad-leaved forests at elevation of 1580-1875 m a.s.l., and can survive in low nutrient soil at Cao Ma Po commune, Quan Ba district, Ha Giang province. Some data on morphology, phenology, population structure, natural regeneration and distribution of Red baybery, climatic characteristics, physical and chemical properties of soil, and vegetation structure of forests having Myrica rubra occurrence are presented in this paper. Keywords Red bayberry, Myrica rubra, biology, ecology, conservation, Ha Giang, Vietnam References [1] Lu A. & Bornstein A. J., Myricaceae in Wu Z. Y. & Raven P. H. (eds.). Flora of China Vol. 4, Science Press & Missouri Botanical Garden Press, Beijing & St. Louis, 1999, pp. 275-276.[2] He X. H., Chen L. G., Asghar S. & Chen Y., Red Bayberry (Myrica rubra), a Promising Fruit and Forest Tree in China, Journal of the American Pomological Society, 58(3), 2004, pp. 163- 168.[3] Joyce D., Khurshid T., Liu S., McGregor G., Li J. & Jiang Y., Red Bayberry-A New and Exciting Crop for Australia? An investigation of the potential for commercialisation of Myrica rubra Sieb. and Zucc. (Yang mei) in Australia, RIRDC Publication No. 05/081, 2005, 26 pp. [4] Sharpe R. H. & Knapp F. W., The Straberry tree, Myrica rubra Sieb. and Zucc., Florida State Horticultural Society, 1972, pp. 326-328. [5] Chai C. Y. & Chen Y. F., Introduction of Yangmei Elite Varieties in California, World Journal of Forestry, 5(1), 2016, pp. 1-6.[6] Fang Z. X., Zhang M., Tao G. J., Sun Y. F. & Sun J. C., Chemical composition of clarified bayberry (Myrica rubra Sieb et Zucc.) juice sediment, Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, 54(20), 2006, pp. 7710-7716.[7] Cheng J. Y., Ye X. Q., Chen J. C., Liu D. H. & Zhou S. H., Nutritional composition of underutilized bayberry (Myrica rubra Sieb. et Zucc.) kernels, Food Chemistry, 107(4), 2008, pp. 1674-1680.[8] Joyce D. & Sanewski G., The Commercial Potential of Red Bayberry in Australia, RIRDC Publication No. 10/200, 2010, 36 pp.[9] Zhang X. N., Huang H. Z., Zhao X. Y., Lu Q., Sun C. D., Li X., Chen K. S., Effects of flavonoids-rich Chinese bayberry (Myrica rubra Sieb. et Zucc.) pulp extracts on glucose consumption in human HepG2 cells, Journal of Functional Foods, 14, 2015, pp. 144-153.[10] Tong Y., Zhou X. M., Wang S. J., Yang Y. & Cao Y. L., Analgesic activity of myricetin isolated from Myrica rubra Sieb. et Zucc. leaves, Archives of Pharmacal Research, 2(4), 2009, pp. 527-533. [11] Zhang Y., Zhou X. Z., Tao W. Y., Li L. Q., Wei C. Y., Duan J., Chen S. G. & Ye X. Q., Antioxidant and antiproliferative activities of proanthocyanidins from Chinese bayberry (Myrica rubra Sieb. et Zucc.) leaves, Journal of Functional Foods, 27, 2016, pp. 645-654.[12] Kim H. H., Kim D. H., Kim M. H., Oh M. H., Kim S. R., et al., Flavonoid constituents in the leaves of Myrica rubra Sieb. et Zucc. with anti-inflammatory activity, Archives of Pharmacal Research, 36(12), 2013, pp. 1533-1540.[13] Kuo P. L., Hsu Y. L., Lin T. C., Lin L. T. & Lin C. C., Induction of apoptosis in human breast adenocarcinoma MCF-7 cells by prodelphinidin B-2 3,3'-di-O-gallate from Myrica rubra via Fas-mediated pathway, Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology 56(11), 2004, pp. 1399-1406.[14] Sun C. D., Zheng Y. X., Chen Q. J., Tang X. L., Jiang M., Zhang J. K., Li X. & Chen K. S., Purification and anti-tumour activity of cyanidin-3-O-glucoside from Chinese bayberry fruit, Food Chemistry, 131(4), 2012, pp. 1287-1294.[15] Sun C. D., Huang H. Z., Xu C. J., Li X. & Chen K. S., Biological activities of extracts from Chinese bayberry (Myrica rubra Sieb. et Zucc.): A review, Plant Foods for Human Nutrition, 68(2), 2013, pp. 97-106.[16] Langhansova L., Hanusova V., Rezek J., Stohanslova B., Ambroz M., et al., Essential oil from Myrica rubra leaves inhibits cancer cell proliferation and induces apoptosis in several human intestinal lines, Industrial Crops Products ,59, 2014, pp. 20-26.[17] Ambrǒz M., Bousǒvá I., Skarka A., Hanusǒvá V., Králová V., et al., The Influence of Sesquiterpenes from Myrica rubra on the Antiproliferative and Pro-Oxidative Effects of Doxorubicin and Its Accumulation in Cancer Cells, Molecules, 20(8), 2015, pp. 15343-15358.[18] Lê Mộng Chân và Lê Thị Huyền, Thực Vật Rừng, Nxb Nông nghiệp, Hà Nội, 2000, tr. 149-150.[19] Xia N. H., Myricaceae in Hu Q. M. & Wu D. L. (eds.), Flora of Hong Kong Vol. 1, Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, Hong Kong, 2007, pp. 125-126.[20] Nguyễn Sinh Khang, Bùi Hồng Quang, Vũ Tiến Chính, Nguyễn Tiến Hiệp, Nguyễn Quang Hiếu, Nguyễn Thành Sơn, Xia Nian He & Davidson Christopher, Myrica rubra (Lour.) Siebold & Zucc. (Myricaceae): A useful plant resource in Vietnam, Hội nghị Khoa học toàn quốc lần thứ 7 về Sinh thái và Tài nguyên sinh vật, Viện Sinh thái và Tài nguyên sinh vật, Nxb Nông nghiệp, Hà Nội, 2017, pp. 226-232. [21] Nguyễn Nghĩa Thìn, Các phương pháp nghiên cứu thực vật, Nxb. Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội, Hà Nội, 2007.[22] Liesner R., Field Techniques Used by Missouri Botanical Garden, 2018, http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/molib/fieldtechbook/welcome.shtml [23] Bộ Khoa học và Công nghệ, Tiêu chuẩn Việt Nam TCVN 7538-2:2005 (ISO 10381 - 2 : 2002) về Chất lượng đất - Lấy mẫu - Phần 2: Hướng dẫn kỹ thuật lấy mẫu.[24] Phạm Hoàng Hộ, Cây cỏ Việt Nam, tập 1, Nxb Trẻ, TP. 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Abstract:

Connecting I’ve moved house on the weekend, closer to the centre of an Australian capital city. I had recently signed up for broadband, with a major Australian Internet company (my first contact, cf. Turner). Now I am the proud owner of a larger modem than I have ever owned: a white cable modem. I gaze out into our new street: two thick black cables cosseted in silver wire. I am relieved. My new home is located in one of those streets, double-cabled by Telstra and Optus in the data-rush of the mid-1990s. Otherwise, I’d be moth-balling the cable modem, and the thrill of my data percolating down coaxial cable. And it would be off to the computer supermarket to buy an ASDL modem, then to pick a provider, to squeeze some twenty-first century connectivity out of old copper (the phone network our grandparents and great-grandparents built). If I still lived in the country, or the outskirts of the city, or anywhere else more than four kilometres from the phone exchange, and somewhere that cable pay TV will never reach, it would be a dish for me — satellite. Our digital lives are premised upon infrastructure, the networks through which we shape what we do, fashion the meanings of our customs and practices, and exchange signs with others. Infrastructure is not simply the material or the technical (Lamberton), but it is the dense, fibrous knotting together of social visions, cultural resources, individual desires, and connections. No more can one easily discern between ‘society’ and ‘technology’, ‘carriage’ and ‘content’, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, or ‘infrastructure’ and ‘applications’ (or ‘services’ or ‘content’). To understand telecommunications in action, or the vectors of fibre, we need to consider the long and heterogeneous list of links among different human and non-human actors — the long networks, to take Bruno Latour’s evocative concept, that confect our broadband networks (Latour). The co-ordinates of our infrastructure still build on a century-long history of telecommunications networks, on the nineteenth-century centrality of telegraphy preceding this, and on the histories of the public and private so inscribed. Yet we are in the midst of a long, slow dismantling of the posts-telegraph-telephone (PTT) model of the monopoly carrier for each nation that dominated the twentieth century, with its deep colonial foundations. Instead our New World Information and Communication Order is not the decolonising UNESCO vision of the late 1970s and early 1980s (MacBride, Maitland). Rather it is the neoliberal, free trade, market access model, its symbol the 1984 US judicial decision to require the break-up of AT&T and the UK legislation in the same year that underpinned the Thatcherite twin move to privatize British Telecom and introduce telecommunications competition. Between 1984 and 1999, 110 telecommunications companies were privatized, and the ‘acquisition of privatized PTOs [public telecommunications operators] by European and American operators does follow colonial lines’ (Winseck 396; see also Mody, Bauer & Straubhaar). The competitive market has now been uneasily installed as the paradigm for convergent communications networks, not least with the World Trade Organisation’s 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services and Annex on Telecommunications. As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer (Goggin, ‘Citizens and Beyond’), we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. Begging for broadband, it seems, is a long way from warchalking for WiFi. Policy Circuits The dreary everyday business of getting connected plugs the individual netizen into a tangled mess of policy circuits, as much as tricky network negotiations. Broadband in mid-2003 in Australia is a curious chimera, welded together from a patchwork of technologies, old and newer communications industries, emerging economies and patterns of use. Broadband conjures up grander visions, however, of communication and cultural cornucopia. Broadband is high-speed, high-bandwidth, ‘always-on’, networked communications. People can send and receive video, engage in multimedia exchanges of all sorts, make the most of online education, realise the vision of home-based work and trading, have access to telemedicine, and entertainment. Broadband really entered the lexicon with the mass takeup of the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, and with the debates about something called the ‘information superhighway’. The rise of the Internet, the deregulation of telecommunications, and the involuted convergence of communications and media technologies saw broadband positioned at the centre of policy debates nearly a decade ago. In 1993-1994, Australia had its Broadband Services Expert Group (BSEG), established by the then Labor government. The BSEG was charged with inquiring into ‘issues relating to the delivery of broadband services to homes, schools and businesses’. Stung by criticisms of elite composition (a narrow membership, with only one woman among its twelve members, and no consumer or citizen group representation), the BSEG was prompted into wider public discussion and consultation (Goggin & Newell). The then Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE), since transmogrified into the Communications Research Unit of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), conducted its large-scale Communications Futures Project (BTCE and Luck). The BSEG Final report posed the question starkly: As a society we have choices to make. If we ignore the opportunities we run the risk of being left behind as other countries introduce new services and make themselves more competitive: we will become consumers of other countries’ content, culture and technologies rather than our own. Or we could adopt new technologies at any cost…This report puts forward a different approach, one based on developing a new, user-oriented strategy for communications. The emphasis will be on communication among people... (BSEG v) The BSEG proposed a ‘National Strategy for New Communications Networks’ based on three aspects: education and community access, industry development, and the role of government (BSEG x). Ironically, while the nation, or at least its policy elites, pondered the weighty question of broadband, Australia’s two largest telcos were doing it. The commercial decision of Telstra/Foxtel and Optus Vision, and their various television partners, was to nail their colours (black) to the mast, or rather telegraph pole, and to lay cable in the major capital cities. In fact, they duplicated the infrastructure in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, then deciding it would not be profitable to cable up even regional centres, let alone small country towns or settlements. As Terry Flew and Christina Spurgeon observe: This wasteful duplication contrasted with many other parts of the country that would never have access to this infrastructure, or to the social and economic benefits that it was perceived to deliver. (Flew & Spurgeon 72) The implications of this decision for Australia’s telecommunications and television were profound, but there was little, if any, public input into this. Then Minister Michael Lee was very proud of his anti-siphoning list of programs, such as national sporting events, that would remain on free-to-air television rather than screen on pay, but was unwilling, or unable, to develop policy on broadband and pay TV cable infrastructure (on the ironies of Australia’s television history, see Given’s masterly account). During this period also, it may be remembered, Australia’s Internet was being passed into private hands, with the tendering out of AARNET (see Spurgeon for discussion). No such national strategy on broadband really emerged in the intervening years, nor has the market provided integrated, accessible broadband services. In 1997, landmark telecommunications legislation was enacted that provided a comprehensive framework for competition in telecommunications, as well as consolidating and extending consumer protection, universal service, customer service standards, and other reforms (CLC). Carrier and reseller competition had commenced in 1991, and the 1997 legislation gave it further impetus. Effective competition is now well established in long distance telephone markets, and in mobiles. Rivalrous competition exists in the market for local-call services, though viable alternatives to Telstra’s dominance are still few (Fels). Broadband too is an area where there is symbolic rivalry rather than effective competition. This is most visible in advertised ADSL offerings in large cities, yet most of the infrastructure for these services is comprised by Telstra’s copper, fixed-line network. Facilities-based duopoly competition exists principally where Telstra/Foxtel and Optus cable networks have been laid, though there are quite a number of ventures underway by regional telcos, power companies, and, most substantial perhaps, the ACT government’s TransACT broadband network. Policymakers and industry have been greatly concerned about what they see as slow takeup of broadband, compared to other countries, and by barriers to broadband competition and access to ‘bottleneck’ facilities (such as Telstra or Optus’s networks) by potential competitors. The government has alternated between trying to talk up broadband benefits and rates of take up and recognising the real difficulties Australia faces as a large country with a relative small and dispersed population. In March 2003, Minister Alston directed the ACCC to implement new monitoring and reporting arrangements on competition in the broadband industry. A key site for discussion of these matters has been the competition policy institution, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and its various inquiries, reports, and considerations (consult ACCC’s telecommunications homepage at http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm). Another key site has been the Productivity Commission (http://www.pc.gov.au), while a third is the National Office on the Information Economy (NOIE - http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm). Others have questioned whether even the most perfectly competitive market in broadband will actually provide access to citizens and consumers. A great deal of work on this issue has been undertaken by DCITA, NOIE, the regulators, and industry bodies, not to mention consumer and public interest groups. Since 1997, there have been a number of governmental inquiries undertaken or in progress concerning the takeup of broadband and networked new media (for example, a House of Representatives Wireless Broadband Inquiry), as well as important inquiries into the still most strategically important of Australia’s companies in this area, Telstra. Much of this effort on an ersatz broadband policy has been piecemeal and fragmented. There are fundamental difficulties with the large size of the Australian continent and its harsh terrain, the small size of the Australian market, the number of providers, and the dominant position effectively still held by Telstra, as well as Singtel Optus (Optus’s previous overseas investors included Cable & Wireless and Bell South), and the larger telecommunications and Internet companies (such as Ozemail). Many consumers living in metropolitan Australia still face real difficulties in realising the slogan ‘bandwidth for all’, but the situation in parts of rural Australia is far worse. Satellite ‘broadband’ solutions are available, through Telstra Countrywide or other providers, but these offer limited two-way interactivity. Data can be received at reasonable speeds (though at far lower data rates than how ‘broadband’ used to be defined), but can only be sent at far slower rates (Goggin, Rural Communities Online). The cultural implications of these digital constraints may well be considerable. Computer gamers, for instance, are frustrated by slow return paths. In this light, the final report of the January 2003 Broadband Advisory Group (BAG) is very timely. The BAG report opens with a broadband rhapsody: Broadband communications technologies can deliver substantial economic and social benefits to Australia…As well as producing productivity gains in traditional and new industries, advanced connectivity can enrich community life, particularly in rural and regional areas. It provides the basis for integration of remote communities into national economic, cultural and social life. (BAG 1, 7) Its prescriptions include: Australia will be a world leader in the availability and effective use of broadband...and to capture the economic and social benefits of broadband connectivity...Broadband should be available to all Australians at fair and reasonable prices…Market arrangements should be pro-competitive and encourage investment...The Government should adopt a National Broadband Strategy (BAG 1) And, like its predecessor nine years earlier, the BAG report does make reference to a national broadband strategy aiming to maximise “choice in work and recreation activities available to all Australians independent of location, background, age or interests” (17). However, the idea of a national broadband strategy is not something the BAG really comes to grips with. The final report is keen on encouraging broadband adoption, but not explicit on how barriers to broadband can be addressed. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the membership of the BAG, dominated by representatives of large corporations and senior bureaucrats was even less representative than its BSEG predecessor. Some months after the BAG report, the Federal government did declare a broadband strategy. It did so, intriguingly enough, under the rubric of its response to the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry report (Estens), the second inquiry responsible for reassuring citizens nervous about the full-privatisation of Telstra (the first inquiry being Besley). The government’s grand $142.8 million National Broadband Strategy focusses on the ‘broadband needs of regional Australians, in partnership with all levels of government’ (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’). Among other things, the government claims that the Strategy will result in “improved outcomes in terms of services and prices for regional broadband access; [and] the development of national broadband infrastructure assets.” (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’) At the same time, the government announced an overall response to the Estens Inquiry, with specific safeguards for Telstra’s role in regional communications — a preliminary to the full Telstra sale (Alston, ‘Future Proofing’). Less publicised was the government’s further initiative in indigenous telecommunications, complementing its Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities (DCITA). Indigenous people, it can be argued, were never really contemplated as citizens with the ken of the universal service policy taken to underpin the twentieth-century government monopoly PTT project. In Australia during the deregulatory and re-regulatory 1990s, there was a great reluctance on the part of Labor and Coalition Federal governments, Telstra and other industry participants, even to research issues of access to and use of telecommunications by indigenous communicators. Telstra, and to a lesser extent Optus (who had purchased AUSSAT as part of their licence arrangements), shrouded the issue of indigenous communications in mystery that policymakers were very reluctant to uncover, let alone systematically address. Then regulator, the Australian Telecommunications Authority (AUSTEL), had raised grave concerns about indigenous telecommunications access in its 1991 Rural Communications inquiry. However, there was no government consideration of, nor research upon, these issues until Alston commissioned a study in 2001 — the basis for the TAPRIC strategy (DCITA). The elision of indigenous telecommunications from mainstream industry and government policy is all the more puzzling, if one considers the extraordinarily varied and significant experiments by indigenous Australians in telecommunications and Internet (not least in the early work of the Tanami community, made famous in media and cultural studies by the writings of anthropologist Eric Michaels). While the government’s mid-2003 moves on a ‘National Broadband Strategy’ attend to some details of the broadband predicament, they fall well short of an integrated framework that grasps the shortcomings of the neoliberal communications model. The funding offered is a token amount. The view from the seat of government is a glance from the rear-view mirror: taking a snapshot of rural communications in the years 2000-2002 and projecting this tableau into a safety-net ‘future proofing’ for the inevitable turning away of a fully-privately-owned Telstra from its previously universal, ‘carrier of last resort’ responsibilities. In this aetiolated, residualist policy gaze, citizens remain constructed as consumers in a very narrow sense in this incremental, quietist version of state securing of market arrangements. What is missing is any more expansive notion of citizens, their varied needs, expectations, uses, and cultural imaginings of ‘always on’ broadband networks. Hybrid Networks “Most people on earth will eventually have access to networks that are all switched, interactive, and broadband”, wrote Frances Cairncross in 1998. ‘Eventually’ is a very appropriate word to describe the parlous state of broadband technology implementation. Broadband is in a slow state of evolution and invention. The story of broadband so far underscores the predicament for Australian access to bandwidth, when we lack any comprehensive, integrated, effective, and fair policy in communications and information technology. We have only begun to experiment with broadband technologies and understand their evolving uses, cultural forms, and the sense in which they rework us as subjects. Our communications networks are not superhighways, to invoke an enduring artefact from an older technology. Nor any longer are they a single ‘public’ switched telecommunications network, like those presided over by the post-telegraph-telephone monopolies of old. Like roads themselves, or the nascent postal system of the sixteenth century, broadband is a patchwork quilt. The ‘fibre’ of our communications networks is hybrid. To be sure, powerful corporations dominate, like the Tassis or Taxis who served as postmasters to the Habsburg emperors (Briggs & Burke 25). Activating broadband today provides a perspective on the path dependency of technology history, and how we can open up new threads of a communications fabric. Our options for transforming our multitudinous networked lives emerge as much from everyday tactics and strategies as they do from grander schemes and unifying policies. We may care to reflect on the waning potential for nation-building technology, in the wake of globalisation. We no longer gather our imagined community around a Community Telephone Plan as it was called in 1960 (Barr, Moyal, and PMG). Yet we do require national and international strategies to get and stay connected (Barr), ideas and funding that concretely address the wider dimensions of access and use. We do need to debate the respective roles of Telstra, the state, community initiatives, and industry competition in fair telecommunications futures. Networks have global reach and require global and national integration. Here vision, co-ordination, and resources are urgently required for our commonweal and moral fibre. To feel the width of the band we desire, we need to plug into and activate the policy circuits. Thanks to Grayson Cooke, Patrick Lichty, Ned Rossiter, John Pace, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Works Cited Alston, Richard. ‘ “Future Proofing” Regional Communications.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.php> —. ‘A National Broadband Strategy.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.php>. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Broadband Services Report March 2003. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm>. —. Emerging Market Structures in the Communications Sector. 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Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), 1994. Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE). Communications Futures Final Project. Canberra: AGPS, 1994. Cairncross, Frances. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives. London: Orion Business Books, 1997. Communications Law Centre (CLC). Australian Telecommunications Regulation: The Communications Law Centre Guide. 2nd edition. Sydney: Communications Law Centre, University of NSW, 2001. Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA). Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities: Report on the Strategic Study for Improving Telecommunications in Remote Indigenous Communities. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. Estens, D. Connecting Regional Australia: The Report of the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.php>, accessed 17 July 2003. Fels, Alan. ‘Competition in Telecommunications’, speech to Australian Telecommunications Users Group 19th Annual Conference. 6 March, 2003, Sydney. <http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc>, accessed 15 July 2003. Flew, Terry, and Spurgeon, Christina. ‘Television After Broadcasting’. In The Australian TV Book. Ed. Graeme Turner and Stuart Cunningham. Allen & Unwin, Sydney. 69-85. 2000. Given, Jock. Turning Off the Television. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Goggin, Gerard. ‘Citizens and Beyond: Universal service in the Twilight of the Nation-State.’ In All Connected?: Universal Service in Telecommunications, ed. Bruce Langtry. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1998. 49-77 —. Rural Communities Online: Networking to link Consumers to Providers. Melbourne: Telstra Consumer Consultative Council, 2003. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (HoR). Connecting Australia!: Wireless Broadband. Report of Inquiry into Wireless Broadband Technologies. Canberra: Parliament House, 2002. <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm>, accessed 17 July 2003. Lamberton, Don. ‘A Telecommunications Infrastructure is Not an Information Infrastructure’. Prometheus: Journal of Issues in Technological Change, Innovation, Information Economics, Communication and Science Policy 14 (1996): 31-38. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Luck, David. ‘Revisiting the Future: Assessing the 1994 BTCE communications futures project.’ Media International Australia 96 (2000): 109-119. MacBride, Sean (Chair of International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems). Many Voices, One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order. Paris: Kegan Page, London. UNESCO, 1980. Maitland Commission (Independent Commission on Worldwide Telecommunications Development). The Missing Link. Geneva: International Telecommunications Union, 1985. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Mody, Bella, Bauer, Johannes M., and Straubhaar, Joseph D., eds. Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Highway in Developing Countries. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. Moyal, Ann. Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1984. Post-Master General’s Department (PMG). Community Telephone Plan for Australia. Melbourne: PMG, 1960. Productivity Commission (PC). Telecommunications Competition Regulation: Inquiry Report. Report No. 16. Melbourne: Productivity Commission, 2001. <http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/>, accessed 17 July 2003. Spurgeon, Christina. ‘National Culture, Communications and the Information Economy.’ Media International Australia 87 (1998): 23-34. Turner, Graeme. ‘First Contact: coming to terms with the cable guy.’ UTS Review 3 (1997): 109-21. Winseck, Dwayne. ‘Wired Cities and Transnational Communications: New Forms of Governance for Telecommunications and the New Media’. In The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone. London: Sage, 2002. 393-409. World Trade Organisation. General Agreement on Trade in Services: Annex on Telecommunications. Geneva: World Trade Organisation, 1994. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm>. —. Fourth protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Geneva: World Trade Organisation. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm>. Links http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommunications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.html http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.html http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm http://www.pc.gov.au http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/ http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.html http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.html http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Broadband" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2003, Aug 26). Broadband. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>

Abstract:

Introduction Ngarrindjeri futures depend on the survival of the land, waters, and other interconnected living things. The Murray-Darling Basin is recognised nationally and internationally as a system under stress. Ngarrindjeri have long understood the profound and intricate connection of land, water, humans, and non-humans (Trevorrow and Hemming). In an effort to secure environmental sustainability the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA) have engaged in political negotiations with the State, primarily with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), to transform natural resource management arrangements that engage with an ethics of justice, redistribution, and recognition (Hattam, Rigney and Hemming). In 1987, prior to the formation of the NRA, Camp Coorong: Race Relations and Cultural Education Centre was established by the Ngarrindjeri Lands and Progress Association in partnership with the South Australian Museum and the South Australian Education Department (Hemming) as a place for all citizens to engage with the values of a land ethic of care. The complex includes a cultural museum, accommodation, conference facilities, and workshop facilities for primary, secondary, and tertiary education students; it also serves as a base for research and course development on Indigenous and Ngarrindjeri culture and history (Hattam, Rigney and Hemming). Camp Coorong seeks to share Ngarrindjeri cultural values, knowledges, and histories with students and visitors in order to “improve relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people with a broader strategy aimed at securing a future for themselves in their own ‘Country’” (Hemming 37). The Centre is adjacent to the Coorong National Park and 200 km South-East of Adelaide. The establishment of Camp Coorong on Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar (land/body/spirit) occurred when Ngarrindjeri Elders negotiated with the Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS) to establish the race relations and cultural education centre. This negotiation was the beginning of many subsequent negotiations between Ngarrindjeri, local, State, and Federal governments about reclaiming ownership, management, and control of Ngarrindjeri lands, waters, and knowledge systems for a healthy Country and by implication healthy people (Hemming, Trevorrow and Rigney). As Elder Tom Trevorrow states: The waters and the seas, the waters of the Kurangh (Coorong), the waters of the rivers and lakes are all spiritual waters…The land and waters is a living body…We the Ngarrindjeri people are a part of its existence…The land and waters must be healthy for the Ngarrindjeri people to be healthy…We say that if Yarluwar-Ruwe dies, the water dies, our Ngartjis die, the Ngarrindjeri will surely die (Ngarrindjeri Nation Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan 13). Ruwe/Ruwar is an important aspect of the public pedagogy practiced at Camp Coorong and by the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA). The NRA’s nation building activities arise from negotiated contractual agreements called KNYs: Kungan Ngarrindjeri Yunnan (Listen to Ngarrindjeri people talking). KNYs establish a vital aspect of the NRA’s strategic platform for political negotiations. However, the focus of this paper is concerned with local Indigenous experience of teaching and experience with the education system rather than the broader Ngarrindjeri educational objectives in the area. The specific concerns of this paper are the performance of storytelling and the dialectic relationship between the listener/learner (Tur and Tur). The pedagogy and place of Camp Coorong seeks to engage non-Indigenous people with Indigenous epistemologies through storytelling as a pedagogy of experience and a “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler and Zembylas). Before detailing the relationship of these with one another, it is necessary to grasp the importance of the interconnectedness of Ruwe/Ruwar articulated in the opening statement of Ngarrindjeri Nations Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan: Caring for Ngarrindjeri Sea, Country and Culture: Our Lands, Our Waters, Our People, All Living Things are connected. We implore people to respect our Ruwe (Country) as it was created in the Kaldowinyeri (the Creation). We long for sparkling, clean waters, healthy land and people and all living things. We long for the Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country) of our ancestors. Our vision is all people Caring, Sharing, Knowing and Respecting the lands, the waters, and all living things. Caring for Country The Lakes and the Coorong are dying as irrigation, over grazing, and pollution have left their toll on the Murray-Darling Basin. Camp Coorong delivers a key message (Hemming, 38) concerning the on-going obligation of Ngarrindjeri’s Ruwe/Ruwar to heal damaged sites both emotionally and environmentally. Couched as a civic responsibility, caring for County augments environmental action. However, there are epistemological distinctions between Natural Resources Management and Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar. Ngarrindjeri conceive of the River Murray as one system that cannot be demarcated along state lines. Ngarrrindjeri Elder Uncle Matt Rigney, who recently passed away, argued that the River Murray and the Darling is embodied and that when the river is sick it impacts directly on Ngarrindjeri personhood and wellbeing (Hemming, Trevorrow and Rigney). Therefore, Ngarrindjeri have a responsibility to care for Ngarrindjeri Country and Ngarrindjeri governance systems are informed by cultural and ethical obligations to Ruwe/Ruwar of the lower Murray River, Lakes and Coorong. Transmitting knowledge of Country is imperative as Aunty Ellen Trevorrow states: We have to keep our culture alive. We want access to our special places, our lands and our waters. We need to be able to protect our places, our ngatji [totems], our Old People and restore damaged sites. We want respect for our land and our water and we want to pass down knowledge (cited in Bell, Women and Indigenous Religions 3). Ruwe/Ruwar is an ethic of care where men and women hold distinctive cultural and environmental knowledge and are responsible for passing knowledge to future generations. Knowledge is not codified into a “canon” but is “living knowledge” connected to how to live and how to understand the connection between material, spiritual, human, and non-human realms. Elders at Camp Coorong facilitate understandings of this ontology by sharing stories that evoke questions in children and adults alike. For settler Australians, the first phase of this understanding begins with an engagement with the discomfort of the colonial history of Indigenous dispossession. It also requires learning new modes of “re/inhabition” through a pedagogy informed by “place-consciousness” that centralises Indigenous connection to Country (Gruenewald Both Worlds). Many settler communities embody a dualist western epistemology that is necessarily disrupted when there is acknowledgment from whence one came (Carter 2009). The activities and stories at Camp Coorong provide a positive transformative pedagogy that transforms a possessive white logic (Moreton-Robinson) to one of shared cultural heritage. Ngarrindjeri epistemologies of connection to Country are expressed through a pedagogy of storytelling at Camp Coorong. This often occurs during weaving, making feather flowers, or walking on Ngarrindjeri Country with visitors and students. Enactments such as weaving are not simply occupational or functional. Weaving has deep cultural and metaphorical significance as Aunty Ellen Trevorrow states: There is a whole ritual in weaving. From where we actually start, the centre part of a piece, you’re creating loops to weave into, then you move into the circle. You keep going round and round creating the loops and once the children do those stages they’re talking, actually having a conversation, just like our Old People. It’s sharing time. And that’s where our stories were told (cited in Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin 44). At Camp Coorong learning involves listening to stories while engaging with activities such as weaving or walking on Country. The ecological changes and the history of dispossession are woven into narrative on Country and students see the impact of the desecration of the Coorong, Lower Murray and Lakes and lands. In this way the relatively recent history of colonial race relations and contemporary struggles with government bureaucracies and legislation also comprise the warp and weave of Ngarrindjeri knowledge and connection to Country. Pedagogy of Experience A pedagogy of experience involves telling the story of Indigenous peoples’ sense of “placelessness” within the nation (Watson) as a story of survival and resistance. It is through such pedagogies that Ngarrindjeri Elders at Camp Coorong reconstruct their lives and create agency in the face of settler colonialism. The experiences of growing up in Australia during the assimilation era, fighting against the State on policies that endorsed child theft, being forced to live at fringe camps, experiencing violent racisms, and, for some, living as part of a diaspora in one’s own Country is embedded in the stories of survival, resilience and agency. “Camp Coorong began as an experiment in alternative teaching methods developed largely by George Trevorrow, a local Ngarrindjeri man” (Hemming 38). Classroom malaise was experienced by Ngarrindjeri Elders from Camp Coorong, such as Uncle Tom and Aunty Ellen Trevorrow and the late Uncle George Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla, and others when interacting or employed in schools as Aboriginal Education Workers (AEWs). It was the invisibility of these Elders’ knowledges inside schools that generated the impetus to establish Camp Coorong as a counter-institution. The spatial dimension of situationality, and its attention to social transformation, connects critical pedagogy to a pedagogy of place at Camp Coorong. Both discourses are concerned with the contextual, geographical conditions that shape people, and the actions people take to shape these conditions (Gruenewald, Both Worlds). Place-based education at Camp Coorong advocates a new localism in order to stimulate community revitalisation and resistance to globalisation and commodity capitalism. It provides the space and opportunity to develop the capacity for inventiveness and adaptation to changing environments and resistance to ecological destruction. Of concern to the growing field of place-based education are how to promote care for people and places (Gruenewald and Smith, xix). For Gruenewald and Smith this requires decolonisation and developing sensitivity to forms of thought that injure and exploit people and places, and re/inhabitation by identifying, conserving, and creating knowledge that nurtures and protects people and places. Engaging in a land ethic of care on Country informs the educational paradigm at Camp Coorong that does not begin in front of bulldozers or under police batons at anti-globalisation rallies, but in the contact zones (Somerville 342) where “a material and metaphysical in-between space for the intersection of multiple and contested stories” (Somerville 342) emerge. Ngarrindjeri knowledge, environmental knowledge, scientific knowledge, colonial histories, and media representations all circulate in the contact zone and are held in productive tension (Carter). Decolonising Pedagogy and Pedagogies of Discomfort The critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller. Reciprocity is based on the principles of interconnectedness, balance, and the idea that actions create corresponding action through the gift of story (Stewart-Harawira). Camp Coorong is a place for inter-cultural dialogue through storytelling. Being located on Ngarrindjeri Country the non-Indigenous listener is more able to “hear” and at the same time move along a continuum of a) disbelief and anger about the dispossession of Indigenous peoples; b) emotional confusion about their own sense of belonging in Australia; c) shock at the ways in which liberal western society’s structural privilege is built on Indigenous inequality on the grounds of race and habitus (Bordieu and Passeron); then, d) towards empathy that is framed as race cognisance (Aveling). Stories are not represented through a sanguine vision of the past, but are told of colonisation, dispossession, as well as of hope for the healing of Ngarrinjderi Country. The listener is gifted with stories at Camp Coorong. However, there is an ethical obligation to the gifting that learners may not understand until later and which concern the rights and obligations fundamental to notions of deep connection to Country. It is often in the recount of one’s experience at Camp Coorong, such as in reflective journals or in conversation, that recognition of the importance of history, social justice, and sovereignty are brought to light. In the first phase of learning, non-Indigenous students and teachers may move from uncomfortable silence, to a space where they can hear the stories and thereby become engaged listeners. They may go through a process of grappling with a range of issues and emotions. There is frustration, anger, and blame that knowledge has been omitted from their education, and they routinely ask: “How did we not know this history?” In the second stage learners tend to remain outside of the story until they are hooked by an aspect that draws them into it. They have the choice of engagement and this requires empathy. At this stage learners are grappling with the antithetical feelings of guilt and innocence; these feelings emerge when those advantaged and challenged by their complicity with settler colonialism, racism, and the structural privilege of whiteness start to understand the benefits they gain from Indigenous dispossession and ask “was it my fault?” Thirdly, learners enter a space which may disavow and dismiss the newly encountered knowledge and move back into resistance, silence, and reluctance to hear. However, it is at this point that a choice emerges. The choice to engage in the emotional labour required to acknowledge the gift of the story and thereby unsettle white Australian identity (Bignall; Boler and Zembylas). In this process “inscribed habits of attention,” as described by Boler and Zembylas (127), are challenged. These habits have been enabled by the emotional binaries of “us” and “them”. The colonial legacy of Indigenous dispossession is an emotive subject that disrupts national pride that is built on this binary. At Camp Coorong, discomfort is created during the reiteration of stories and engagement in various activities. Uncertainty and discomfort are necessary parts of restructuring the emotional habitus and reconstructing identity. The primary ethical aim of a pedagogy of discomfort is the creation of contestability. The learner comes to understand the rights and obligations of caring for Country and has to decide how to carry the story. Ngarrindjeri ethics of care inspire the learner to undertake the emotional labour necessary to relocate their understanding of identity. As a zone of cultural contestation, Camp Coorong also enables pedagogies that allow for critical reflection on common educational practices undertaken by educators and students. Conclusion The aim of the camp was to overturn racism and provide employment for Ngarrindjeri on Country (Hemming, 38). Students and teachers from around the state come to Camp Coorong and learn to weave, make feather flowers, and listen to stories about Ngarrindjeri Country whilst walking on Country (Hemming 38). Camp Coorong fosters understanding of Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar and at the same time overturns essentialist notions developed by deficit theories that routinely remain embedded in the school curriculum. Camp Coorong’s anti-racist epistemology mobilises an Indigenous pedagogy of storytelling and experience as a decolonising methodology. Learning Ngarrindjeri history, cultural heritage, and land ethic of care deepens students’ understanding of connecting to Country through reflection on situations, histories, and shared spaces of human and non-human actors. Pedagogies of discomfort also inform practice at Camp Coorong and the intersections of theory and practice in this context disrupts identity formations that have been grounded in a white colonial construction of nationhood. Education is a means of social and cultural reproduction, as well as a key site of resistance and vehicle for social change. Although the analysis of domination is a feature of critical pedagogy, what is urgently required is a language of hope and transformation understood from a Ngarrindjeri standpoint; something that is achieved at Camp Coorong. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the process of collaboration that occurred at Camp Coorong with Aunty Ellen Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla, and Deborah Rankine. The key ideas were established in conversation and the article was revised on subsequent occasions whilst at Camp Coorong with the aforementioned authors. This paper was produced as part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, ‘Negotiating a Space in the Nation: The Case of Ngarrindjeri’ (DP1094869). 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Abstract:

In today's society there is evidence of a culture of the 'empowered consumer' -- an image of the consumer as a citizen rather than a subordinate. In fact, human rights language is increasingly coming to the fore in the consumption debate. The consumer has been allocated rights by the United Nations whereby all human beings are born free and equal and have civil, political, economic and social rights (McGregor 44). However, as citizens we also have responsibilities of an environmental and social concern. Food retailing and equality of shopping provision is one such concern. Food is a basic right. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights everyone has a fundamental right to be free from hunger and have access to safe and nutritious food. Social exclusion refers to those in the population who are unable to participate in economic, political, social and cultural life. Social exclusion is different from, but related to, poverty since it further marginalises the most disadvantaged -- for example, those who cannot access a large supermarket. In keeping with the rights/responsibilities language, the consumer has a basic right to food and the retailer has the social responsibility to supply the needs of the consumer. It is in this respect that food is an ethical issue and has social justice implications. Inability to consume, or have access to, sufficient food of nutritional quality is a global concern. In North America the issue is one of 'food insecurity' or 'food poverty' due to inadequate finance to purchase sufficient food. In the United Kingdom the same problem arises within the context of access to food stores. This is identified as a 'food (shopping) desert', where due to restricted access social exclusion can arise. The term 'food deserts' was first used by the Low Income Project Team of the Nutrition Task Force in 1996 and was succinctly defined by Tessa Jowell (Government Health Minister) in 1997 when she stated that a food desert was an area "where people do not have easy access to healthy, fresh foods particularly if they are poor and have limited mobility". The term 'food desert' is an emotive one referring to a unique tool of social polarisation and exclusion (Lang 5). The issues compounding the problem include low income, locational policy of supermarkets with the acquisition of edge-of-town / out-of-town sites, consumer mobility, car ownership levels and food availability. This research study focuses on Northern Ireland -- a region of the UK on the periphery of Europe. The Province of Northern Ireland (Ulster) is a sparsely populated (122 people per km²), predominantly rural area with the highest unemployment and poverty statistics in the United Kingdom. Similarly, Northern Ireland has a proportionately high degree of non-car ownership (35%) which further complicates the equation since shopping is increasingly becoming a car-borne activity necessitating transportation to edge-of-town superstores. Those not able to avail themselves of large edge-of-town superstores are being socially excluded, since inner-city areas are becoming denuded of food stores. Those that do exist usually have a limited range of food items, usually non-perishable, or are specialist shops stocking high priced items. It is the aim of the study to identify the characteristics, extent and location of food deserts in both rural and urban areas of Northern Ireland. It is a particularly apt time to do so since Northern Ireland is experiencing a 'retail revolution' with the arrival of the major UK grocery multiples and subsequent situational policies to locate off-centre. Similarly, there are plans to curtail out-of-town developments which has been viewed by some smaller retailers as "too little, too late". With the above in mind, it is a timely study for Northern Ireland. Multiple research tools of both a qualitative and a quantitative nature have been employed including consumer focus groups, shopping diaries, comparative shopping exercises, consumer questionnaires and retail interviews. This will enable sufficient validation of results. The focus groups provide qualitative depth (Colquhoun 39) and serve to highlight the issues of shopping inequality from the point of view of different consumer groups which could be identified as potentially vulnerable in the food poverty stakes; the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed or low income families, lone-parent families and females in general; to whom falls the responsibility for provisioning the household, organising the kitchen and doing the household's cooking (Murcott 11). Basically, food is gendered -- women are mainly in charge (Vaines 13). The respondents in this study demonstrate exactly that point since 77% of the sample were female and reported that they were responsible for household shopping. This point is particularly prevalent with regard to access to cars. In fact over 50% of women in 1991-1993 either lived in households without a car or were non-drivers in a household with a car. Similarly, although there is a rising proportion of women who work they still do most of the shopping and spend twice as much time as men provisioning the household (Piachaud & Webb 18). Ultimately, anything that affects the purchaser also affects the purchasing experience -- in this case physical access to the foodstore. Comparative shopping exercises illustrate the availability and price indices of food and reiterate the price differences between the smaller independents, the local corner shops and the supermarkets. Initial research using the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food's "Low Cost, Healthy Diet" (Leather 75) provides evidence of a cost differential of £1.41, or a 26% cost penalty by shopping at a corner store rather than a superstore. Availability among corner shops similarly compared unfavourably with the supermarkets, with the smallest stores offering minimal fresh fruit and vegetables and regularly offering no 'economy' branded equivalent to an established manufacturer's brand. This supports previous research which found that in areas where small shops do exist they offer only a limited overpriced range of processed foods (Elliott 5), and it is generally accepted that those who can shop at supermarkets can generally benefit from lower prices and more choice (Piachaud & Webb 32). The benefits of supermarkets are not therefore available to all. Shopping diaries further illustrate this point with the dichotomy existing where the lower-income consumer shops more frequently and locally than does her higher-income counterpart and it is these same consumers who patronise the smaller, often more expensive corner shop. Many consumers like the convenience of large supermarkets where they have access to a vast range of items and do not mind paying premium prices on some items for this convenience. Supermarkets do not offer low prices on all items, but do stock economy lines as well as premium priced items. The consumer questionnaire provides some quantitative analysis and statistical weight to the data and was analysed using the χ-square test on SPSS for Windows Version 8. With the χ-square test the important detail is the significance level (reported as a p-value). A p-value of less than 0.05 indicates that the two groups are significantly different at a confidence level of 95% -- in other words, it can be concluded that the author is 95% certain that the result is statistically significant and free from error. Four areas of the Province were sampled -- two rural and two urban. The sample was 77% female and the median age group fell between 45 to 54 years. The social class status was skewed towards the lower socio-economic classes and only 12% fell into social classes A or B. The mean household income was £151 to £200 per week. The survey was interviewer-assisted and pointed to some interesting correlations between levels of satisfaction with store location and distance travelled, product choice and the decision to continue shopping in the town centre. Thirty percent of the sample stated that they shop at off-centre complexes and 70% of the sampled households shop in the town centre or closer to home. This sample also provides evidence that shopping is largely a car-borne activity with 58% of the sample using the family car. Journey distance is significantly influenced by degree of satisfaction with locality: p<0.01 and is supported with the evidence that 64% of the respondents stated that they shop less than fifteen minutes from home. Similar relationships exist between reported satisfaction with locality and differing degrees of satisfaction for product choice: p<0.01. A significant bias similarly exists between those who continue to shop in the town centre after the advent of the UK multiples into Northern Ireland in 1996 and those who do not: p<0.05 with a bias towards those continuing to shop in the town centre reporting high satisfaction levels. Ultimately, perceived adequacy of shopping provision influences satisfaction with store locality: p<0.05. Although the majority of respondents' weekly shopping is conducted at a multiple there is still an identified need for the local corner shops and independents since approximately 29% of respondents buy essentials like bread, milk and other basic grocery provision there. In fact, 98% of those surveyed reported that every town centre should have a food store, and 82% noticed a reduction in the number of food stores locally in recent years. In a concluding open question in the survey attitudes towards off-centre supermarkets were gauged. Responses ranged from positive in nature ("better parking facilities") to indifferent ("I never bother with them") to negative ("they [out-of-town supermarkets] only suit people with cars" and "they hurt the small shopkeeper"). From a retail management point of view, the multiple stores perceive (or want the consumer to believe) that they have a "social responsibility" but suggest that it should be a coalition between retailers and councillors to rejuvenate the town centres and it is not their sole responsibility. The corner shops argue their business position has survived but allude to the fact that the migration to out-of-town sites by the supermarkets has "created a void in the town centre". The issue is complex. While it is true that the multiples have brought shoppers a number of benefits -- price, choice and quality -- they have also both directly (siting shops outside town centres and in high income areas) and indirectly (undermining the economies of small, local outlets) increased costs on disadvantaged consumers in terms of time, physical effort and transport. This has led to a degree of social exclusion amongst certain consumer groups, although this was not quantitatively expressed as significant via the medium of the questionnaire in this preliminary study. It should be remembered that food and mealtimes are imbued with social and cultural meaning (Lang 27) and that "food is a vehicle for social control" (7). In fact food desertification has been likened to the "food equivalent of disconnecting the water supply" (27) and initiatives should be considered to alleviate food poverty and rejuvenate town centres throughout the Province. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary with input from retailers, councillors, health promotion personnel and education bodies to bring about a policy to eradicate this form of social exclusion and disadvantage. References Colquhoun, A. "Food Retailing in Transition: Memories of Traditional Grocer Shops in the 1950s." Strugnell and Armstrong. Elliott, V. "Food Deserts Threaten Health of Poor and Old." Sunday Times 5 Nov. 1997: 5. Lang, T. "Running On Empty." Demos Collection 12 (1997). 25-7. ---. "Food Education and the Citizen: Whose Responsibility?" Strugnell and Armstrong 7. Leather, S. "Less Money, Less Choice: Poverty and Diet in the United Kingdom Today". Your Food: Whose Choice? Ed. National Consumer Council. London: HMSO, 1992. 72-94. McGregor, S. "Globalising Consumer Education: Shifting from Individual Consumer Rights to Collective Human Responsibilities." Strugnell and Armstrong 43-52. Murcott, A. "Is It Still a Pleasure to Cook for Him? Social Changes in the Household and the Family." Strugnell and Armstrong 11. Piachaud, D. and J. Webb. The Price of Food: Missing Out on Mass Consumption." London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1996. 32. Strugnell, C. J. "Food Deserts: Fact or Fiction." Nutrition and Food Science 6. MCB UP. 349-50. Strugnell, C.J. and G. A. Armstrong, eds. Consumer Education: An International Dimension. Conference Proceedings of the XIXth International Consumer Studies and Home Economics Research Conference. Belfast: University of Ulster, 1999. Vaines, E. "The Sacred Nature of Food: A Family Perspective" Strugnell and Armstrong 13. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sinead Furey, Heather McIlveen, Christopher Strugnell. "Food Deserts: An Issue of Social Justice." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/deserts.php>. Chicago style: Sinead Furey, Heather McIlveen, Christopher Strugnell, "Food Deserts: An Issue of Social Justice," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/deserts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sinead Furey, Heather McIlveen, Christopher Strugnell. (1999) Food deserts: an issue of social justice. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/deserts.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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Abstract:

IntroductionBritish initiatives to manage both the number of arrivals of asylum seekers and the experiences of those who arrive have burgeoned in recent years. The budget dedicated to asylum seeker management increased from £357 million in 1998-1999 to £1.71 billion in 2004-2005, making the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) the second largest concern of the Home Office behind the Prison Service in 2005 (Back et al). The IND was replaced in April 2007 by the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA), whose expenditure exceeded £2 billion in 2007-2008 (BIA). Perhaps as a consequence the number of asylum seekers applying to the UK has fallen dramatically, illustrating the continuing influence of exclusionary state policies despite the globalisation and transnationalisation of migrant flows (UNHCR; Koser).One of the difficulties with the study of asylum seekers is the persistent risk that, by employing the term ‘asylum seeker’, research conducted into their experiences will contribute towards the exclusion of a marginalised and abject group of people, precisely by employing a term that emphasises the suspended recognition of a community (Nyers). The ‘asylum seeker’ is a figure defined in law in order to facilitate government-level avoidance of humanitarian obligations by emphasising the non-refugeeness of asylum claimants (Tyler). This group is identified as supplicant to the state, positioning the state itself as a legitimate arbiter. It is in this sense that asylum seekers suffer a degree of cruel optimism (Berlant) – wishing to be recognised as a refugee while nevertheless subject to state-defined discourses, whatever the outcome. The term ‘forced migrant’ is little better, conveying a de-humanising and disabling lack of agency (Turton), while the terms ‘undocumented migrant’, ‘irregular migrant’ and ‘illegal migrant’ all imply a failure to conform to respectable, desirable and legitimate forms of migration.Another consequence of these co-opted and politically subjugating forms of language is their production of simple imagined geographies of migration that position the foreigner as strange, unfamiliar and incapable of communication across this divide. Such imaginings precipitate their own responses, most clearly expressed in the blunt, intrusive uses of space and time in migration governance (Lahav and Guiraudon; Cohen; Guild; Gronendijk). Various institutions exist in Britain that function to actually produce the imagined differences between migrants and citizens, from the two huge, airport-like ‘Asylum Screening Units’ in Liverpool and London where asylum seekers can lodge their claims, to the 12 ‘Removal Centres’ within which soon-to-be deported asylum seekers are incarcerated and the 17 ‘Hearing Centres’ at which British judges preside over the precise legal status of asylum applicants.Less attention, however, has been given to the tension between mobility and stillness in asylum contexts. Asylum seeker management is characterised by a complex combination of enforced stillness and enforced mobility of asylum seeking bodies, and resistance can also be understood in these terms. This research draws upon 37 interviews with asylum seekers, asylum activists, and government employees in the UK conducted between 2005 and 2007 (see Gill) and distils three characteristics of stillness. First, an association between stillness and safety is clearly evident, exacerbated by the fear that the state may force asylum seekers to move at any time. Second, stillness of asylum seekers in a physical, literal sense is intimately related to their psychological condition, underscoring the affectual properties of stillness. Third, the desire to be still, and to be safe, precipitates various political strategies that seek to secure stillness, meaning that stillness functions as more than an aspiration, becoming also a key political metric in the struggle between the included and excluded. In these multiple and contradictory ways stillness is a key factor that structures asylum seekers’ experiences of migration. Governing through Mobility The British state utilises both stillness and mobility in the governance of asylum seeking bodies. On the one hand, asylum seekers’ personal freedoms are routinely curtailed both through their incarceration and through the requirements imposed upon them by the state in terms of ‘signing in’ at local police stations, even when they are not incarcerated, throughout the time that they are awaiting a decision on their claim for asylum (Cwerner). This requirement, which consists of attending a police station to confirm the continuing compliance of the asylum seeker, can vary in frequency, from once every month to once every few days.On the other hand, the British state employs a range of strategies of mobility that serve to deprive asylum seeking communities of geographical stillness and, consequently, also often undermines their psychological stability. First, the seizure of asylum seekers and transportation to a Removal Centre can be sudden and traumatic, and incarceration in this manner is becoming increasingly common (Bacon; Home Office). In extreme cases, very little or no warning is given to asylum seekers who are taken into detention, and so-called ‘dawn raids’ have been organised in order to exploit an element of surprise in the introduction of asylum seekers to detention (Burnett). A second source of forced mobility associated with Removal Centres is the transfer of detainees from one Removal Centre to another for a variety of reasons, from the practical constraints imposed by the capacities of various centres, to differences in the conditions of centres themselves, which are used to form a reward and sanction mechanism among the detainee population (Hayter; Granville-Chapman). Intra-detention estate transfers have increased in scope and significance in recent years: in 2004/5, the most recent financial year for which figures are available, the British government spent over £6.5 million simply moving detainees from one secure facility to another within the UK (Hansard, 2005; 2006).Outside incarceration, a third source of spatial disruption of asylum seekers in the UK concerns their relationship with accommodation providers. Housing is provided to asylum seekers as they await a decision on their claim, but this housing is provided on a ‘no-choice’ basis, meaning that asylum seekers who are not prepared to travel to the accommodation that is allocated to them will forfeit their right to accommodation (Schuster). In other words, accommodation is contingent upon asylum seekers’ willingness to be mobile, producing a direct trade-off between the attractions of accommodation and stillness. The rationale for this “dispersal policy”, is to draw asylum seekers away from London, where the majority of asylum seekers chose to reside before 2000. The maintenance of a diverse portfolio of housing across the UK is resource intensive, with the re-negotiation of housing contracts worth over a £1 billion a constant concern (Noble et al). As these contracts are renegotiated, asylum seekers are expected to move in response to the varying affordability of housing around the country. In parallel to the system of deportee movements within the detention estate therefore, a comparable system of movement of asylum seekers around the UK in response to urban and regional housing market conditions also operates. Stillness as SanctuaryIn all three cases, the psychological stress that movement of asylum seekers can cause is significant. Within detention, according to a series of government reports into the conditions of removal centres, one of the recurring difficulties facing incarcerated asylum seekers is incomprehension of their legal status (e.g. HMIP 2002; 2008). This, coupled with very short warning of impending movements, results in widespread anxiety among detained asylum seekers that they may be deported or transferred imminently. Outside detention, the fear of snatch squads of police officers, or alternatively the fear of hate crimes against asylum seekers (Tyler), render movement in the public realm a dangerous practice in the eyes of many marginalised migrants. The degree of uncertainty and the mental and emotional demands of relocation introduced through forced mobility can have a damaging psychological effect upon an already vulnerable population. Expressing his frustration at this particular implication of the movement of detainees, one activist who had provided sanctuary to over 20 asylum seekers in his community outlined some of the consequences of onward movement.The number of times I’ve had to write panic letters saying you know you cannot move this person to the other end of the country because it destabilises them in terms of their mental health and it is abusive. […] Their solicitors are here, they’re in process, in legal process, they’ve got a community, they’ve got friends, they may even have a partner or a child here and they would still move them.The association between governance, mobility and trepidation highlights one characteristic of stillness in the asylum seeking field: in contra-distinction to the risk associated with movement, to be still is very often to be safe. Given the necessity to flee violence in origin countries and the tendency for destination country governments to require constant re-positioning, often backed-up with the threat of force, stillness comes to be viewed as offering a sort of sanctuary. Indeed, the Independent Asylum Commission charity that has conducted a series of reviews of asylum seekers’ treatment in the UK (Hobson et al.), has recently suggested dispensing with the term ‘asylum’ in favour of ‘sanctuary’ precisely because of the positive associations with security and stability that the latter provides. To be in one place for a sustained period allows networks of human trust and reciprocity to develop which can form the basis of supportive community relationships. Another activist who had accompanied many asylum seekers through the legal process spoke passionately about the functions that communities can serve in asylum seekers’ lives.So you actually become substitute family […] I think it’s what helps people in the midst of trauma when the future is uncertain […] to find a community which values them, which accepts them, which listens to them, where they can begin to find a place and touch a creative life again which they may not have had for years: it’s enormously important.There is a danger in romanticising the benefits of community (Joseph). Indeed, much of the racism and xenophobia directed towards asylum seekers has been the result of local community hostilities towards different national and ethnic groups (Boswell). For many asylum seekers, however, the reciprocal relations found in communities are crucially important to their well-being. What is more, the inclusion of asylum seekers into communities is one of the most effective anti-state and anti-deportation strategies available to activists and asylum seekers alike (Tyler), because it arrests the process of anonymising and cordoning asylum seekers as an hom*ogenous group, providing instead a chance for individuals to cast off this label in favour of more ‘humane’ characteristics: families, learning, friendship, love.Strategies for StillnessFor this reason, the pursuit of stillness among asylum seekers is both a human and political response to their situations – stillness becomes a metric in the struggle between abject migrants and the state. Crucial to this political function is the complex relationship between stillness and social visibility: if an asylum seeker can command their own stillness then they can also have greater influence over their public profile, either in order to develop it or to become less conspicuous.Tyler argues that asylum seekers are what she calls a ‘hypervisible’ social group, referring to the high profile association between a fictional, dehumanised asylum seeking figure and a range of defamatory characteristics circulated by the popular printed press. Stillness can be used to strategically reduce this imposed form of hypervisibility, and to raise awareness of real asylum seeker stories and situations. This is achieved by building community coalitions, which require physically and socially settled asylum seeking families and communities. Asylum advocacy groups and local community support networks work together in the UK in order to generate a genuine public profile of asylum seekers by utilising local and national newspapers, staging public demonstrations, delivering speeches, attending rallies and garnering support among local organisations through art exhibitions, performances and debates. Some activist networks specialise explicitly in supporting asylum seekers in these endeavours, and sympathetic networks of journalists, lawyers, doctors and radio producers combine their expertise with varying degrees of success.These sorts of strategies can produce strong loyalties between local communities and the asylum seekers in their midst, precisely because, through their co-presence, asylum seekers cease to be merely asylum seekers, but become active and valued members of communities. One activist who had helped to organise the protection of an asylum seeker in a church described some of the preparations that had been made for the arrival of immigration task forces in her middle class parish.There were all sorts of things we practiced: if they did break through the door what would we do? We set up a telephone tree so that each person would phone two or three people. We had I don’t know how many cars outside. We arranged a safe house, where we would hide her. We practiced getting her out of the room into a car […] We were expecting them to come at any time. We always had people at the back […] guarding, looking at strangers who might be around and [name] was never, ever allowed to be on her own without a whole group of people completely surrounding her so she could feel safe and we would feel safe. Securing stillness here becomes more than simply an operation to secure geographic fixity: it is a symbolic struggle between state and community, crystallising in specific tactics of spatial and temporal arrangement. It reflects the fear of further forced movement, the abiding association between stillness and safety, and the complex relationship between community visibility and an ability to remain still.There are, nevertheless, drawbacks to these tactics that suggest a very different relationship between stillness and visibility. Juries can be alienated by loud tactics of activism, meaning that asylum seekers can damage their chances of a sympathetic legal hearing if they have had too high a profile. Furthermore, many asylum seekers do not have the benefits of such a dedicated community. An alternative way in which stillness becomes political is through its ability to render invisible the abject body. Invisibility is taken to mean the decision to ‘go underground’, miss the appointments at local police stations and attempt to anticipate the movements of immigration removal enforcement teams. Perversely, although this is a strategy for stillness at the national or regional scale, mobile strategies are often employed at finer scales in order to achieve this objective. Asylum seekers sometimes endure extremely precarious and difficult conditions of housing and subsistence moving from house to house regularly or sleeping and living in cars in order to avoid detection by authorities.This strategy is difficult because it involves a high degree of uncertainty, stress and reliance upon the goodwill of others. One police officer outlined the situation facing many ‘invisible’ asylum seekers as one of poverty and desperation:Immigration haven’t got a clue where they are, they just can’t find them because they’re sofa surfing, that’s living in peoples coffee shops … I see them in the coffee shop and they come up and they’re bloody starving! Despite the difficulties associated with this form of invisibility, it is estimated that this strategy is becoming increasingly common in the UK. In 2006 the Red Cross estimated that there were some 36 000 refused and destitute asylum seekers in England, up from 25 000 the previous year, and reported that their organisation was having to provide induction tours of soup kitchens and night shelters in order to alleviate the conditions of many claimants in these situations (Taylor and Muir). Conclusion The case of asylum seekers in the UK illustrates the multiple, contradictory and splintered character of stillness. While some forms of governance impose stillness upon asylum seeking bodies, in the form of incarceration and ‘signing in’ requirements, other forms of governance impose mobility either within detention or outside it. Consequently stillness figures in the responses of asylum seeking communities in various ways. Given the unwelcome within-country movement of asylum seekers, and adding to this the initial fact of their forced migration from their home countries, the condition of stillness becomes desirable, promising to bring with it stability and safety. These promises contrast the psychological disruption that further mobility, and even the threat of further mobility, can bring about. This illustrates the affectual qualities both of movement and of stillness in the asylum-seeking context. Literal stillness is associated with social and emotional stability that complicates the distinction between real and emotional spaces. While this is certainly not the case uniformly – incarceration and inhibited personal liberties have opposite consequences – the promises of stillness in terms of stability and sanctuary are clearly significant because this desirability leads asylum advocates and asylum seekers to execute a range of political strategies that seek to ensure stillness, either through enhanced or reduced forms of social visibility.The association of mobility with freedom that typifies much of the literature surrounding mobility needs closer inspection. At least in some situations, asylum seekers pursue geographical stillness for the political and psychological benefits it can offer, while mobility is both employed as a subjugating strategy by states and is itself actively resisted by those who constitute its targets.ReferencesBack, Les, Bernadette Farrell and Erin Vandermaas. A Humane Service for Global Citizens. London: South London Citizens, 2005.Bacon, Christine. The Evolution of Immigration Detention in the UK: The Involvement of Private Prison Companies. Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, 2005.Berlant, Lauren. “Cruel Optimism.” differences : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17.3 (2006): 20—36.Border and Immigration Agency. Business Plan for Transition Year April 2007 – March 2008: Fair, Effective, Transparent and Trusted. London: Home Office, 2007.Boswell, Christina. “Burden-Sharing in the European Union: Lessons from the German and UK Experience.” Journal of Refugee Studies 16.3 (2003): 316—35.Burnett, Jon. Dawn Raids. PAFRAS Briefing Paper Number 4. Leeds: Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, 2008. ‹http://www.statewatch.org/news/2008/apr/uk-patras-briefing-paper-4-%2Ddawn-raids.pdf›.Cohen, Steve. “The Local State of Immigration Controls.” Critical Social Policy 22 (2002): 518—43.Cwerner, Saulo. “Faster, Faster and Faster: The Time Politics of Asylum in the UK.” Time and Society 13 (2004): 71—88.Gill, Nick. "Presentational State Power: Temporal and Spatial Influences over Asylum Sector." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2009 (forthcoming).Granville-Chapman, Charlotte, Ellie Smith, and Neil Moloney. Harm on Removal: Excessive Force Against Failed Asylum Seekers. London: Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 2004.Groenendijk, Kees. “New Borders behind Old Ones: Post-Schengen Controls behind the Internal Borders and inside the Netherlands and Germany”. In Search of Europe's Borders. Eds. Kees Groenendijk, Elspeth Guild and Paul Minderhoud. The Hague: Kluwer International Law, 2003. 131—46.Guild, Elspeth. “The Europeanisation of Europe's Asylum Policy.” International Journal of Refugee Law 18 (2006): 630—51.Guiraudon, Virginie. “Before the EU Border: Remote Control of the 'Huddled Masses'.” In Search of Europe's Borders. Eds. Kees Groenendijk, Elspeth Guild and Paul Minderhoud. The Hague: Kluwer International Law, 2003. 191—214.Hansard, House of Commons. Vol. 440 Col. 972W. 5 Dec. 2005. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/vo051205/text/51205w18.htm›.———. Vol. 441 Col. 374W. 9 Jan. 2006. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/vo060109/text/60109w95.htm›.Hayter, Theresa. Open Borders: The Case against Immigration Controls. London: Pluto P, 2000.HM Inspectorate of Prisons. An Inspection of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre. London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2002.———. Report on an Unannounced Full Follow-up Inspection of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre. London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2008. Hobson, Chris, Jonathan Cox, and Nicholas Sagovsky. Saving Sanctuary: The Independent Asylum Commission’s First Report of Conclusions and Recommendations. London: Independent Asylum Commission, 2008.Home Office. “Record High on Removals of Failed Asylum Seekers.” Press Office Release, 27 Feb. 2007. London: Home Office, 2007. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk/press-releases/asylum-removals-figures›. Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2002.Koser, Khalid. “Refugees, Trans-Nationalism and the State.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33 (2007): 233—54.Lahav, Gallya, and Virginie Guiraudon. “Comparative Perspectives on Border Control: Away from the Border and outside the State”. Wall around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe. Eds. Gallya Lahav and Virginie Guiraudon. The Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 55—77.Noble, Gill, Alan Barnish, Ernie Finch, and Digby Griffith. A Review of the Operation of the National Asylum Support Service. London: Home Office, 2004. Nyers, Peter. "Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement." Third World Quarterly 24.6 (2003): 1069—93.Schuster, Lisa. 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Abstract:

Content warning: although it was kept to a minimum, this text displays instances of (anti-Semitic) hate speech. During the 2016 U.S. election and its aftermath, multiple journalistic accounts reported on “alt-right trolls” emanating from anonymous online spaces like the imageboard 4chan (e.g. Abramson; Ellis). Having gained infamy for its nihilist trolling subcultures (Phillips, This Is Why) and the loose hacktivist movement Anonymous (Coleman), 4chan now drew headlines because of the alt-right’s “genuinely new” concoction of white supremacy, ironic Internet humour, and a lack of clear leadership (Hawley 50). The alt-right “anons”, as imageboard users call themselves, were said to primarily manifest on the “Politically Incorrect” subforum of 4chan: /pol/. Gradually, a sentiment arose in the titles of several news articles that the pro-Trump “alt-right trolls” had successfully won the metapolitical battle intertwined with the elections (Phillips, Oxygen 5). For instance, articles titled that “trolls” were “The Only True Winners of this Election” (Dewey) or even “Plotting a GOP Takeover” (Stuart).The headlines were as enticing as questionable. As trolling-expert Whitney Phillips headlined herself, the alt-right did not attain political gravity solely through its own efforts but rather was “Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention” (“The Alt-Right”), with news outlets being provoked to criticise, debunk, or sensationalise its trolling activities (Faris et al. 131; Phillips, “Oxygen” 5-6). Even with the right intentions, attempts at denouncement through using vague, structuralist notions–from “alt-right” and “trolls” to “the basket of deplorables” (Robertson) – arguably only strengthened the coherence of those it was meant to disavow (Phillips, Oxygen; Phillips et al.; Marantz). Phillips et al. therefore lamented such generalisations, arguing attributing Trump’s win to vague notions of “4chan”, “alt-right”, or “trolls” actually bestowed an “atemporal, almost godlike power” to what was actually an “ever-reactive anonymous online collective”. Therefore, they called to refrain from making claims about opaque spaces like 4chan without first “plotting the landscape” and “safeguarding the actual record”. Indeed, “when it comes to 4chan and Anonymous”, Phillips et al. warned, “nobody steps in the same river twice”.This text answers the call to map anonymous online groups by engaging with the complexity of testing the muddy waters of the ever-changing and dissimulative 4chan-current. It first argues how anti-structuralist research outlooks can answer to many of the pitfalls arising from this complex task. Afterwards, it traces the word trump as it was used on 4chan/pol/ to problematise some of the above-mentioned media narratives. How did anons consider Trump, and how did the /pol/-current change during the build-up of the 2016 U.S. elections and afterwards?On Researching Masked and Dissimulative ExtremistsWhile potentially playing into the self-imagination of malicious actors (Phillips et al.), the frequent appearance of overblown narratives on 4chan is unsurprising considering the peculiar affordances of imageboards. Imageboards are anonymous – no user account is required to post – and ephemeral – posts are deleted after a certain amount of activity, sometimes after days, sometimes after minutes (Bernstein et al.; Hagen). These affordances complicate studying collectives on imageboards, with the primary reasons being that 1) they prevent insights into user demographics, 2) they afford particularly dissimulative, playful discourse that can rarely be taken at face value (Auerbach; de Zeeuw and Tuters), and 3) the sheer volume of auto-deleted activity means one has to stay up-to-date with a rapid waterfall of subcultural ephemera. Additionally, the person stepping into the muddy waters of the chan-river also changes their gaze over time. For instance, Phillips bravely narrates how she once saw parts of the 4chan-stream as “fun” to only later realise the blatantly racist elements present from the start (“It Wasn’t Just”).To help render legible the changing currents of imageboard activity without relying on vague understandings of the “alt-right”, “trolls”, or “Anonymous”, anti-structuralist research outlooks form a possible answer. Around 1900, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde already argued to refrain from departing from structuralist notions of society and instead let social compositions arise through iterative tracing of minute imitations (11). As described in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, actor-network theory (ANT) revitalises the Tardean outlook by similarly criticising the notion of the “social” and “society” as distinct, sui-generis entities. Instead, ANT advocates tracing “flat” networks of agency made up of both human and non-human actors (165-72). By tracing actors and describing the emerging network of heterogeneous mediators and intermediaries (105), one can slowly but surely get a sense of collective life. ANT thus takes a page from ethnomethodology, which advocates a similar mapping of how participants of a group produce themselves as such (Garfinkel).For multiple reasons, anti-structuralist approaches like ANT can be useful in tracing elusive anonymous online groups and their changing compositions. First, instead of grasping collectives on imageboards from the outset through structuralist notions, as networked individuals, or as “amorphous and formless entities” (see e.g. Coleman 113-5), it only derives its composition after following where its actors lead. This can result in an empirical and literally objective mapping of their collectivity while refraining from mystifications and non-existent connections–so often present in popular narratives about “trolls” and the “alt-right”. At the same time, it allows prominent self-imaginations and mythologizations – or, in ANT-parlance, “localisations of the global” (Latour 173-190) – rise to the surface whenever they form important actors, which, as we will see, tends to happen on 4chan.Second, ANT offers a useful lens with which to consider how non-human actors can uphold a sense of collectivity within anonymous imageboards. This can include digital objects as part of the infrastructure–e.g. the automatically assigned post numbers having mythical value on 4chan (Beran, It Came From 69)–but also cultural objects like words or memes. Considering 4chan’s anonymity, this focus on objects instead of individuals is partly a necessity: one cannot know the exact amount and flow of users. Still, as this text seeks to show, non-human actors like words or memes can form suitable actors to map the changing collectivity of anonymous imageboard users in the absence of demographic insights.There are a few pitfalls worth noting when conducting ANT-informed research into extremist spaces like 4chan/pol/. The aforementioned ironic and dissimulative rhetoric of anonymous forum culture (de Zeeuw and Tuters) means tracing is complicated by implicit (yet omnipresent) intertextual references undecipherable to the untrained eye. Even worse, when misread or exaggerated, such tracing efforts can play into trolling tactics. This can in turn risk what Phillips calls “giving oxygen” to bigoted narratives by amplifying their presence (“Oxygen”). Since ANT does not prescribe what sort of description is needed (Latour 149), this exposure can be limited and/or critically engaged with by the researcher. Still, it is inevitable that research on extremist collectives adds at least some garbage to already polluted information ecologies (Phillips and Milner 2020), even when “just” letting the actors speak (Venturini). Indeed, this text will unfortunately also show hate speech terms below.These complications of irony and amplification can be somewhat mitigated by mixing ethnographic involvement with computational methods. Together, they can render implicit references explicit while also mapping broad patterns in imitation and preventing singular (misleading) actors from over-dominating the description. When done well, such descriptions do not only have to amplify but can also marginalise and trivialise. An accurate mapping can thereby counter sensationalist media narratives, as long as that is where the actors lead. It because of this potentiality that anti-structuralist tracing of extremist, dissimulative online groups should not be discarded outright.Stopping Momentarily to Test the WatersTo put the above into practice, what follows is a brief case study on the term trump on 4chan/pol/. Instead of following users, here the actor trump is taken an entry point for tracing various assemblages: not only referring to Donald J. Trump as an individual and his actions, but also to how /pol/-anons imagine themselves in relation to Trump. In this way, the actor trump is a fluid one: each of its iterations contains different boundaries and variants of its environment (de Laet and Mol 252). By following these environments, can we make sense of how the delirious 2016 U.S. election cycle played out on /pol/, a space described as the “skeleton key to the rise of Trump” (Beran, 4chan)?To trace trump, I use the 4plebs.com archive, containing almost all posts made on /pol/ between late-2013 and early 2018 (the time of research). I subsequently use two text mining methods to trace various connections between trump and other actors and use this to highlight specific posts. As Latour et al. note, computational methods allow “navigations” (593) of different data points to ensure diverse empirical perspectives, preventing both structuralist “zoomed-out” views and local contexts from over-dominating. Instead of moving between micro and macro views, such a navigation should therefore be understood as a “circulation” around the data, deploying various perspectives that each assemble the actors in a different way. In following this, the case study aims to demonstrate how, instead of a lengthy ethnographic account, a brief navigation using both quali- and quantitative perspectives can quickly demystify some aspects of seemingly nebulous online groups.Tracing trump: From Meme-Wizard to Anti-Semitic TargetTo get a sense of the centrality of Trump on /pol/, I start with post frequencies of trump assembled in two ways. The first (Figure 1) shows how, soon after the announcement of Trump’s presidential bid on 16 June 2015, around 100,000 comments mention the word (2% of the total amount of posts). The frequencies spike to a staggering 8% of all comments during the build-up to Trump’s win of the Republican nomination in early 2016 and presidential election in November 2016. Figure 1: The absolute and relative amount of posts on 4chan/pol/ containing the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).To follow the traces between trump and the more general discourse surrounding it, I compiled a more general “trump-dense threads” dataset. These are threads containing thirty or more posts, with at least 15% of posts mentioning trump. As Figure 2 shows, at the two peaks, 8% of any thread on /pol/ was trump-dense, accounting for approximately 15,000 monthly threads. While Trump’s presence is unsurprising, these two views show just how incredibly central the former businessman was to /pol/ at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. Figure 2: The absolute and relative amount of threads on 4chan/pol/ that are “trump-dense”, meaning they have thirty comments or more, out of which at least 15% contain the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).Instead of picking a certain moment from these aggregate overviews and moving to the “micro” (Latour et al.), I “circulate” further with Figure 3, showing another perspective on the trump­-dense thread dataset. It shows a scatter plot of trump-dense threads grouped per week and plotted according to how similar their vocabulary is. First, all the words per week are weighted with tf-idf, a common information retrieval algorithm that scores units on the basis if they appear a lot in one of the datasets but not in others (Spärck-Jones). The document sets are then plotted according to the similarity of their weighted vocabulary (cosine similarity). The five highest-scoring terms for the five clusters (identified with K-means) are listed in the bottom-right corner. For legibility, the scatterplot is compressed by the MDS algorithm. To get a better sense of specific vocabulary per week, terms that appeared in all weeks are filtered out (like trump or hillary). Read counterclockwise, the nodes roughly increase in time, thus showing a clear temporal change of discourse, with the first clusters being more similar in vocabulary than the last, and the weeks before and after the primary election (orange cluster) showing a clear gap. Figure 3: A scatterplot showing cosine distances between tf-idf weighted vocabularies of trump-dense threads per week. Compressed with MDS and coloured by five K-means clusters on the underlying tf-idf matrix (excluding terms that appeared in all weeks). Legend shows the top five tf-idf terms within these clusters. ★ denotes the median week in the cluster.With this map, we can trace other words appearing around trump as significant actors in the weekly documents. For instance, Trump-supportive words like stump (referring to “Can’t Stump the Trump”) and maga (“Make America Great Again”) are highly ranked in the first two clusters. In later weeks, less clearly pro-Trump terms appear: drumpf reminds of the unattractive root of the Trump family name, while impeached and mueller show the Russia probe in 2017 and 2018 were significant in the trump-dense threads of that time. This change might thus hint at growing scepticism towards Trump after his win, but it is not shown how these terms are used. Fortunately, the scatterplot offers a rudder with which to navigate to further perspectives.In keeping with Latour’s advice to keep “aggregate structures” and “local contexts” flat (165-72), I contrast the above scatterplot with a perspective on the data that keeps sentence structures intact instead of showing abstracted keyword sets. Figure 4 uses all posts mentioning trump in the median weeks of the first and last clusters in the scatterplot (indicated with ★) and visualises word trees (Wattenberg and Viégas) of most frequent words following “trump is a”. As such, they render explicit ontological associations about Trump; what is Trump, according to /pol/-anons? The first word tree shows posts from 2-8 November 2015, when fifteen Republican competitors were still in the race. As we have seen in Figure 1, Trump was in this month still “only” mentioned in around 50,000 posts (2% of the total). This word tree suggests his eventual nomination was at this point seen as an unlikely and even undesirable scenario, showing derogatory associations like retard and failure, as well as more conspiratorial words like shill, fraud, hillary plant, and hillary clinton puppet. Notably, the most prominent association, meme, and others like joke and f*cking comic relief, imply Trump was not taken too seriously (see also Figure 5). Figure 4: Word trees of words following “trump is a” in the median weeks of the first and last clusters of the scatterplot. Made with Jason Davies’s Word Tree application. Figure 5: Anons who did not take Trump seriously. Screencapture taken from archive.4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).The first word tree contrast dramatically with the one from the last median week from 18 to 24 December 2017. Here, most associations are anti-Semitic or otherwise related to Judaism, with trump most prominently related to the hate speech term kike. This prompts several questions: did /pol/ become increasingly anti-Semitic? Did already active users radicalise, or were more anti-Semites drawn to /pol/? Or was this nefarious current always there, with Trump merely drawing anti-Semitic attention after he won the election? Although the navigation did not depart from a particular critical framework, by “just following the actors” (Venturini), it already stumbled upon important questions related to popular narratives on 4chan and the alt-right. While it is tempting to stop here and explain the change as “radicalisation”, the navigation should continue to add more empirical perspectives. When doing so, the more plausible explanation is that the unlikely success of Trump briefly attracted (relatively) more diverse and playful visitors to /pol/, obscuring the presence and steady growth of overt extremists in the process.To unpack this, I first focus on the claim that a (relatively) diverse set of users flocked to /pol/ because of the Trump campaign. /pol/’s overall posting activity rose sharply during the 2016 election, which can point to already active users becoming more active, but is likely mostly caused by new users flocking to /pol/. Indeed, this can be traced in actor language. For instance, many anons professed to be “reporting in” from other 4chan boards during crucial moments in the campaing. One of the longest threads in the trump-dense threads dataset (4,504 posts) simply announces “Cruz drops out”. In the comments below, multiple anons state they arrived from other boards to join the Trump-infused activity. For instance, Figure 6 shows an anon replying “/v/ REPORTING IN”, to which sixty other users reacted by similarly affirming themselves as representatives from other boards (e.g. “/mu/ here. Ready to MAGA”). While but another particular view, this implies Trump’s surprising nomination stimulated a crowd-like gathering of different anons jumping into the vortex of trump-related activity on /pol/. Figure 6: Replies by outside-anons “reporting in” the sticky thread announcing Ted Cruz's drop out, 4 May 2016. Screenshots taken from 4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).Other actor-language further expresses Trump’s campaign “drew in” new and unadjusted (or: less extreme) users. Notably, many anons claimed the 2016 election led to an “invasion of Reddit users”. Figure 7 shows one such expression: an annotated timeline of /pol/’s posting activity graph (made by 4plebs), posted to /pol/ on 26 February 2016 and subsequently reposted 34 times. It interprets 2016 as a period where “Trump sh*t goes into overdrive, meme sh*t floods /pol/, /pol/ is now reddit”. Whether these claims hold any truth is difficult to establish, but the image forms an interesting case of how the entirety “/pol/” is imagined and locally articulated. Such simplistic narratives relate to what Latour calls “panoramas”: totalising notions of some imagined “whole” (188-90) that, while not to be “confused with the collective”, form crucial data since they express how actors understand their own composition (190). Especially in the volatile conditions of anonymous and ephemeral imageboards, repeated panoramic narratives can help in constructing a sense of cohesion–and thereby also form interesting actors to trace. Indeed, following the panoramic statement “/pol/ is now reddit”, other gatekeeping-efforts are not hard to find. For instance, phrases urging other anons to go “back to reddit” (occurring in 19,069 posts in the total dataset) or “back to The_Donald” (a popular pro-Trump subreddit, 1,940 posts) are also particularly popular in the dataset. Figure 7: An image circulated on /pol/ lamenting that "/pol/ is now reddit" by annotating 4plebs’s posting metrics. Screenshot taken from archive.4plebs.org (see posts).Did trump-related activity on /pol/ indeed become more “meme-y” or “Reddit-like” during the election cycle, as the above panorama articulates? The activity in the trump-dense threads seems to suggest so. Figure 8 again uses the tf-idf terms from these threads, but here with the columns denoting the weeks and the rows the top scoring tf-idf terms of their respective week. To highlight relevant actors, all terms are greyed out (see the unedited sheet here), except for several keywords that indicate particularly playful or memetic vernacular: the aforementioned stump, emperor, referring to Trump’s nickname as “God Emperor”; energy, referring to “high energy”, a common catchphrase amongst Trump supporters; magic, referring to “meme magic”, the faux-ironic belief that posting memes affects real-life events; and pepe, the infamous cartoon frog. In both the tf-idf ranking and the absolute frequencies, these keywords flourish in 2016, but disappear soon after the presidential election passes. The later weeks in 2017 and 2018 rarely contain similarly playful and memetic terms, and if they do, suggest mocking discourse regarding Trump (e.g. drumpf). This perspective thus pictures the environment around trump in the run-up to the election as a particularly memetic yet short-lived carnival. At least from this perspective, “meme sh*t” thus indeed seemed to have “flooded /pol/”, but only for a short while. Figure 8: tf-idf matrix of trump-dense threads, columns denoting weeks and rows denoting the top hundred most relevant terms per week. Download the full tf-idf matrix with all terms here.Despite this carnivalesque activity, further perspectives suggest it did not go at the expense of extremist activity on /pol/. Figure 9 shows the absolute and relative counts of the word "jew" and its derogatory synonym "kike". Each of these increases from 2015 onwards. As such, it seems to align with claims that Trump’s success and /pol/ becoming increasingly extremist were causally related (Thompson). However, apart from possibly confusing correlation with causation, the relative presence remains fairly stable, even slightly decreasing during the frenzy of the Trump campaign. Since we also saw Trump himself become a target for anti-Semitic activity, these trendlines rather imply /pol/’s extremist current grew proportionally to the overall increase in activity, and increased alongside but not but necessarily as a partisan contingent as a result of Trump’s campaign. Figure 9: The absolute and relative frequency of the terms "jew" and "kike" on 4chan/pol/.ConclusionCombined, the above navigation implies two main changes in 4chan/pol/’s trump-related current. First, the climaxes of the 2016 Republican primaries and presidential elections seem to have invoked crowd-like influxes of (relatively) heterogeneous users joining the Trump-delirium, marked by particularly memetic activity. Second, /pol/ additionally seemed to have formed a welcoming hotbed for anti-Semites and other extremists, as the absolute amount of (anti-Semitic) hate speech increased. However, while already-present and new users might have been energised by Trump, they were not necessarily loyal to him, as professed by the fact that Trump himself eventually became a target. Together with the fact that anti-Semitic hate speech stayed relatively consistent, instead of being “countercultural” (Nagle) or exclusively pro-Trump, /pol/ thus seems to have been composed of quite a stable anti-Semitic and Trump-critical contingent, increasing proportionally to /pol/’s general growth.Methodologically, this text sought to demonstrate how a brief navigation of trump on 4chan/pol/ can provide provisional yet valuable insights regarding continuously changing current of online anonymous collectives. As the cliché goes, however, this brief exploration has left more many questions, or rather, it did not “deploy the content with all its connections” (Latour 147). For instance, I have not touched on how many of the trump-dense threads are distinctly separated and pro-Trump “general threads” (Jokubauskaitė and Peeters). Considering the vastness of such tasks, the necessity remains to find appropriate ways to “accurately map” the wild currents of the dissimulative Web–despite how muddy they might get.NoteThis text is a compressed and edited version of a longer MA thesis available here.ReferencesAbramson, Seth. “Listen Up, Progressives: Here’s How to Deal with a 4Chan (“Alt-Right”) Troll.” Medium, 2 May 2017. <https://medium.com/@Seth_Abramson/listen-up-progressives-heres-how-to-deal-with-a-4chan-alt-right-troll-48594f59a303>.Auerbach, David. “Anonymity as Culture: Treatise.” Triple Canopy, n.d. 22 June 2020 <https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/anonymity_as_culture__treatise>.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump”. Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. <https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb>.Beran, Dale. It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. 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Abstract:

Staphylococcus aureus é uma bactéria que faz parte da microbiota natural do ser humano, podendo ser encontrada em inúmeras partes do corpo, como pele, narinas, cavidade oral e intestino. Esta bactéria é capaz de causar inúmeras doenças, exigindo assim um tratamento complexo por meio de antimicrobianos, que podem ser de origem sintética ou natural. O propósito desse trabalho foi avaliar a atividade antibacteriana do ósseo essencial da Lavandula Híbrida Grosso associado com o antimicrobiano gentamicina contra cepas de S. aureus. O caráter antibacteriano do óleo essencial da Lavandula Híbrida Grosso foi quantificado e qualificado pela técnica de microdiluição em caldo para a obtenção da CIM (Concentração Inibitória Mínima). Em seguida, realizou-se a associação do óleo essencial com o antimicrobiano gentamicina (10 μg/mL). A CIM (Concentração Inibitória Minima) foi de 128 μg/mL para a cepa em análise. Quanto a associação, foi observado um efeito sinérgico ao se associar a gentamicina com o óleo essencial da Lavandula Híbrida Grosso. Portanto, observou-se um efeito sinérgico ao se associar o óleo essencial em estudo com o antimicrobiano gentamicina.Descritores: Anti-infecciosos; Fitoterapia; Microbiologia.ReferênciasCassetari VC, Strabelli T, Medeiros EAS. Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia : whats is the impacto f oxicillin resistance on mortality. Braz J Infect Dis. 2005;9(1):70-6.Koneman EW, Allen SD, Janda WM, Schreckenberger PC, Winn WC. Diagnóstico Microbiológico: texto e atlas colorido. Medsi: Rio de Janeiro; 2001. Trabulsi LR, Teixeira LM, Bueris V. Stahphylococcus aureus. In: Trabulsi LR, Alterthum F. Microbiologia. 4ª ed. São Paulo: Atheneu; 2004. p.175-82.Andriolo A. Guias de medicina ambulatorial e hospitalar. São Paulo: Manole; 2005.Braunwald E. Harrison Medicina Interna. 15. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Mcgraw-Hill Interamericana do Brasil; 2002.Schechter M, Marangoni DV. 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Abstract:

In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circ*mstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate Islam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circ*mstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. 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Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001. 206-28.Brown, Chris. “Narratives of Religion, Civilization and Modernity.” Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. Eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 293-324. Buckley, Anisa. “Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Sunday Herald Sun 10 Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008 < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,231869735000117,00.html >.Bush, George. W. “President Outlines War Effort: Remarks by the President at the California Business Association Breakfast.” California Business Association 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011017-15.html >.———. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”. 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Bush’s Discourse.” Discourse and Society 18 (2007): 123- 37.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Herald Sun. “Readers’ Comments: Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Herald Sun Online Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008. < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/comments/0,22023,23186973-5000117,00.html >.Humphries, David. “Live Here, Be Australian.” The Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2006, 1 ed.Hutcheson, John S., David Domke, Andre Billeaudeaux, and Philip Garland. “U.S. National Identity, Political Elites, and Patriotic Press Following September 11.” Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 27-50.Kymlicka, Will. “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality.” Ethics 99.4 (1989): 883-905.Modood, Tariq. “Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship.” The Political Quarterly (1994): 53-74.Osuri, Goldie, and Subhabrata B. Banerjee. “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia.” Social Semiotics 14.2 (2004): 151- 71.Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books 1978.Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism. WA: Government of Western Australia, Nov. 2004. 11 March 2008 < http://www.equalopportunity.wa.gov.au/pdf/wa_charter_multiculturalism.pdf >.Yousif, Ahmad. “Islam, Minorities and Religious Freedom: A Challenge to Modern Theory of Pluralism.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20.1 (2000): 30-43.

Abstract:

Introduction Negative stereotyping of alternative diets such as veganism and other plant-based diets has been common in Australia, conventionally a meat-eating culture (OECD qtd. in Ting). Indeed, meat consumption in Australia is sanctioned by the ubiquity of advertising linking meat-eating to health, vitality and nation-building, and public challenges to such plant-based diets as veganism. In addition, state, commercial enterprises, and various community groups overtly resist challenges to Australian meat-eating norms and to the intensive animal husbandry practices that underpin it. Hence activists, who may contest not simply this norm but many of the customary industry practices that comprise Australia’s meat production, have been accused of promoting a vegan agenda and even of undermining the “Australian way of life”.If veganism meansa philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals. (Vegan Society)then our interest in this article lies in how a stereotyped label of veganism (and other associated attributes) is being used across Australian public spheres to challenge the work of animal activists as they call out factory farming for entrenched animal cruelty. This is carried out in three main parts. First, following an outline of our research approach, we examine the processes of stereotyping and the key dimensions of vegan stereotyping. Second, in the main part of the article, we reveal how opponents to such animal activist organisations as Animals Australia attempt to undermine activist calls for change by framing them as promoting an un-Australian vegan agenda. Finally, we consider how, despite such framing, that organisation is generating productive public debate around animal welfare, and, further, facilitating the creation of new activist identifications and identities.Research ApproachData collection involved searching for articles where Animals Australia and animal activism were yoked with veg*n (vegan and vegetarian), across the period May 2011 to 2016 (discussion peaked between May and June 2013). This period was of interest because it exposed a flare point with public discord being expressed between communities—namely between rural and urban consumers, farmers and animal activists, Coles Supermarkets (identified by The Australian Government the Treasury as one of two major supermarkets holding over 65% share of Australian food retail market) and their producers—and a consequent voicing of disquiet around Australian identity. We used purposive sampling (Waller, Farquharson, and Dempsey 67) to identify relevant materials as we knew in advance the case was “information-rich” (Patton 181) and would provide insightful information about a “troublesome” phenomenon (Emmel 6). Materials were collected from online news articles (30) and readers’ comments (167), online magazines (2) and websites (2) and readers’ comments (3), news items (Factiva 13), Australian Broadcasting Commission television (1) and radio (1), public blogs (2), and Facebook pages from involved organisations, specifically Australia’s National Farmers’ Federation (NFF, 155 posts) and Coles Supermarkets (29 posts). Many of these materials were explicitly responsive to a) Animals Australia’s Make It Possible campaign against Australian factory farming (launched and highly debated during this period), and b) Coles Supermarket’s short-lived partnership with Animals Australia in 2013. We utilised content analysis so as to make visible the most prominent and consistent stereotypes utilised in these various materials during the identified period. The approach allowed us to code and categorise materials so as to determine trends and patterns of words used, their relationships, and key structures and ways of speaking (Weerakkody). In addition, discourse analysis (Gee) was used in order to identify and track “language-in-use” so as to make visible the stereotyping deployed during the public reception of both the campaign and Animals Australia’s associated partnership with Coles. These methods enabled a “nuanced approach” (Coleman and Moss 12) with which to spot putdowns, innuendos, and stereotypical attitudes.Vegan StereotypingStereotypes creep into everyday language and are circulated and amplified through mainstream media, speeches by public figures, and social media. Stereotypes maintain their force through being reused and repurposed, making them difficult to eradicate due to their “cumulative effects” and influence (Harris and Sanborn 38; Inzlicht, Tullett, Legault, and Kang; Pickering). Over time stereotypes can become the lens through which we view “the world and social reality” (Harris and Sanborn 38; Inzlicht et al.). In summation, stereotyping:reduces identity categories to particular sets of deeds, attributes and attitudes (Whitley and Kite);informs individuals’ “cognitive investments” (Blum 267) by associating certain characteristics with particular groups;comprises symbolic and connotative codes that carry sets of traits, deeds, or beliefs (Cover; Rosello), and;becomes increasingly persuasive through regulating language and image use as well as identity categories (Cover; Pickering; Rosello).Not only is the “iterative force” (Rosello 35) of such associative stereotyping compounded due to its dissemination across digital media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, websites, and online news, but attempts to denounce it tend to increase its “persuasive power” (29). Indeed, stereotypes seem to refuse “to die” (23), remaining rooted in social and cultural memory (Whitley and Kite 10).As such, despite the fact that there is increasing interest in Australia and elsewhere in new food norms and plant-based diets (see, e.g., KPMG), as well as in vegan lifestyle options (Wright), studies still show that vegans remain a negatively stereotyped group. Previous studies have suggested that vegans mark a “symbolic threat” to Western, conventionally meat-eating cultures (MacInnis and Hodson 722; Stephens Griffin; Cole and Morgan). One key UK study of national newspapers, for instance, showed vegans continuing to be discredited in multiple ways as: 1) “self-evidently ridiculous”; 2) “ascetics”; 3) having a lifestyle difficult and impossible to maintain; 4) “faddist”; 5) “oversensitive”; and 6) “hostile extremists” (Cole and Morgan 140–47).For many Australians, veganism also appears anathema to their preferred culture and lifestyle of meat-eating. For instance, the NFF, Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), and other farming bodies continue to frame veganism as marking an extreme form of lifestyle, as anti-farming and un-Australian. Such perspectives are also circulated through online rural news and readers’ comments, as will be discussed later in the article. Such representations are further exemplified by the MLA’s (Lamb, Australia Day, Celebrate Australia) Australia Day lamb advertising campaigns (Bembridge; Canning). For multiple consecutive years, the campaign presented vegans (and vegetarians) as being self-evidently ridiculous and faddish, representing them as mentally unhinged and fringe dwellers. Such stereotyping not only invokes “affective reactions” (Whitley and Kite 8)—including feelings of disgust towards individuals living such lifestyles or holding such values—but operates as “political baits” (Rosello 18) to shore-up or challenge certain social or political positions.Although such advertisem*nts are arguably satirical, their repeated screening towards and on Australia Day highlights deeply held views about the normalcy of animal agriculture and meat-eating, “hom*ogenizing” (Blum 276; Pickering) both meat-eaters and non-meat-eaters alike. Cultural stereotyping of this kind amplifies “social” as well as political schisms (Blum 276), and arguably discourages consumers—whether meat-eaters or non-meat-eaters—from advocating together around shared goals such as animal welfare and food safety. Additionally, given the rise of new food practices in Australia—including flexitarian, reducetarian, pescatarian, kangatarian (a niche form of ethical eating), vegivores, semi-vegetarian, vegetarian, veganism—alongside broader commitments to ethical consumption, such stereotyping suggests that consumers’ actual values and preferences are being disregarded in order to shore-up the normalcy of meat-eating.Animals Australia and the (So-Called) Vegan Agenda of Animal ActivismGiven these points, it is no surprise that there is a tacit belief in Australia that anyone labelled an animal activist must also be vegan. Within this context, we have chosen to primarily focus on the attitudes towards the campaigning work of Animals Australia—a not-for-profit organisation representing some 30 member groups and over 2 million individual supporters (Animals Australia, “Who Is”)—as this organisation has been charged as promoting a vegan agenda. Along with the RSPCA and Voiceless, Animals Australia represents one of the largest animal protection organisations within Australia (Chen). Its mission is to:Investigate, expose and raise community awareness of animal cruelty;Provide animals with the strongest representation possible to Government and other decision-makers;Educate, inspire, empower and enlist the support of the community to prevent and prohibit animal cruelty;Strengthen the animal protection movement. (Animals Australia, “Who Is”)In delivery of this mission, the organisation curates public rallies and protests, makes government and industry submissions, and utilises corporate outreach. Campaigning engages the Web, multiple forms of print and broadcast media, and social media.With regards to Animals Australia’s campaigns regarding factory farming—including the Make It Possible campaign (see fig. 1), launched in 2013 and key to the period we are investigating—the main message is that: the animals kept in these barren and constrictive conditions are “no different to our pets at home”; they are “highly intelligent creatures who feel pain, and who will respond to kindness and affection – if given the chance”; they are “someone, not something” (see the Make It Possible transcript). Campaigns deliberately strive to engender feelings of empathy and produce affect in viewers (see, e.g., van Gurp). Specifically they strive to produce mainstream recognition of the cruelties entrenched in factory farming practices and build community outrage against these practices so as to initiate industry change. Campaigns thus expressly challenge Australians to no longer support factory farmed animal products, and to identify with what we have elsewhere called everyday activist positions (Rodan and Mummery, “Animal Welfare”; “Make It Possible”). They do not, however, explicitly endorse a vegan position. Figure 1: Make It Possible (Animals Australia, campaign poster)Nonetheless, as has been noted, a common counter-tactic used within Australia by the industries targeted by such campaigns, has been to use well-known negative stereotypes to discredit not only the charges of systemic animal cruelty but the associated organisations. In our analysis, we found four prominent interconnected stereotypes utilised in both digital and print media to discredit the animal welfare objectives of Animals Australia. Together these cast the organisation as: 1) anti-meat-eating; 2) anti-farming; 3) promoting a vegan agenda; and 4) hostile extremists. These stereotypes are examined below.Anti-Meat-EatingThe most common stereotype attributed to Animals Australia from its campaigning is of being anti-meat-eating. This charge, with its associations with veganism, is clearly problematic for industries that facilitate meat-eating and within a culture that normalises meat-eating, as the following example expresses:They’re [Animals Australia] all about stopping things. They want to stop factory farming – whatever factory farming is – or they want to stop live exports. And in fact they’re not necessarily about: how do I improve animal welfare in the pig industry? Or how do I improve animal welfare in the live export industry? Because ultimately they are about a meat-free future world and we’re about a meat producing industry, so there’s not a lot of overlap, really between what we’re doing. (Andrew Spencer, Australian Pork Ltd., qtd. in Clark)Respondents engaging this stereotype also express their “outrage at Coles” (McCarthy) and Animals Australia for “pedalling [sic]” a pro-vegan agenda (Nash), their sense that Animals Australia is operating with ulterior motives (Flint) and criminal intent (Brown). They see cultural refocus as unnecessary and “an exercise in futility” (Harris).Anti-FarmingTo be anti-farming in Australia is generally considered to be un-Australian, with Glasgow suggesting that any criticism of “farming practices” in Australian society can be “interpreted as an attack on the moral integrity of farmers, amounting to cultural blasphemy” (200). Given its objectives, it is unsurprising that Animals Australia has been stereotyped as being “anti-farming”, a phrase additionally often used in conjunction with the charge of veganism. Although this comprises a misreading of veganism—given its focus on challenging animal exploitation in farming rather than entailing opposition to all farming—the NFF accused Animals Australia of being “blatantly anti-farming and proveganism” (Linegar qtd. in Nason) and as wanting “to see animal agriculture phased out” (National Farmers’ Federation). As expressed in more detail:One of the main factors for VFF and other farmers being offended is because of AA’s opinion and stand on ALL farming. AA wants all farming banned and us all become vegans. Is it any wonder a lot of people were upset? Add to that the proceeds going to AA which may have been used for their next criminal activity washed against the grain. If people want to stand against factory farming they have the opportunity not to purchase them. Surely not buying a product will have a far greater impact on factory farmed produce. Maybe the money could have been given to farmers? (Hunter)Such stereotyping reveals how strongly normalised animal agriculture is in Australia, as well as a tendency on the part of respondents to reframe the challenge of animal cruelty in some farming practices into a position supposedly challenging all farming practices.Promoting a Vegan AgendaAs is already clear, Animals Australia is often reproached for promoting a vegan agenda, which, it is further suggested, it keeps hidden from the Australian public. This viewpoint was evident in two key examples: a) the Australian public and organisations such as the NFF are presented as being “defenceless” against the “myopic vitriol of the vegan abolitionists” (Jonas); and b) Animals Australia is accused of accepting “loans from liberation groups” and being “supported by an army of animal rights lawyers” to promote a “hard core” veganism message (Bourke).Nobody likes to see any animals hurt, but pushing a vegan agenda and pushing bad attitudes by group members is not helping any animals and just serves to slow any progress both sides are trying to resolve. (V.c. Deb Ford)Along with undermining farmers’ “legitimate business” (Jooste), veganism was also considered to undermine Australia’s rural communities (Park qtd. in Malone).Hostile ExtremistsThe final stereotype linking veganism with Animals Australia was of hostile extremism (cf. Cole and Morgan). This means, for users, being inimical to Australian national values but, also, being akin to terrorists who engage in criminal activities antagonistic to Australia’s democratic society and economic livelihood (see, e.g., Greer; ABC News). It is the broad symbolic threat that “extremism” invokes that makes this stereotype particularly “infectious” (Rosello 19).The latest tag team attacks on our pork industry saw AL giving crash courses in how to become a career criminal for the severely impressionable, after attacks on the RSPCA against the teachings of Peter Singer and trying to bully the RSPCA into vegan functions menu. (Cattle Advocate)The “extremists” want that extended to dairy products, as well. The fact that this will cause the total annihilation of practically all animals, wild and domestic, doesn’t bother them in the least. (Brown)What is interesting about these last two dimensions of stereotyping is their displacement of violence. That is, rather than responding to the charge of animal cruelty, violence and extremism is attributed to those making the charge.Stereotypes and Symbolic Boundary ShiftingWhat is evident throughout these instances is how stereotyping as a “cognitive mechanism” is being used to build boundaries (Cherry 460): in the first instance, between “us” (the meat-eating majority) and “them” (the vegan minority aka animal activists); and secondly between human interest and livestock. This point is that animals may hold instrumental value and receive some protection through such, but any more stringent arguments for their protection at the expense of perceived human interests tend to be seen as wrong-headed (Sorenson; Munro).These boundaries are deeply entrenched in Western culture (Wimmer). They are also deeply problematic in the context of animal activism because they fragment publics, promote restrictive identities, and close down public debate (Lamont and Molnár). Boundary entrenching is clearly evident in the stereotyping work carried out by industry stakeholders where meat-eating and practices of industrialised animal agriculture are valorised and normalised. Challenging Australia’s meat production practices—irrespective of the reason given—is framed and belittled as entailing a vegan agenda, and further as contributing to the demise of farming and rural communities in Australia.More broadly, industry stakeholders are explicitly targeting the activist work by such organisations as Animals Australia as undermining the ‘Australian way of life’. In their reading, there is an irreconcilable boundary between human and animal interests and between an activist minority which is vegan, unreasonable, extremist and hostile to farming and the meat-eating majority which is representative of the Australian community and sustains the Australian economy. As discussed so far, such stereotyping and boundary making—even in their inaccuracies—can be pernicious in the way they entrench identities and divisions, and close the possibility for public debate.Rather than directly contesting the presuppositions and inaccuracies of such stereotyping, however, Animals Australia can be read as cultivating a process of symbolic boundary shifting. That is, rather than responding by simply underlining its own moderate position of challenging only intensive animal agriculture for systemic animal cruelty, Animals Australia uses its campaigns to develop “boundary blurring and crossing” tactics (Cherry 451, 459), specifically to dismantle and shift the symbolic boundaries conventionally in place between humans and non-human animals in the first instance, and between those non-human animals used for companionship and those used for food in the second (see fig. 2). Figure 2: That Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady (Animals Australia, campaign image on back of taxi)Indeed, the symbolic boundaries between humans and animals left unquestioned in the preceding stereotyping are being profoundly shaken by Animals Australia with campaigns such as Make It Possible making morally relevant likenesses between humans and animals highly visible to mainstream Australians. Namely, the organisation works to interpellate viewers to exercise their own capacities for emotional identification and moral imagination, to identify with animals’ experiences and lives, and to act upon that identification to demand change.So, rather than reactively striving to refute the aforementioned stereotypes, organisations such as Animals Australia are modelling and facilitating symbolic boundary shifting by building broad, emotionally motivated, pathways through which Australians are being encouraged to refocus their own assumptions, practices and identities regarding animal experience, welfare and animal-human relations. Indeed the organisation has explicitly framed itself as speaking on behalf of not only animals but all caring Australians, suggesting thereby the possibility of a reframing of Australian national identity. Although such a tactic does not directly contest this negative stereotyping—direct contestation being, as noted, ineffective given the perniciousness of stereotyping—such work nonetheless dismantles the oppositional charge of such stereotyping in calling for all Australians to proudly be a little bit anti-meat-eating (when that meat is from factory farmed animals), a little bit anti-factory farming, a little bit pro-veg*n, and a little bit proud to consider themselves as caring about animal welfare.For Animals Australia, in other words, appealing to Australians to care about animal welfare and to act in support of that care, not only defuses the stereotypes targeting them but encourages the work of symbolic boundary shifting that is really at the heart of this dispute. 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