Journal articles: 'Small groups. Group relations training. Social psychology' – Grafiati (2024)

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The article considers the problem of selecting the content of educational material about the socio-psychological mechanisms of drunkenness in order to implement the paradigm of personal development of students in the study of the discipline “Life Safety and Fundamentals of Occupational Safety”. We believe that revealing to students the hidden meanings of events that accompany the phenomenon of drunkenness will provide knowledge on the safety of life of practical value, helping to understand the essence of the tradition of feasting and influence safe behavior in their future independent life. The difficulty of solving this problem in its interdisciplinary nature, namely the intersection of areas of knowledge of medicine, social psychology, culturology, law. It was decided to limit the selection of the content of educational material to the analysis of scientific knowledge of social psychology, culturology and law, as medical knowledge requires special professional training. This approach allowed us to consider the phenomena of human behavior involved in the process of drunkenness, without considering the essence of alcohol dependence. We have chosen a narrative method to intensify the educational activities of students and to explain the meaning of educational material about the socio-psychological mechanisms of the phenomenon of alcoholism. As a result of the analysis of a wide area of interdisciplinary knowledge about drunkenness, we came to the conclusion that traditional narratives as narrative stories, the plots of which take into account the temporal relations between events are of little use. Narrative stories about the safety of life about the phenomenon of drunkenness should explain mainly the meanings of the behavioral actions of the participants of the feast. The article presents the author's examples of narratives for the identification of small groups of socially motivated, psychologically motivated and biologically motivated. Further research will be related to the development of a system of narrative narratives, which will help students form a holistic view of the types of small alcohol groups and the peculiarities of the organization of their group activities aimed at the realization of alcohol episodes.Key words: drunkenness, small alcohol group, social motivation of the feast, psychological motivation of the feast, biological motivation of the feast, narrative. Мета. У статті розглянуто проблему відбору змісту навчального матеріалу про соціально-психо-логічні механізми функціонування явища пияцтва із метою реалізації парадигми особистісного роз-витку студентів під час вивчення навчальної дисципліни «Безпека життєдіяльності та основи охорони праці». Ми вважаємо, що розкриття студентам прихованих смислів подій, які супроводжують явище пияцтва, надасть знанням із безпеки життєдіяльності практичної цінності, сприяючи усвідомленню сутності традиції застілля, та впливатиме на безпечну поведінку в їх майбутньому самостійному жит-ті. Складність розв’язання зазначеної проблеми – в її міждисциплінарному характері, а саме перети-ні областей знань медицини, соціальної психології, культурології, права. Результати. Були прийняті рішення обмежити відбір змісту навчального матеріалу аналізом наукових знань соціальної психології, культурології і права, оскільки медичні знання вимагають спеціальної фахової підготовки. Такий підхід дозволив розглядати феномени поведінки людини, залученої до процесу пияцтва, без розгляду сут-ності алкогольної залежності. Для активізації навчальної діяльності студентів та з метою роз’яснення смислів навчального матеріалу про соціально-психологічні механізми функціонування явища пияцтва нами було обрано наративний метод. У результаті аналізу широкої області міждисциплінарного знан-ня про пияцтво ми прийшли до висновку, що традиційні наративи – як оповідальні історії, сюжети яких враховують темпоральні відношення між подіями малопридатні. Наративні оповідання з безпеки життєдіяльності про явище пияцтва повинні пояснювати переважно смисли поведінкових дій учасни-ків застілля. Висновки. У статті наведено авторські приклади наративів на ідентифікацію малих груп соціально мотивованих, психологічно мотивованих і біологічно мотивованих. Подальші дослідження будуть пов’язані з розробленням системи оповідальних наративів, яка сприятиме формуванню у сту-дентів цілісної уяви про типи малих алкогольних груп та про особливості організації їх групової діяль-ності, спрямованої на реалізації алкогольних епізодів.Ключові слова: пияцтво, мала алкогольна група, соціальна мотивація застілля, психологічна мотивація застілля, біологічна мотивація застілля, наратив.

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The authors address unanswered questions about the attraction of the often stormy large group and the interplay between it and small groups. If the large group is a place that arouses many difficult feelings, why do people in conferences, workshops, training programmes and on the Internet continue to participate in them? The authors found that within Internet large groups there was a clear pattern of setting up a small, intimate core group. They found a similar pattern in two live, group workshops. The authors learned that large and small groups are intricately related, and that when participants have the chance, they choose to continue in an on-going, back-and-forth movement between each.

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The author focuses on observed clinical material of interplay between the large group and small groups in a training situation. Cross border interplay have seldom been described: specific material from a large group setting is brought up in the context of another, the small group, or vice versa. These phenomena need to be conceptualized. The author makes use of Freud’s and Mario Erdheim’s concept of the antagonism between family and civilization, developing a conceptualization from Erdheim’s interpretation of adolescence as a dynamic factor of progress in civilization. The interplay between the small and large group is seen as a re-staging of the adolescent process. After applying this concept to the described material, the implications and consequences for group-analytic interpretation are discussed.

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Abstract: The aim of doctoral programs in psychology is to help students become competent psychologists, capable of conducting research and of finding suitable employment. Starting with a brief description of the basic organization of the French university system, this paper presents an overview of how the psychology doctoral training is organized in France. Since October 2000, the requisites and the training of PhD students are the same in all French universities, but what now differs is the openness to other disciplines according to the size and location of the university. Three main groups of doctoral programs are distinguished in this paper. The first group refers to small universities in which the Doctoral Schools are constructed around multidisciplinary seminars that combine various themes, sometimes rather distant from psychology. The second group covers larger universities, with a PhD program that includes psychology as well as other social sciences. The third group contains a few major universities that have doctoral programs that are clearly centered on psychology (clinical, social, and/or cognitive psychology). These descriptions are followed by comments on how PhD programs are presently structured and organized. In the third section, I suggest some concrete ways of improving this doctoral training in order to give French psychologists a more European dimension.

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One of the contemporary social psychology di­rections, sociometry, has played a vital role in small groups investigation. That direction was formed, de­veloped and widely applied in the first decades of 20th century by Moreno who was first of all con­cerned with primary, i. e. intimate, emotional rela­tions of people in small groups, emergence of fee­lings among group members such as sympathy and dislike, love and hatred, respect and contempt, the desire to be in mutual communication or isolation from each other, etc. With the help of sociometric method created and currently applied by Moreno the latter tries revealing such inter-group relations that are nearly not perceptible for “naked eyes“ (to observe superficially), however they often have serious, sometimes also critical influence on people’s behavior and state of mind. And though there has been put forth the viewpoint that sociometry is not as efficient in family investigation as when studying other small and medium groups, nevertheless, family sociometric research is compulsory and useful for investigating family psychology.

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The article deals with the phenomenon of social identity of a group subject from the point of view of the subject approach to small groups in psychology. The problem of studying a small group is the most significant for Russian psychology, and this is due to a number of factors. First, the very study of human development and formation is impossible in isolation from the social environment in which it is included. This inclusion is not always based on an individual’s conscious choice, but is sometimes simply due to the time and place of birth. Secondly, the worldview of a person often identifies the concept of personal and social, in the Russian mentality «I» is associated with the social groups in which it consists (educational, professional, sports, etc.), so the problem of studying small groups is especially relevant in our time. In addition, social and economic instability increases the need to join and receive protection from group membership. The article emphasizes the lack of development of this topic in domestic and foreign psychology. The author describes the developed method of diagnostics of social identity of a group subject and its application in groups of cadets of different training courses in the educational organization of the Ministry of internal Affairs of Russia. The analysis of the obtained psychodiagnostic results and the General conclusion about the effectiveness of a specific technique, as well as about the category of social identity of a group subject, depending on the direction of training and the duration of training in an educational organization of higher education.

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AbstractThis pilot study evaluated the effectiveness of delivering a new cognitive behavioural intervention package ‘Emotion-Based Social Skills Training (EBSST) for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Mild Intellectual Disability (ASD + MID)’ in schools. Fourteen school counsellors nominated 75 children (aged 7–13 years) with ASD + MID to receive 16 sessions of EBSST in groups of 3–8 children in their schools. Parent and teacher pre-post ratings of emotional competence (Emotions Development Questionnaire), social skills (Social Skills Improvement System Rating Scales) and mental health (Developmental Behaviour Checklist) were collected. Forty-three children received 16 sessions of EBSST and 32 children were allocated to the 9-month waitlist control group. Teachers and parents also received six EBSST training sessions in separate groups at school. Significant improvements in parent and teacher ratings of emotional competence were found at posttreatment among children in the EBSST group relative to controls; however, the results were not significant after the Bonferroni adjustment. Small to medium effect sizes were found. No difference in untrained social skills or mental health was observed. This study provides preliminary support for the utility of EBSST in teaching emotional competence skills for children with ASD + MID in schools and provides valuable pilot data for future research.

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This study assessed the effect of two different psychological methods of skills training—self-talk and goal setting—on the swimming performance of youth swimmers. We allocated a convenience sample of club and county level youth swimmers ( N = 49; Mage = 10.8, SD = 1.25) to one of the three groups: self-talk, goal setting, or a control group engaged in no systematic psychological method of skills training. The groups were balanced in terms of competitive performance ability, age, and gender. Participants in the experimental conditions (self-talk and goal setting) completed a 5-week psychological skills intervention program and were measured on pre- and post-200-m swimming time in competition. After controlling for level of engagement in the program, analysis of covariance revealed a significant omnibus effect ( p = .006, [Formula: see text] = .20) with post hoc pairwise comparisons using magnitude-based statistics demonstrating that goal setting had a small positive effect compared with self-talk ( η2 = .40; ± 0.45). Both self-talk ( η2 = .50; ±0.48) and goal setting ( η2 = .71; ±0.4) showed a small and moderate positive effect, respectively, relative to the control group. A social validation check confirmed that the swimmers found the intervention to be relevant, beneficial, and meaningful for improving performance. Psychological skills training may be effective in improving youth swimming performance; specific mechanisms underlying these benefits need further exploration.

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Compensation refers to the fact that a group perceived as higher than another on one of the fundamental dimensions of social judgment (competence and warmth) is also perceived as lower than the other group on the other dimension. Relying on a full-crossed design, the present work tested compensation in a real-life situation using existing groups involved in an ongoing relation. As predicted, compensation emerged when (a) the difference between the groups, and thus the perceived legitimacy of the status difference, was large as opposed to small, and (b) the relation between the groups was asymmetrical. In contrast, the smaller the difference (the lesser the legitimacy), the more ingroup bias emerged.

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Purpose: This randomized controlled study examines the efficacy of two innovative methods to teach beginning motivational interviewing (MI) skills: live supervision (LS), a small group experiential learning interaction with standardized client actors and in-the-moment guidance from a supervisor, and a coding learning (CL) method, where students in a classroom setting are introduced to MI skill development via learning to code MI practice behaviors. Methods: Seventeen social work students in a child welfare training program were randomized to receive either LS or CL training method. Changes in MI knowledge, attitudes, and MI skill were assessed through self-report and observational measures pretraining, posttraining, and at 5 months follow-up, after a semester of learning-as-usual. Results: Both training groups demonstrated an improvement in MI knowledge and attitudes from pretest to follow-up. MI skill gain within groups varied for specific MI skills. Discussion: Implications for maximally efficient MI training are advanced.

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This article is grounded in social constructivist perspectives of learning: its purpose is to provide an overview of the ‘ Interactions Sociales et Acquisition’ (ISA) [Social Interactions and Acquisition] French group’s research that examines how a peer-assisted learning (PAL) group context facilitates students’ acquisition of motor and social skills in physical education (PE). Issues addressed include the pairing of students in dyads and how training them to endorse tutor and tutee roles facilitates students to work in small groups. The effects of peer interaction on social relations and the inclusion of students with special needs are also overviewed. Findings regarding the influence of student interactions on learning were derived using a variety of data collection methodologies, including quantitative data used to test the effectiveness of various interactive procedures and qualitative analyses of verbal protocols to better understand the interactive dynamics involved in such learning devices. The ISA work highlights the complementary value of both of these methodological approaches for studying group work effects. ISA findings suggest that PE teachers prepare students for functional interaction group work by taking into consideration the students’ characteristics (like gender or desire for control) in the constitution of dyads and then effectively training the tutors to deliver the expected content. Cooperative learning (CL) contexts also provided a viable alternative for facilitating the inclusion of students with disabilities or those with lower initial skill levels.

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Abstract Social well-being is important to health, but maintaining social relations often becomes difficult in later life due to retirement, chronic disease, and the death of spouses and friends. Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, present accessible and low cost communication technologies that are associated with enhanced feelings of social connection and reduced loneliness in younger age groups. This paper examines whether similar benefits might arise for adults at older ages. Using a four-week social media training workshop as a randomized, controlled wait-list intervention, this study examines whether social benefits are realized among a group of novice social media users, aged 65+. Measures of social well-being, including social capital, loneliness, social connectedness, and social provisions, were assessed at pre- and multiple post-test intervals for differences related to social media learning. Findings revealed only small differences between groups in one dimension of social connectedness, that of social integration. As these findings seemingly contradict studies conducted with younger persons, the contexts of social media use in older adulthood are discussed. These include the relevance of lower social media adoption rates, as well as influences that intersect with an older person’s life stage, such as gaps in network coverage on technological platforms, perceptions of the value of weak connections, and a reduced digital skills base. These additional factors are relevant to understanding disparity in the benefits that can be obtained through the use of social media and highlight the differing needs that social media fulfill at varying life stages.

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Purpose This meta-analysis aims to verify the efficacy of occupational health and safety (OHS) training in terms of knowledge, attitude and beliefs, behavior and health. Design/methodology/approach The authors included studies published in English (2007–2014) selected from ten databases. Eligibility criteria were studies concerned with the effectiveness of OHS training for primary prevention of workplace injury; and studies focused on examined outcome related to OHS. Findings The selected studies (n = 28) highlighted a strong support for the effectiveness of training on worker OHS attitudes and beliefs and, to a lesser extent, on worker’s knowledge but only medium for behavior and small evidences for its effectiveness on health. Research limitations/implications Future research should more deeply investigate the efficacy on knowledge increase of trainings delivered by experts and researchers, applying different methods, in a small group; training delivered by peer and by researcher, applying different methods; and trained workers less than 29 years and more than 49 years old, considering that workers in these age groups are particularly vulnerable to fatalities. Practical implications Our study is a contribution for those they intend to grant effective training, in response to specific needs of OHS. The evidences presented could be considered a first step to identify the factors related to the efficacy of OHS training to plan adequate interventions. Social implications The OHS training is effective on the basis of the extent interventions are carried out for each specific learning outcome. Originality/value This meta-analysis suggested that classroom training, although the most used and studied, does not ever revealed itself very effective: it was not significant for outcomes in terms of knowledge and showed a decreasing efficacy for attitudes and beliefs, behaviors and health. It seemed that there was a distinction between interventions on knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, as opposed to behavioral interventions and health.

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Systematic observations regarding techniques of medical career-socialization has hardly ever appeared in Hungarian technical literature yet. Focusing on the need for practical medical training the author elaborated a career-socialization program consisting of a three-level, three-branch training technique. This consisted of a Junior Bálint-group, an imaginative visualization technique, and an expressive, drama-pedagogical working method completed with a projective technique. This career-socialization program focuses on the physician’s personality, capability-expansion in relationship management, and practicing a set of professional behavior-roles. During the empirical observations connected to the work the author examined medical students’ patient-representation, their relation to the patients, and the development of the physician’s professional character. Within the frames of this three-level, three-branch training technique program it enables us to observe which training technique is able to reveal all those psychological qualities that can contribute to the conformation of the representations, thus to the process of career-socialization in the most effective way. The content-analyses of the cases of Junior Bálint-groups (n = 60) revealed that the most frequent problems are fear of intimacy, of bodily contact, communication with patients in a chronic or terminal state, and the fear of medical practice. The content-analyses of imaginary patient-images (n = 62) with Rorschach-signs confirmed that the psychological burdens mentioned above are the most serious problems for medical students. The process-, and content-analyses of drama-games, the integrative healing contact training groups (n = 74) showed that group work primarily intensifies the relationship responsiveness, the ability to adopt the other’s (the patient’s) viewpoints, and enables an involuntary and distressless identification with the patient and the physician, both agents in the healing relationship. It is the drama-game that gives significant support to experience the physician- patient relationship in a high quality level. In the next phase the author tested the short story used for the drama-game and its projective contents on a sample of medical and psychology students (n = 313). For the statistical analysis the SPSS and the LEM program-packets were applied. Statistical methods included variance analysis, chi-square test and log-linear analysis. The vast similarity of the projective contents appearing in the survey questionnaire and in the drama-group verified that the chosen short story as a projective surface is suitable for recalling the students’ typical stereotypes and representations related to diseases, patients, healing experts and therapeutic situations. The drama-group focused on the realization of these stereotypical representations, and also on experiencing and forming the students’ emotional relations to them. Orv. Hetil., 2011, 152, 475–480.

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This paper explores whether perceived entitativity of a group (i.e., how much it is seen as a unit) influences how its apologies are perceived. Because entitative groups are assigned agency and collective responsibility and their members are viewed as interchangeable, their apologies were hypothesized to appear more sincere and less due to ulterior motives. This effect emerged with small groups apologizing for minor grievances (Studies 1 and 2), although not always if the apology came from a leader (vs. the whole group). In Study 3, these benefits of entitativity extended to greater liking for the more entitative group, and in the case of a government apologizing for international harm. Whereas past research has emphasized the harmful impact outgroup entitativity can have on intergroup relations, these studies suggest entitativity can have benefits when the intergroup behavior is a beneficial one (e.g., apology).

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AbstractBackgroundWhile studies suggest that nutritional supplementation may reduce aggressive behavior in children, few have examined their effects on specific forms of aggression. This study tests the primary hypothesis that omega-3 (ω-3), both alone and in conjunction with social skills training, will have particular post-treatment efficacy for reducing childhood reactive aggression relative to baseline.MethodsIn this randomized, double-blind, stratified, placebo-controlled, factorial trial, a clinical sample of 282 children with externalizing behavior aged 7–16 years was randomized into ω-3 only, social skills only, ω-3 + social skills, and placebo control groups. Treatment duration was 6 months. The primary outcome measure was reactive aggression collected at 0, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months, with antisocial behavior as a secondary outcome.ResultsChildren in the ω-3-only group showed a short-term reduction (at 3 and 6 months) in self-report reactive aggression, and also a short-term reduction in overall antisocial behavior. Sensitivity analyses and a robustness check replicated significant interaction effects. Effect sizes (d) were small, ranging from 0.17 to 0.31.ConclusionsFindings provide some initial support for the efficacy of ω-3 in reducing reactive aggression over and above standard care (medication and parent training), but yield only preliminary and limited support for the efficacy of ω-3 in reducing overall externalizing behavior in children. Future studies could test further whether ω-3 shows promise in reducing more reactive, impulsive forms of aggression.

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ABSTRACTThe present paper describes and traces the emergence of an innovative psychoeducational model of support for family caregivers of dependent elderly persons, its associated systematic evaluation and leadership training process, provides details of a small group programme and its underlying philosophy, and reports on outcome evaluation research ascertained from both quantitative and qualitative data analyses. Details of these analyses are presented within the context provided by a three-level model of support, which recruits and trains professionals from a range of disciplines to help families in caregiving situations. The 72 treatment and 29 waiting-list control subjects were assessed at pretreatment and at posttest on measures of anxiety and psychological well-being. Statistically significant differences emerged between the treatment and waiting-list control groups on these measures. Positive changes for programme participants were further demonstrated by contextual analysis of evaluative responses. Implications for practitioners, educators, and policy specialists, as well as for research and programme development are discussed.

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A general problem of this research is to identify if there is a relationship between the assumption on human nature and work (Mcgregor, Argyris, Schein, Steers and Porter) and a general organizational model preference, as well as a mechanism of human resource management? This research was carried out in 2005/2006. The sample consisted of 317 subjects (197 managers, 105 highly educated subordinates and 15 entrepreneurs) in 7 big enterprises in a group of small business enterprises differentiating in terms of the entrepreneur?s structure and a type of activity. A general hypothesis "that assumptions on human nature and work are statistically significant in connection to the preference approach (models), of work motivation commitment", has been confirmed. A specific hypothesis have been also confirmed: ?The assumptions on a human as a rational economic being are statistically significant in correlation with only two mechanisms of traditional models, the mechanism of method work control and the working discipline mechanism. ?Statistically significant assumptions on a human as a social being are correlated with all mechanisms of engaging employees, which belong to the model of the human relations, except the mechanism introducing the adequate type of prizes for all employees independently of working results. ?The assumptions on a human as a creative being are statistically significant, positively correlating with preference of two mechanisms belonging to the human resource model by investing into education and training and making conditions for the application of knowledge and skills. The young with assumptions on a human as a creative being prefer much broader repertoire of mechanisms belonging to the human resources model from the remaining category of subjects in the pattern. The connection between the assumption on human nature and preference models of engaging appears especially in the sub-pattern of managers, in the category of young subjects, as it has been expected.

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The definition of lifestyle in psychology is traditionally associated with various aspects of the development of personality and social groups. The way of life depends not only on objective social factors, but also on a person himself, on what external and internal activity he represents in the objective process of life. Thus, the formation and development of personality is reflected in his activity increasing in preserving or transforming own way of life. One of the main features of the present is the existence of such social group as entrepreneurs. The development of this social group is connected with the formation of the independence of our state and the activation of a certain social stratum of the development of entrepreneurial way of life. Entrepreneurship in Ukraine has been developing ever since 1991. During the years of independence in Ukraine, the socio-economic situation has changed significantly. Favorable socio-economic conditions of the early 2000s have increased the activity of people to transform their own way of life and the realization of entrepreneurial activity. We were interested in how this was reflected in the development of socio-psychological qualities of an individual. The purpose of our research is to determine the socio-psychological peculiarities of the individual in the making a way of life for entrepreneurs at different stages of small business development in independent Ukraine (in the 1990s and in the period from 2010 to 2014). The following methods and techniques were used. 16 PF Kettell (Form C) adaptation A. G. Shmelev, V. I. Pohilko, A. S. Solovaychik, the method of personal differentiation (V. F. Bazhin, E. A. Golinkina, A. M. Etkind), the method of determining the level of subjective control (V. F. Bazhin, E. A. Golinkina, A. M. Etkind), the method of graphical scaling D. Guilford for determining the level of risk, the test-questionnaire for the diagnosis of the presence and severity degree of the main psychological barriers for entrepreneurship (O. P. Ermolaeva), the method of pair comparisons of L. Terstoun, methods "Self-Cost" and "New social status" O. M. Laktionov, the method of determining the severity of entrepreneurial activity indicators of S. G. Ianovska. Mathematical-statistical processing of results was carried out using a number of mathematical statistics methods (Mann-Whitney U-criterion, Student's t-criterion). A comparative analysis of the socio-psychological qualities of entrepreneur’s personality at different stages of small business development in Ukraine revealed that the transformation that has occurred over the time is manifested in the following features: increasing the role of the communicative unit of a personality profile of an entrepreneurial entity, increasing the internal locus of control and the value of economic wealth values in regulating the entrepreneurial activity. The role of the professional component of entrepreneurial professional activity is changing: the importance of professional knowledge and special training in running business is growing. The results of the study were used to create a training program for the development of entrepreneurial activity, which was implemented during the last year in work with internal immigrants and start-uppers.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the elements of a LinkedIn profile that hiring professionals focus on most, and then examine LinkedIn profiles in terms of these identified elements across different industries. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology was comprised of two phases. In the first phase, researchers interviewed hiring professionals to determine their usage of LinkedIn. In the second phase, LinkedIn group member profiles from three industries – HR, sales/marketing and industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology – were compared on the 21 variables identified in Phase 1 (n=288). Findings – χ2 and ANOVA tests showed significant differences with respect to ten of the LinkedIn variables in how people presented themselves across the three groups. There were also several gender differences found. Research limitations/implications – A general limitation was the use of a qualitative research approach. A limitation of Phase 1 was that only a small sample of New York City-based hiring professionals was interviewed. Perhaps a wider, more diverse sample would have yielded different variables. In terms of Phase 2, it is possible that just utilizing the second connections of the researchers limited the generalizability of findings. Practical implications – User unwillingness to fully complete the LinkedIn profile suggests that it may not have replaced the traditional resume yet. Sales/marketing professionals were more likely than HR and I/O psychology professionals to complete multiple aspects of a LinkedIn profile. Women were also less likely than men to provide personal information on their profiles. Originality/value – Most of the empirical research on social networking sites has focussed on Facebook, a non-professional site. This is, from the knowledge, the first study that systematically examined the manner in which people present themselves on LinkedIn – the most popular professional site used by applicants and recruiters worldwide.

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On the basis of the principle of cultural mediation in aspects of culture – environment, mediation – the model of “Humanity in interpersonal and intergroup relations in the organization”, which is a deep modernization of T. Pittinski’s allophilia model, is considered. The subscales of the A scale (sympathy, comfort, involvement, enthusiasm, closeness) were added to the subscales of the D scale (dominance, antiegalitarianism). Stable feedbacks were determined between subscales A and D: the maximum - r = -0.853 with the “Sympathy” subscale, and the minimum – r = -0.456 “Comfort”, while the subscale “Antiegalitarianism” makes a greater contribution. A real experiment was carried out according to L.S. Vygotsky, in which the situations of study during the period of self-isolation from COVID-19 in humanitarian and departmental universities are considered. It was revealed that the humanity index (HIO) in educational organizations under the influence of the pandemic has a non-linear dynamics: from a sharp drop in the index in the first month to a gradual increase in the next 3 months (to the level of everyday life). With a balanced sample (66 people in total), by age (20-22 years old), gender (90% girls), the training program “Psychology of Service”, similar quality of teachers selection, learning conditions, the HIO level in a humanitarian university is lower than in the departmental. It has been proven that the reason is the result of the interaction of a more ordered organizational environment of a departmental university with the personal characteristics of students, which reduces uncertainty, paradoxically leads to an increase of HIO. The culture of mediation was manifested in the presentation of the typicality of ideas about group and intergroup interactions, assessments of stereotyping and bias. A similar social typicality of groups was determined, with differences in the interrelationships between HIO and stereotyping and bias. A stable positive correlation of HIO with stereotyping at the level of 0.01, negative with a bias at the level of 0.05 was revealed, which speaks about the possibilities of HIO in predicting the manifestation of cognitive and motivational social-psychological phenomena in various groups of subjects.

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Introduction. Theoretical background. The territorial formation and economic development of Оlexandrivsk and the district is associated with the activation of social, including artistic, life all aspects in the Russian Empire. The creative potential of small towns, including Olexandrivsk, has become a fertile ground for the development of the principles and means of theatrical and stage creativity. Theater, as the most democratic form of art, is directly connected with changes in public life. The theater significant social role and insufficient knowledge on it in the Olexandrivsk conditions and its district determined the relevance of the research topic. The researches by S. Voitkovsky (2014), G. Dadamyan (1987), M. Yevreinov (2019) constitute the scientific and theoretical basis of the work. The study of theatrical art in the Oleksandrivsk (Zaporizhzhya) region is based on the works of O. Antonenko (2017), S. Grushkina (2011), T. Martynyuk (2003). The aim of the research is to study the theater art in Olexandrivsk and the district of the same name as an integral phenomenon of a certain time. The tasks of the work are determine the origins of the theater art in the region, coverage of the features of this phenomenon, identification of theater companies’ organizational forms, study of the theater groups’ repertoire and genre priorities, consideration of theater art professionalization issues in the region. The methodology involves the application of the basic dialectic principles (to reveal the internal contradictions of the research subject and the sources of its development); historical principle (to study the theater’ development as a process of changes in existence’ some forms); comparative method (to identify the theater art characteristics in the region); source study method (to create an archival and historical base for studying the problem); axiological approach (to identify of the theater artistic troupes’ value orientations in the region). Results of the research. Historical materials contain a few facts about the theatrical entertainment of the local population long before the foundation of Olexandrivsk. Similar to the more inhabited neighboring regions, in these territories the existence of a folk theater is likely, the roots of which M. Yevreinov sees in magical actions, rituals and buffoonery. The researcher considers the theater of Russia, the roots of which are in the theatrical art of Europe, to be a counterbalance to folk theater. At the state level, these traditions have been inculcated since the 17th century. This process in the region began from the time of Olexandrivsk foundation. There are two most stable groups of theater collectives in the theater environment of the region. Domestic and foreign drama and opera troupes, which were guided by the Western European theater traditions, are made up the first group. Ukrainian artists’ association and local amateur drama circles that further developed the traditions of folk theater consisted the second group. They united by the idea of national dramatic art. The factors of theater collective’ differentiation in this region are the form of organization of theater business, repertoire and genre priorities, issues of professionalization. The sole proprietorship form is characteristic for the Western European tradition collectives. In Olexandrivsk and the district, the private enterprise was the dominant form, as the most active organization type of theater business. This type of enterprise does not have the conventions of imperial, state, municipal and other theaters in terms of repertoire and personnel relations. This provided it with freedom, mobility and ingenuity. The organizational form of the partnership is characteristic for the troupes oriented towards the traditions of folk theater. Democracy of this form manifested itself in collective decisionmaking. The next factor in differentiating theater groups is repertoire and genre priorities. The Western European tradition troupes gave preference to the works of Western European and Russian authors. Ukrainian authors’ works, Ukrainian song and dance folklore dominated in the repertoire of Ukrainian associations, which continued the traditions of folk theater. These groups preferred works of a pronounced national orientation. The repertoire differences between the two groups reflected to the methods and skills of acting. It is necessary to master Italian vocal technique, classic instrumental technique, conducting symphonic skills in the Western European tradition troupes. In Ukrainian troupes’ music and dramatic performances, universal training actor is needed, equally skillful in stage speech, the folk dance, the style of folk singing. The theater groups’ genre preferences repertoire related to an orientation towards the original artistic traditions. The Western European tradition’ collectives repertoire abounded in dramas, operas, operettas and the romances, arias, opera scenes in the concert departments. The Ukrainian folk-theater tradition repertoire dominated by music and drama plays, simple Ukrainian opera and Ukrainian folk songs, romances by domestic composers in concert departments. In Olexandrivsk and the district, questions of theater art’ professionalization were not publicly raised widely. Some striving for the performances artistic level increase we can saw in the practice of inviting famous artists for touring performances. Thanks to this, acting skills, methods of working on the role and the performance as a whole enriched. Invitations to participation in the performance of famous performers of the folk-theatrical tradition to Ukrainian troupes were episodic. An indicative fact of development was the director’s position emergence in the Western European tradition troupes. Conclusions. The peculiarity of theater art in the Olexandrivsk region is the absence of a local professional theater, represented, on the one hand, by the work of guest domestic and foreign troupes, on the other – by Ukrainian artistic societies and local amateur associations. The dominant groups of groups embodied two types of theater: Western European tradition and folk tradition. These types of theater functioned in various organizational forms. Dramatic and operatic corpses of the European tradition were characterized by a form of individual private enterprise; Ukrainian groups that developed the traditions of folk theater – a form of acting society. Theater troupes of these two traditions distinguished by their repertoire priorities. The core of the repertoire of the Western European tradition groups was the Russian and Western European authors’ works. The groups, which developed the folk theater, staged mainly plays by Ukrainian and local authors. The vector of theatrical art development in the Olexandrivsk and region is not clear enough at the historical period under consideration. An organized and purposeful movement towards the theater art professionalization in the region of this historical period is not visible. Certain facts of attracting famous artists and interaction with other groups as well as the emergence of the directed theater can be considered as elements of а professionalization.

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Abstract Social wellbeing is important to health, but maintaining social relations often becomes difficult in later life due to retirement, chronic disease, and the death of spouses and friends. Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, present accessible and low-cost communication technologies that have been demonstrated to enhance feelings of social connection and reduce loneliness in younger age groups. This exploratory study uses a four-week social media training workshop as an intervention in a randomised controlled study to examine whether similar social benefits might be realised for those at older ages, aged 65+ years. Social wellbeing measures of social capital, loneliness, social connectedness and social provisions were examined, revealing only small differences in social integration. As these findings seemingly contradict studies conducted with younger persons, the contexts of social media use in older adulthood are discussed, along with proposals for future research directions.

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This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that hom*ocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. They have been given the opportunity to review and suggest changes to the account. References Askin, Dean (aka: dnskct). “Hall of Inappropriate.” Abstract Photos/Discuss/Hall of Inappropriate, 2010. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractphotos/discuss/72157623148695254/>. Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredeon, and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Bruckman, Amy. Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet. 2002. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html>. Bruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Proceedings: Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006. Perth: Murdoch U, 2006. 275–84. ———, and Mark Bahnisch. Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content. 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Indigenous cross-cultural training has been around since the 1980s. It is often seen as a way to increase the skills and competency of staff engaged in providing service to Indigenous clients and customers, teaching Indigenous students within universities and schools, or working with Indigenous communities (Fredericks and Bargallie, “Indigenous”; “Which Way”). In this article we demonstrate how such training often exposes power, whiteness, and concepts of an Indigenous “other”. We highlight how cross-cultural training programs can potentially provide a setting in which non-Indigenous participants can develop a deeper realisation of how their understandings of the “other” are formed and enacted within a “white” social setting. Revealing whiteness as a racial construct enables people to see race, and “know what racism is, what it is not and what it does” (Bargallie, 262). Training participants can use such revelations to develop their racial literacy and anti-racist praxis (Bargallie), which when implemented have the capacity to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations.What Does the Literature Say about Cross-Cultural Training? An array of names are used for Indigenous cross-cultural training, including cultural awareness, cultural competency, cultural responsiveness, cultural safety, cultural sensitivity, cultural humility, and cultural capability. Each model takes on a different approach and goal depending on the discipline or profession to which the training is applied (Hollinsworth). Throughout this article we refer to Indigenous cross-cultural training as “cultural competence” or “cultural awareness” and discuss these in relation to their application within higher education institutions. While literature on health and human services programs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other nation states provide clear definitions of terms such as “cultural safety”, cultural competence or cultural awareness is often lacking a concise and consistent definition.Often delivered as a half day or a one to two-day training course, it is unrealistic to think that Indigenous cultural competence can be achieved through one’s mere attendance and participation. Moreover, when courses centre on “cultural differences” and enable revelations about those differences they are in danger of presenting idealised notions of Indigeneity. Cultural competence becomes a process through which an Indigenous “other” is objectified, while very little is offered by way of translating knowledge and skills into practice when working with Indigenous peoples.What this type of learning has the capacity to do is oversimplify and reinforce racism and racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous cultures. What is generally believed is that if non-Indigenous peoples know more about Indigenous peoples and cultures, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will somehow improve. The work of Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson is vital to draw on here, when she asks, has the intellectual investment in defining our cultural differences resulted in the valuing of our knowledges? Has the academy become a more enlightened place in which to work, and, more important, in what ways have our communities benefited? (xvii)What is revealed in a range of studies – whether centring on racism and discrimination or the ongoing disparities across health, education, incarceration, employment, and more – is that despite forty plus years of training focused on understanding cultural differences, very little has changed. Indigenous knowledges continue to be devalued and overlooked. Everyday and structural racisms shape everyday experiences for Indigenous employees in Australian workplaces such as the Australian Public Service (Bargallie) and the Australian higher education sector (Fredericks and White).As the literature demonstrates, the racial division of labour in such institutions often leaves Indigenous employees languishing on the lower rungs of the employment ladder (Bargallie). The findings of an Australian university case study, discussed below, highlights how power, whiteness, and concepts of “otherness” are exposed and play out in cultural competency training. Through their exposure, we argue that better understandings about Indigenous Australians, which are not based on culture difference but personal reflexivity, may be gained. Revealing What Was Needed in the Course’s Foundation and ImplementationThis case study is centred within a regional Australian university across numerous campuses. In 2012, the university council approved an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy, which included a range of initiatives, including the provision of cross-cultural training for staff. In developing the training, a team explored the evidence as it related to university settings (Anning; Asmar; Butler and Young; Fredericks; Fredericks and Thompson; Kinnane, Wilks, Wilson, Hughes and Thomas; McLaughlin and Whatman). This investigation included what had been undertaken in other Australian universities (Anderson; University of Sydney) and drew on the recommendations from earlier research (Behrendt, Larkin, Griew and Kelly; Bradley, Noonan, Nugent and Scales; Universities Australia). Additional consultation took place with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.While some literature on cross-cultural training centred on the need to understand cultural differences, others exposed the problems of focusing entirely on difference (Brach and Fraser; Campinha-Bacote; Fredericks; Spencer and Archer; Young). The courses that challenged the centrality of cultural difference explained why race needed to be at the core of its training, highlighting its role in enabling discussions of racism, bias, discrimination and how these may be used as means to facilitate potential individual and organisational change. This approach also addressed stereotypes and Eurocentric understandings of what and who is an Indigenous Australian (Carlson; Gorringe, Ross and Forde; Hollinsworth; Moreton-Robinson). It is from this basis that we worked and grew our own training program. Working on this foundational premise, we began to separate content that showcased the fluidity and diversity of Indigenous peoples and refrained from situating us within romantic notions of culture or presenting us as an exotic “other”. In other words, we embraced work that responded to non-Indigenous people’s objectified understandings and expectations of us. For example, the expectation that Indigenous peoples will offer a Welcome to Country, performance, share a story, sing, dance, or disseminate Indigenous knowledges. While we recognise that some of these cultural elements may offer enjoyment and insight to non-Indigenous people, they do not challenge behaviours or the nature of the relationships that non-Indigenous people have with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Bargallie; Fredericks; Hollinsworth; Westwood and Westwood; Young).The other content which needed separating were the methods that enabled participants to understand and own their standpoints. This included the use of critical Indigenous studies as a form of analysis (Moreton-Robinson). Critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic) was also used as a means for participants to interrogate their own cultural positionings and understand the pervasive nature of race and racism in Australian society and institutions (McLaughlin and Whatman). This offered all participants, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, the opportunity to learn how institutional racism operates, and maintains discrimination, neglect, abuse, denial, and violence, inclusive of the continued subjugation that exists within higher education settings and broader society.We knew that the course needed to be available online as well as face-to-face. This would increase accessibility to staff across the university community. We sought to embed critical thinking as we began to map out the course, including the theory in the sections that covered colonisation and the history of Indigenous dispossession, trauma and pain, along with the ongoing effects of federal and state policies and legislations that locates racism at the core of Australian politics. In addition to documenting the ongoing effects of racism, we sought to ensure that Indigenous resistance, agency, and activism was highlighted, showing how this continues, thus linking the past to the contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples.Drawing on the work of Bargallie we wanted to demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience racism through systems and structures in their everyday work with colleagues in large organisations, such as universities. Participants were asked to self-reflect on how race impacts their day-to-day lives (McIntosh). The final session of the training focused on the university’s commitment to “Closing the Gap” and its Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). The associated activity involved participants working individually and in small groups to discuss and consider what they could contribute to the RAP activities and enact within their work environments. Throughout the training, participants were asked to reflect on their personal positioning, and in the final session they were asked to draw from these reflections and discuss how they would discuss race, racism and reconciliation activities with the governance of their university (Westwood and Westwood; Young).Revelations in the Facilitators, Observers, and Participants’ Discussions? This section draws on data collected from the first course offered within the university’s pilot program. During the delivery of the in-person training sessions, two observers wrote notes while the facilitators also noted their feelings and thoughts. After the training, the facilitators and observers debriefed and discussed the delivery of the course along with the feedback received during the sessions.What was noticed by the team was the defensive body language of participants and the types of questions they asked. Team members observed how there were clear differences between the interest non-Indigenous participants displayed when talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and a clear discomfort when they were asked to reflect on their own position in relation to Indigenous people. We noted that during these occasions some participants crossed their arms, two wrote notes to each other across the table, and many participants showed discomfort. When the lead facilitator raised this to participants during the sessions, some expressed their dislike and discomfort at having to talk about themselves. A couple were clearly unhappy and upset. We found this interesting as we were asking participants to reflect and talk about how they interpret and understand themselves in relation to Indigenous people and race, privilege, and power.This supports the work of DiAngelo who explains that facilitators can spend a lot of time trying to manage the behaviour of participants. Similarly, Castagno identifies that sometimes facilitators of training might overly focus on keeping participants happy, and in doing so, derail the hard conversations needed. We did not do either. Instead, we worked to manage the behaviours expressed and draw out what was happening to break the attempts to silence racial discussions. We reiterated and worked hard to reassure participants that we were in a “safe space” and that while such discussions may be difficult, they were worth working through on an individual and collective level.During the workshop, numerous emotions surfaced, people laughed at Indigenous humour and cried at what they witnessed as losses. They also expressed anger, defensiveness, and denial. Some participants revelled in hearing answers to questions that they had long wondered about; some openly discussed how they thought they had discovered a distant Aboriginal relative. Many questions surfaced, such as why hadn’t they ever been told this version of Australian history? Why were we focusing on them and not Aboriginal people? How could they be racist when they had an Aboriginal friend or an Aboriginal relative?Some said they felt “guilty” about what had happened in the past. Others said they were not personally responsible or responsible for the actions of their ancestors, questioning why they needed to go over such history in the first place? Inter-woven within participants’ revelations were issues of racism, power, whiteness, and white privilege. Many participants took a defensive stance to protect their white privilege (DiAngelo). As we worked through these issues, several participants started to see their own positionality and shared this with the group. Clearly, the revelation of whiteness as a racial construct was a turning point for some. The language in the group also changed for some participants as revelations emerged through the interrogation and unpacking of stories of racism. Bargallie’s work exploring racism in the workplace, explains that “racism”, as both a word and theme, is primarily absent in conversations amongst non-Indigenous colleagues. Despite its entrenchment in the dialogue, it is rarely, if ever addressed. In fact, for many non-Indigenous people, the fear of being accused of racism is worse than the act of racism itself (Ahmed; Bargallie). We have seen this play out within the media, sport, news bulletins, and more. Lentin describes the act of denying racism despite its existence in full sight as “not racism”, arguing that its very denial is “a form of racist violence” (406).Through enhancing racial literacy, Bargallie asserts that people gain a better understanding of “what racism is, what racism is not and how race works” (258). Such revelations can work towards dismantling racism in workplaces. Individual and structural racism go hand-in-glove and must be examined and addressed together. This is what we wanted to work towards within the cultural competency course. Through the use of critical Indigenous studies and critical race theory we situated race, and not cultural difference, as central, providing participants with a racial literacy that could be used as a tool to challenge and dismantle racism in the workplace.Revelations in the Participant Evaluations?The evaluations revealed that our intention to disrupt the status quo in cultural competency training was achieved. Some of the discussions were difficult and this was reflected in the feedback. It was valuable to learn that numerous participants wanted to do more through group work, conversations, and problem resolution, along with having extra reading materials. This prompted our decision to include extra links to resource learning materials through the course’s online site. We also opted to provide all participants with a copy of the book Indigenous Australia for Dummies (Behrendt). The cost of the book was built into the course and future participants were thankful for this combination of resources.One unexpected concern raised by participants was that the course should not be “that hard”, and that we should “dumb down” the course. We were astounded considering that many participants were academics and we were confident that facilitators of other mandatory workplace training, for example, staff Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Fire Safety, Risk Management, Occupational Health and Safety, Discrimination and more, weren’t asked to “dumb down” their content. We explained to the participants what content we had been asked to deliver and knew their responses demonstrated white fragility. We were not prepared to adjust the course and dumb it down for white understandings and comfortabilities (Leonardo and Porter).Comments that were expected included that the facilitators were “passionate”, “articulate”, demonstrated “knowledge” and effectively “dealt with issues”. A couple of the participants wrote that the facilitators were “aggressive” or “angry”. This however is not new for us, or new to other Aboriginal women. We know Aboriginal women are often seen as “aggressive” and “angry”, when non-Indigenous women might be described as “passionate” or “assertive” for saying exactly the same thing. The work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Australia, and the works of numerous other Aboriginal women provide evidence of this form of racism (Fredericks and White; Bargallie; Bond). Internationally, other Indigenous women and women of colour document the same experiences (Lorde). Participants’ assessment of the facilitators is consistent with the racism expressed through racial microaggression outside of the university, and in other organisations. This is despite working in the higher education sector, which is normally perceived as a more knowledgeable and informed environment. Needless to say, we did not take on these comments.The evaluations did offer us the opportunity to adjust the course and make it stronger before it was offered across the university where we received further evaluation of its success. Despite this, the university decided to withdraw and reallocate the money to the development of a diversity training course that would cover all equity groups. This meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be covered along with sexual diversity, gender, disability, and people from non-English speaking backgrounds. The content focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was reduced to one hour of the total course. Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this way is not based on evidence and works to minimise Indigenous Australians and their inherent rights and sovereignty to just another “equity group”. Conclusion We set out to develop and deliver a cross-cultural course that was based on evidence and a foundation of 40 plus years’ experience in delivering such training. In addition, we sought a program that would align with the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan and the directions being undertaken in the sector and by Universities Australia. Through engaging participants in a process of critical thinking centring on race, we developed a training program that successfully fostered self-reflection and brought about revelations of whiteness.Focusing on cultural differences has proven ineffective to the work needed to improve the lives of Indigenous Australian peoples. Recognising this, our discussions with participants directly challenged racist and negative stereotypes, individual and structural racism, prejudices, and white privilege. By centring race over cultural difference in cultural competency training, we worked to foster self-revelation within participants to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations. The institution’s disbandment and defunding of the program however is a telling revelation in and of itself, highlighting the continuing struggle and importance of placing additional pressure on persons, institutions, and organisations to implement meaningful structural change. ReferencesAhmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.Anderson, Ian. “Advancing Indigenous Health through Medical Education”. Focus on Health Professional Education: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal 13.1 (2011): 1-12.Anning, Beres. “Embedding an Indigenous Graduate Attribute into University of Western Sydney’s Courses”. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 39 (2010): 40-52.Asmar, Christine. Final Report on the Murrup Barak of Indigenous Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Melbourne, 2010-2011. Murrup Barak – Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development, University of Melbourne, 2011.Bargallie, Debbie. Unmasking The Racial Contract: Everyday Racisms and the Impact of Racial Microaggressions on “Indigenous Employees” in the Australian Public Service. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2020. Behrendt, Larissa. Indigenous Australia for Dummies. Wiley Publishing, 2010.Behrendt, Larissa, Steven Larkin, Robert Griew, Robert, and Patricia Kelly. Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People: Final Report. Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations, 2012.Brach, Cindy, and Irene Fraser. “Can Cultural Competency Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities? A Review and Conceptual Model”. Medical Care Research and Review 57.sup 1 (2000): 181-217.Bond, Chelsea. “When the Object Teaches: Indigenous Academics in Australian Universities”. Right Now 14 (2014). <http://rightnow.org.au/opinion-3/when-the-object-teaches-indigenous-academics-in-australian-universities/>.Bradley, Denise, Peter Noonan, Helen Nugent, and Bill Scales. Review of Australian Higher Education. Australian Government, 2008.Butler, Kathleen, and Anne Young. Indigenisation of Curricula – Intent, Initiatives and Implementation. Canberra: Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, 2009. 20 Apr. 2020 <http://www.teqsa.gov.au/news-publications/publications>.Campinha-Bacote, Josepha. “A Model and Instrument for Addressing Cultural Competence in Health Care”. Journal of Nursing Education 38.5 (1999): 203-207.Carlson, Bronwyn. The Politics of Identity – Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016.Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 2001.DiAngelo, Robin. “Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions”. Understanding and Dismantling Privilege 11.1 (2012). <http://www.wpcjournal.com/article/view/10100/Nothing%20to%20add%3A%20A%20Challenge%20to%20White%20Silence%20in%20Racial%20Discussions>.Frankenburg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.Fredericks, Bronwyn. “The Need to Extend beyond the Knowledge Gained in Cross-Cultural Awareness Training”. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 37.S (2008): 81-89.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Debbie Bargallie. “An Indigenous Cultural Competency Course: Talking Culture, Care and Power”. In Cultural Competence and the Higher Education Sector: Perspectives, Policies and Practice, eds. Jack Frawley, Gabrielle Russell, and Juanita Sherwood, Springer Publications, 295-308. <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-981-15-5362-2>.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Debbie Bargallie. “‘Which Way? Talking Culture, Talking Race’: Unpacking an Indigenous Cultural Competency Course”. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 9.1 (2016): 1-14.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Marlene Thompson. “Collaborative Voices: Ongoing Reflections on Cultural Competency and the Health Care of Australian Indigenous People”. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 13.3 (2010): 10-20.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Nereda White. “Using Bridges Made by Others as Scaffolding and Establishing Footings for Those That Follow: Indigenous Women in the Academy”. Australian Journal of Education 62.3 (2018): 243–255.Gorringe, Scott, Joe Ross, and Cressida Fforde. Will the Real Aborigine Please Stand Up? Strategies for Breaking the Stereotypes and Changing the Conversation. AIATSIS Research Discussion Paper No. 28. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), 2011.Hollinsworth, David. “Forget Cultural Competence: Ask for an Autobiography”. Social Work Education: The International Journal 32.8 (2013): 1048-1060.hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. London: Pluto Press, 2000.Kinnane, Stephen, Judith Wilks, Katie Wilson, Terri Hughes, and Sue Thomas. Can’t Be What You Can’t See: The Transition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students into Higher Education. Final report to the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. Canberra: Office of Learning and Teaching, 2014.Lentin, Alana. “Beyond Denial: ‘Not Racism’ as Racist Violence”. Continuum 32.1 (2018): 1-15.Leonardo, Zeus, and Ronald L. Porter. “Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory of ‘Safety’ in Race Dialogue”. Race Ethnicity and Education 13.2 (2010): 139-157.Lorde, Audrey. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.McIntosh, Peggy. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies. Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, 1988.McLaughlin, Juliana, and Sue Whatman. “The Potential of Critical Race Theory in Decolonizing University Curricula”. Asia Pacific Journal of Education 31.4 (2011): 365-377.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.Sargent, Sara E., Carol A. Sedlak, and Donna S. Martsolf. “Cultural Competence among Nursing Students and Faculty”. Nurse Education Today 25.3 (2005): 214-221.Sherwood, Juanita, and Tahnia Edwards. “Decolonisation: A Critical Step for Improving Aboriginal health”. Contemporary Nurse 22.2 (2016): 178-190.Spencer, Caroline, and Frances L. Archer. “Surveys of Cultural Competency in Health Professional Education: A Literature Review”. Journal of Emergency Primary Health Care 6.2 (2008): 17.Universities Australia. National Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency in Australian Universities. Universities Australia, 2011. <http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/lightbox/1312>.University of Sydney. National Centre for Cultural Competence, 2016. <http://sydney.edu.au/nccc/>.Westwood, Barbara, and Geoff Westwood. “Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Training: Policy v. Accountability – Failure in Reality”. Australian Health Review 34 (2010): 423-429.Young, Susan. “Not Because It’s a Bloody Black Issue! Problematics of Cross Cultural Training”. In Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation, ed. Belinda McKay, 204-219. Queensland Studies Centre, University of Queensland Press, 1999.

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In the contemporary urban environment of mass transit, it falls to a small group of public officers to keep large number of travellers safe. The small size of their force and the often limited powers they exert mean that these public safety ‘transit officers’ must project more authority and control than they really have. It is this ambience of authority and control which, in most situations they encounter and seek to influence, is enough to keep the public safe. This paper examines the ambience of a group of transit officers working on the railway lines of an Australian capital city. We seek to show how transit officers are both influenced by, and seek to influence, the ambience of their workplace and the public spaces they inhabit whilst on duty, and here we take ambience to apply to the surrounding atmosphere, the aura, and the emotional environment of a place or situation: the setting, tone, or mood. For these transit officers to keep the public safe, they must themselves remain safe. A transit officer who is disabled in a confrontation with a violent offender is unable to provide protection to his or her passengers. Thus, in the culture of the transit officers, their own workplace safety takes on a higher significance. It affects not just themselves. The ambience exuded by transit officers, and how transit officers see their relationship with the travelling public, their management and other organisational work groups, is an important determinant of their work group’s safety culture. Researching the Working Lives of Transit Officers in Perth Our discussion draws on an ethnographic study of the working lives and communication cultures of transit officers (TOs) employed by the Public Transport Authority (PTA) of Western Australia (WA). Transit officers have argued that to understand fully the challenges of their work it is necessary to spend time with them as they undertake their daily duties: roster in, roster out. To this end, the research team and the employer organisation secured an ARC Linkage Grant in partnership with the PTA to fund doctoral candidate and ethnographer Christine Teague to research the workers’ point of view, and the workers’ experiences within the organisation. The two-hundred TOs are unique in the PTA. Neither of the other groups who ride with them on the trains, the drivers and revenue protection staff (whose sole job is to sell and check tickets), experiences the combination of intense contact with passengers, danger of physical injury or group morale. The TOs of the PTA in Perth operate from a central location at the main train station and the end stations on each line. Here there are change lockers where they can lock up their uniforms and equipment such as handcuffs and batons when not on duty, an equipment room where they sign out their radios, and ticket-checking machines. At the main train station there is also a gym, a canteen and holding cells for offenders they detain. From these end stations and central location, the TOs fan out across the network to all suburbs where they either operate from stations or onboard the trains. The TOs also do ‘delta van’ duty providing rapid, mobile back-up support for their colleagues on stations or trains, and providing transport for arrested persons to the holding cell or police lock up. TOs are on duty whenever the trains are running–but the evenings and nights are when they are mainly rostered on. This is when trouble mostly occurs. The TOs’ work ends only after the final train has completed its run and all offenders who may require detaining and charging have been transferred into police custody. While the public perceive that security is the TOs’ most frequent role, much of the work involves non-confrontational activity such as assisting passengers, checking tickets and providing a reassuring presence. One way to deal with an ambiguous role is to claim an ambience of power and authority regardless. Various aspects of the TO role permit and hinder this, and the paper goes on to consider aspects of ambience in terms of fear and force, order and safety, and role confusion. An Ambience of Fear and Force The TOs are responsible for front-line security in WA’s urban railway network. Their role is to offer a feeling of security for passengers using the rail network after the bustle of the work day finishes, and is replaced by the mainly recreational travels of the after hours public. This is the time when some passengers find the prospect of evening travel on the public transport rail network unsettling–so unsettling that it was a 2001 WA government election promise (WA Legislative Council) that every train leaving the city centre after 7pm would have two TOs riding on it. Interestingly, recruitment levels have never been high enough for this promise to be fully kept. The working conditions of the TOs reflect the perception, and to an extent, the reality that some late night travel on public transport involves negotiating an edgy ambience with an element of risk, rubbing shoulders with people who may be loud, rowdy, travelling in a group, and or drug and alcohol affected. As Fred (all TO names are pseudonyms) comments: You’re not dealing with rational people, you’re not dealing with ‘people’: most of the people you’re dealing with are either drunk or under the influence of drugs, so they’re not rational, they don’t hear you, they don’t understand what you’re saying, they just have no sense of what’s right or wrong, you know? Especially being under the influence, so I mean, you can talk till you’re blue in the face with somebody who’s drunk or on drugs, I mean, all you have to say is one thing. ‘Oh, can I see your ticket please’, ‘oh, why do I need a f*cking ticket’, you know? They just don’t get simple everyday messages. Dealing with violence and making arrest is a normal part of this job. Jo described an early experience in her working life as a TO:Within the first week of coming out of course I got smacked on the side of the head, but this lady had actually been certified, like, she was nuts. She was completely mental and we were just standing on the train talking and I’ve turned around to say something to my partner and she was fine, she was as calm as, and I turned around and talked to my partner and the next thing I know I ended up with her fist to the side of my head. And I went ‘what the hell was that’? And she went off, she went absolutely ballistic. I ended up arresting her because it was assault on an officer whether she was mental or not so I ended up arresting her.Although Jo here is describing how she experienced an unprovoked assault in the early days of her career as a TO, one of the most frequent precursors to a TO injury occurs when the TO is required to make an arrest. The injury may occur when the passenger to be arrested resists or flees, and the TO gives chase in dark or treacherous circ*mstances such as railway reserves and tunnels, or when other passengers, maybe friends or family of the original person of concern, involve themselves in an affray around the precipitating action of the arrest. In circ*mstances where capsicum spray is the primary way of enforcing compliance, with batons used as a defence tool, group members may feel that they can take on the two TOs with impunity, certainly in the first instance. Even though there are security cameras on trains and in stations, and these can be cued to cover the threatening or difficult situations confronting TOs, the conflict is located in the here-and-now of the exchanges between TOs and the travelling public. This means the longer term consequence of trouble in the future may hold less sway with unruly travellers than the temptation to try to escape from trouble in the present. In discussing the impact of remote communications, Rubert Murdoch commented that these technologies are “a powerful influence for civilised behaviour. If you are arranging a massacre, it will be useless to shoot the cameraman who has so inconveniently appeared on the scene. His picture will already be safe in the studio five thousand miles away and his final image may hang you” (Shawcross 242). Unfortunately, whether public aggression in these circ*mstances is useless or not, the daily experience of TOs is that the presence of closed circuit television (CCTV) does not prevent attacks upon them: nor is it a guarantee of ‘civilised behaviour’. This is possibly because many of the more argumentative and angry members of the public are dis-inhibited by alcohol or other drugs. Police officers can employ the threat or actual application of stun guns to control situations in which they are outnumbered, but in the case of TOs they can remain outnumbered and vulnerable until reinforcements arrive. Such reinforcements are available, but the situation has to be managed through the communication of authority until the point where the train arrives at a ‘manned’ station, or the staff on the delta vehicle are able to support their colleagues. An Ambience of Order and Safety Some public transport organisations take this responsibility to sustain an ambience of order more seriously than others. The TO ethnographer, Christine Teague, visited public transport organisations in the UK, USA and Canada which are recognised as setting world-class standards for injury rates of their staff. In the USA particularly, there is a commitment to what is called ‘the broken windows’ theory, where a train is withdrawn from service promptly if it is damaged or defaced (Kelling and Coles; Maple and Mitchell). According to Henry (117): The ‘Broken Windows’ theory suggests that there is both a high correlation and a causal link between community disorder and more serious crime: when community disorder is permitted to flourish or when disorderly conditions or problems are left untended, they actually cause more serious crime. ‘Broken windows’ are a metaphor for community disorder which, as Wilson and Kelling (1982) use the term, includes the violation of informal social norms for public behaviour as well as quality of life offenses such as littering, graffiti, playing loud radios, aggressive panhandling, and vandalism.This theory implies that the physical ambience of the train, and by extension the station, may be highly influential in terms of creating a safe working environment. In this case of ‘no broken window’ organisations, the TO role is to maintain a high ‘quality of life’ rather than being a role predominantly about restraining and bringing to justice those whose behaviour is offensive, dangerous or illegal. The TOs in Perth achieve this through personal means such as taking pride in their uniforms, presenting a good-natured demeanour to passengers and assisting in maintaining the high standard of train interiors. Such a priority, and its link to reduced workforce injury, suggests that a perception of order impacts upon safety. It has long been argued that the safety culture of an organisation affects the safety performance of that organisation (Pidgeon; Leplat); but it has been more recently established that different cultural groupings in an organisation conceive and construct their safety culture differently (Leith). The research on ‘safety culture’ raises a problematic which is rarely addressed in practice. That problematic is this: managers frequently engage with safety at the level of instituting systems, while workers engage with safety in terms of behaviour. When Glendon and Litherland comment that, contrary to expectations, they could find no relationship between safety culture and safety performance, they were drawing attention to the fact that much managerial safety culture is premised upon systems involving tick boxes and the filling in of report forms. The broken window approach combines the managerial tick box with managerial behaviour: a dis-ordered train is removed from service. To some extent a general lack of fit between safety culture and safety performance endorses Everett’s view that it is conceptually inadequate to conceive organisations as cultures: “the conceptual inadequacy stems from the failure to distinguish between culture and behavioural features of organizational life” (238). The general focus upon safety culture as a way of promoting improvements in safety performance assumes that compliance with a range of safety systems will guarantee a safe workplace. Such an assumption, however, risks positioning the injured worker as responsible for his or her own predicament and sets up an environment in which some management officials are wont to seek ways in which that injured worker’s behaviour failed to conform with safety rules or safety processes. Yet there are roles which place workers in harm’s way, including military duties, law enforcement and some emergency services. Here, the work becomes dangerous as it becomes disorderly. An Ambience of Roles and Confusion As the research reported here progressed, it became clear that the ambience around the presentation of the self in the role of a TO (Goffman) was an important part of how ‘safety’ was promoted and enacted in their work upon the PTA (WA) trains, face to face with the travelling public. Goffman’s view of all people, not specifically TOs, is that: Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This will largely be through influencing the perception and definition that others will come to formulate of him. He will influence them by expressing himself in such a way that the kind of impression given off will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan. (3)This ‘influencing of perception’ is an important element of performing the role of a TO. This task of the TOs is made all the more difficult because of confusions about their role in relation to two other officers: police (who have more power to act in situations of public safety) and revenue project officers (who have less), as we now discuss. The aura of the TO role borrows somewhat from those quintessential law and order officers: the police. TOs work in pairs, like many police, to support each other. They have a range of legal powers including the power of arrest, and they carry handcuffs, a baton and capsicum spray as a means of helping ensure their safety and effectiveness in circ*mstances where they might be outnumbered. The tools of their trade are accessibly displayed on heavy leather belts around their waists and their uniforms have similarities with police uniforms. However, in some ways these similarities are problematic, because TOs are not afforded the same respect as police. This situation underlines of the ambiguities negotiated within the ambience of what it is to be a TO, and how it is to conduct oneself in that role. Notwithstanding the TOs’ law and order responsibilities, public perceptions of the role and some of the public’s responses to the officers can position these workers as “plastic cops” (Teague and Leith). The penultimate deterrent of police officers, the stun gun (Taser), is not available to TOs who are expected to control all incidents arising on duty through the fact that they operate in pairs, with capsicum spray available and, as a last resort, are authorised to use their batons in self defence. Furthermore, although TOs are the key security and enforcement staff in the PTA workforce, and are managed separately from related staff roles, they believe that the clarity of this distinction is compromised because of similarities in the look of Revenue Protection Officers (RPOs). RPOs work on the trains to check that passengers have tickets and have paid the correct fares, and obtain names and addresses to issue infringement notices when required. They are not PTA employees, but contracted staff from an outside company. They also work in pairs. Significantly, the RPO uniform is in many respects identical to that of the TO, and this appears to be a deliberate management choice to make the number of TOs seem greater than it is: extending the TO ambience through to the activities of the RPOs. However, in the event of a disturbance, TOs are required and trained to act, while RPOs are instructed not to get involved; even though the RPOs appear to the travelling public to be operating in the role of a law-and-order-keeper, RPOs are specifically instructed not to get involved in breaches of the peace or disruptive passenger behaviour. From the point of view of the travelling public, who observe the RPO waiting for TOs to arrive, it may seems as if a TO is passively standing by while a chaotic situation unravels. As Angus commented: I’ve spoken to quite a few members of public and received complaints from them about transit officers and talking more about the incident have found out that it was actually [RPOs] that are dealing with it. So it’s creating a bad image for us …. It’s Transits that are copping all the flak for it … It is dangerous for us and it’s a lot of bad publicity for us. It’s hard enough, the job that we do and the lack of respect that we do get from people, we don’t need other people adding to it and making it harder. Indeed, it is not only the travelling public who can mistake the two uniforms. Mike tells of an “incident where an officer [TO] has called for backup on a train and the guys have got off [the train at the next station] and just stood there, and he didn’t realise that they are actually [revenue protection] officers, so he effectively had no backup. He thought he did, but he didn’t.” The RPO uniform may confer an ambience of power borrowed from TOs and communicated visually, but the impact is to compromise the authority of the TO role. Unfortunately, what could be a complementary role to the TOs becomes one which, in the minds of the TO workforce, serves to undermine their presence. This effect of this role confusion is to dilute the aura of authority of the TOs. At one end of a power continuum the TO role is minimised by those who see it as a second-rate ‘Wannabe cop’ (Teague and Leith 2008), while its impact is diluted at the other end by an apparently deliberate confusion between the TO broader ‘law and order’ role, and the more limited RPO revenue collection activities. Postlude To the passengers of the PTA in Perth, the presence and actions of transit officers appear as unremarkable as the daily commute. In this ethnographic study of their workplace culture, however, the transit officers have revealed ways in which they influence the ambience of the workplace and the public spaces they inhabit whilst on duty, and how they are influenced by it. While this ambient inter-relationship is not documented in the organisation’s occupational safety and health management system, the TOs are aware that it is a factor in their level at safety at work, both positively and negatively. Clearly, an ethnography study is conducted at a certain point in time and place, and culture is a living and changing expression of human interaction. The Public Transport Authority of Western Australia is committed to continuous improvement in safety and to the investigation of all ways and means in which to support TOs in their daily activities. This is evident not only in their support of the research and their welcoming of the ethnographer into the workforce and onto the tracks, but also in their robust commitment to change as the findings of the research have progressed. In particular, changes in the ambient TO culture and in the training and daily practices of TOs have already resulted from this research or are under active consideration. Nonetheless, this project is a cogent indicator of the fact that a safety culture is critically dependent upon intangible but nonetheless important factors such as the ambience of the workplace and the way in which officers are able to communicate their authority to others. References Everett, James. “Organizational Culture and Ethnoecology in Public Relations Theory and Practice.” Public Relations Research Annual. Vol. 2. Eds. Larissa Grunig and James Grunig. Hillsdale, NJ, 1990. 235-251. Glendon, Ian, and Debbie Litherland. “Safety Climate Factors, Group Differences and Safety Behaviour in Road Construction.” Safety Science 39.3 (2001): 157-188. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Henry, Vincent. The Comstat Paradigm: Management Accountability in Policing, Business and the Public Sector. New York: Looseleaf Law Publications, 2003. Kelling, George, and Catherine Coles. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Leith, David. Workplace Culture and Accidents: How Management Can Communicate to Prevent Injuries. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2008. Leplat, Jacques. “About Implementation of Safety Rules.” Safety Science 29.3 (1998): 189-204. Maple, Jack, and Chris Mitchell. The Crime Fighter: How You Can Make Your Community Crime-Free. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Pidgeon, Nick. “Safety Culture and Risk Management in Organizations.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 22.1 (1991): 129-140. Shawcross, William. Rupert Murdoch. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Teague, Christine, and David Leith. “Men of Steel or Plastic Cops? The Use of Ethnography as a Transformative Agent.” Transforming Information and Learning Conference Transformers: People, Technologies and Spaces, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, 2008. ‹http://conferences.scis.ecu.edu.au/TILC2008/documents/2008/teague_and_leith-men_of_steel_or_plastic_cops.pdf›. Wilson, James, and George Kelling. “Broken Windows.” The Atlantic Monthly (Mar. 1982): 29-38. WA Legislative Council. “Metropolitan Railway – Transit Guards 273 [Hon Ed Dermer to Minister of Transport Hon. Simon O’Brien].” Hansard 19 Mar. 2009: 2145b.

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The 1950s era appears to hold a nostalgic place in contemporary memories and current cultural practices. While the 1950s is a period that can signify a time from the late 1940s to the early 1960s (Guffey, 100), the era is often represented as a liminal space or dream world, mediated to reflect current desires. It is a dream-like world, situated half way between the mediated vision of the 1950s and today. Modern participants of 1950s culture need to negotiate what is authentic and what is not, because as Piatti-Farnell and Carpenter remind us ‘history is what we want it to be’ (their emphasis). The world of the 1950s can be bent to suit differing interpretations, but it can never be broken. This is because nostalgia functions as a social emotion as well as a personal one (Davis, vii). Drawing on interviews conducted with 27 women and three men, this article critically examines how the 1950s are nostalgically reimagined in contemporary culture via fashion and car festivals. This article asks: in dreaming of the past, how authentic is the 1950s reimagined today from the point of view of the participants?Liminal spaces exist for participants to engage in their nostalgic reimagining of 1950s culture. Throughout Australia, and in several other countries, nostalgic retro festivals have become commonplace. In Australia prominent annual events include Cooly Rocks On (Coolangatta, Qld.), Chromefest (The Entrance, NSW) and Greazefest (Brisbane, Qld.). Festivals provide spaces where nostalgia can be acted out socially. Bennett and Woodward consider festivals such as these to be giving individuals an “opportunity to participate in a gathering of like-minded individuals whose collective investment in the cultural texts and artefacts on display at the festival are part of their ongoing lifestyle project” (Bennett and Woodward, 15). Festivals are important social events where fans of the 1950s can share in the collective re-imagining of the 1950s.MethodologyEthnographic interviews with 30 participants who self-identified as wearers of 1950s style fashion. The interviews were conducted in person, via telephone and Skype. The participants come from a range of communities that engage with 1950s retro culture, including pin-up, rockabilly, rock'n'roll dancers and car club members. Due to the commonality of the shared 1950s space, the boundaries between the various cohorts can be fluid and thus some participants were involved with multiple groups. The researcher also immersed herself in the culture, conducting participant observation at various events such as retro festivals, pin-up competitions, shopping excursions and car club runs. Participants were given the option to have their real names used with just a few choosing to be anonymised. The participants ranged in age from 23 to their 60s.NostalgiaOur relationship with past eras is often steeped in nostalgia. Fred Davis (16-26) identified three orders of nostalgia: simple, reflexive and interpreted. Simple nostalgia “harbors the common belief that THINGS WERE BETTER (MORE BEAUTIFUL) (HEALTHIER) (HAPPIER) (MORE CIVILIZED) (MORE EXCITING) THEN THAN NOW” (Davis, 18, his emphasis). This is a relatively straightforward depiction of a halcyon past that is uncritical in its outlook. The second order, reflexive nostalgia, sees subjects question if their view of the past is untainted: “was it really that way?” (21). The third and final order sees the subject question the reasons behind the feelings of nostalgia, asking “why am I feeling nostalgic?” (24).Davis argues that nostalgia “must in some fashion be a personally experienced psst” rather than knowledge acquired second-hand (Davis, 8). Others dispute this, noting a vicarious or second-hand nostalgia can be experienced by those who have no direct experience of the past in question (Goulding, “Exploratory”). Christina Goulding’s work at heritage museums found two patterns of nostalgic behaviour amongst visitors whom she termed the existentials and the aesthetics (Goulding, “Romancing”). For the existentials, experiencing the liminal space of a heritage museum validated their nostalgia “because of their ability to construct their own values and ideologies relating to a particular time period in history and then to transpose these values to a time belonging to their own experiences, whether real or partially constructed” (Goulding “Romancing”, 575). This attitude is similar to Davis’s first order or simple nostalgia. In comparison, aesthetics viewed history differently; their nostalgia was grounded in an interest in history and its authentic reconstruction, and a desire to escape into an imaginary world, if only for an hour or two. However, they were more critical of the realism presented to them and aware of the limits of accuracy in reconstruction.Second-Hand NostalgiaFor the participants interviewed for this research, second-hand nostalgia for the 1950s was apparent for many. This is not very surprising given the time and distance between now and then. That is, a majority of the participants had not actually lived in the 1950s. For many their interest in the 1950s connected them to key family members such as mothers, fathers and grandparents. Two participants, Noel and Charlie, discussed fathers who were keen listeners of 1950s rock'n'roll music. Women often discussed female family members whose 1950s fashion sense they admired. Statements such as “I look back at the photos now and I think it would have been awesome if I had grown up in that era” (Noel) were common in interviews; however, many of them later qualified this with a more critical analysis of the time.For some, the 1950s represented a time when things were ‘better’. The range of indicators ran from the personal to the social:Curves and shapeliness were celebrated a little bit more in that era than they are now … when you look at the 50s woman they were a little bit curvier, when you think of pin-up and that kind of stuff, like Marilyn Monroe and Betty Page and all that sort of style, whereas for so long that hasn’t been where fashion has been at. So the average woman is bigger, or is curvier, or… So that’s kind of, it just works with my body shape in a way that modern stuff just doesn’t necessarily. (Ashleigh)I get treated differently when I wear Rockabilly as opposed to modern clothes. People will treat me more like a lady, will open doors for me … . I think people respect more people that dress like ladies than girls that let it all show. People have respect for people who respect themselves and I think Rockabilly allows you to do that. Allows you to be pretty and feminine without letting it all show. (Becky)For others, their fascination with the 1950s was limited to the aesthetic as they drew a more critical analysis of the era:There’s a housewife’s guide. I’m sure you’ve read that a housewife is expected to have a bow in her hair when her husband gets home from work. And should have the children in bed or silent. And we should be appreciating that he’s had a very hard day at work, so he should come home and put his feet up and we should rub his feet and provide him with a hot meal … . The mindset was different between then and now, and it’s not really that big a gap in history. (Belinda)The majority of women interviewed noted that they would be unwilling to relinquish modern social attitudes towards women to return to an era where women were expected to remain in the domestic sphere. They cited a number of differences, including technology (modern washing machines, dishwashers, etc.), gender relations (one participant noted rape in marriage), expectations to marry and have children young, careers, own finances etc.Nooooo! Absolutely not. Nooooo! No way! Oh my gosh! The labour in housework. Almost daily I’m grateful for the dishwasher and the stick Dyson for the floors and I don’t know, the steam iron. So many of the conveniences that you know, you go down stairs in the rush before the walk to school, throw the clothes into the washing machine and know that in 30 minutes it’s done. … No way would I go back. I absolutely would not want to live in the 50s regarding the social mores. It’s a little bit too repressive … . Love the look though! (Anna)Despite this, ‘outsiders’ (those who do not participate in 1950s subcultures) will often assume that since adherents are dressed in fifties style they obviously wish they could return there:And it sometimes will open a conversation where people will say “you should have been born earlier” or “I bet you wished you lived in the 50s” and I always say “no, I’m glad I live in an era where there’s less racism and sexism and I can work. (Emma)In contrast, men who were interviewed had expressed fewer barriers to living in the 1950s. Both Charlie and Noel were quick to say yes when asked if they would be happy to live in the actual 1950s. Even Ashley, a hom*osexual man who dresses in 1950s drag as a woman on the weekends would “give it a go”. This perhaps reflects the privileged position that white heterosexual men enjoyed in the era. Ashley could, like many hom*osexual men at the time, easily disguise his sexual orientation in order to fit into this privileged position, keeping his overt drag behaviour to “safe gay spaces” (Cole, 45). Further, all three men are white, although Charlie, being from a Cypriot background, may experience a different social response if he was to return to the actual 1950s. Immigrants from southern Europe were not welcomed by all Australians, with some openly hostile to the immigrants (Murphy, 156-64). Women, on the other hand, would experience a retrograde transformation of their position within society; women of colour even more so. This echoes other studies of historically based cohorts where women in particular hold progressive modern views and are reluctant to return to time periods such as the 1960s (Jenss) and the 1970s (Gregson, Brooks, and Crewe).Popular Cultures as a Conduit to the PastNostalgia is often mediated through popular culture, with many participants referencing popular icons of the fifties such as Elvis, Rita Hayworth, and Marilyn Monroe. This was complicated by references to popular culture films and music which were themselves a product of 1950s nostalgia, such as the movie Grease (1978) and the band the Stray Cats (1979-present). The 1950s has been the ongoing subject of revivalism since at least the late 1960s (Reynolds, 277), and this layering complicates social understandings of the decade. One participant, Charlie (in his late 50s), notes how the 1950s revival in the 1970s gave him the opportunity to immerse himself in the culture he admired. For Charlie, popular culture gave him the opportunity to wear authentic 1950s clothing and surround himself with 1950s memorabilia, music, and cars.Alternative clothing allows people to create an identity outside the parameters of contemporary fashion. For women, the thin body, replete with small breasts and hips, has been held up as the ideal in both mass media and fashion from advent of Twiggy in the 1960s to the present day (Hackett and Rall). Yet, 1950s style clothing allows wearers the freedom to create a fashionable identity that presents a different body ideal; that of the hyper-feminine woman who is characterised by her exaggerated hour-glass figure. This body shape has recently become fashionable again with influencers such as Kim Kardashian promoting this as an alternate to the thin body ideal. For men, the clothes represent the complimentary ideal of the hyper-masculine man: tight shirts, worker jeans, working class suits. Some participants, like Charlie, wear original 1950s clothing. I’ve got my dad’s sports coat, and I still wear it today … that song … [Marty Robins – ‘A white sport coat and a pink carnation’] … it explains that coat. My dad had it when he first came to Australia … I’ve still got it today and I still wear it proudly. (Charlie)However, due to the age of available authentic clothing, complicated by the fact that many garments from that era have already been recycled, there remains limited supply of true 1950s clothing for today’s fans. Most rely upon reproduction clothing which varies in its level of authenticity. Some reproduction brands remake styles from the fifties, whereas others are merely inspired by the era. In her study of costume, Valerie Cumming argued that it was “rare for clothing from previous eras to be worn in an unaltered state as it offered an alternative construction of identity” (Cumming, 109). Contemporary body sizes and shapes are different from their mid-century counterparts due to range of issues, particularly the average increase in body size. Women’s bust and waist measurements, for example, have increased by about ten percent over the last century (Etchells, Kinkade, and Henneberg). Further, technological advances in fabric coupled with changing social mores around undergarments mean that the body upon which garments sit is shaped differently. Most of the women in this study feel no need to wear restrictive, body modifying undergarments such as girdles or merry widows beneath their clothes. This echoes other research which reports that re-enactors wear clothes that are not really authentic, but “approximations created for twenty-first century” fans (Kiesel). Despite this diluting of 1950s style to suit modern sensibilities, the superficial look of the clothes are, for the participants, strongly reminiscent of the 1950s.I have a very Rubensesque body shape, so when I was younger that was the sort of styles that was better on me. So I like the pencil skirts enhanced a bit that weren’t supposed to be enhanced because I came from a very conservative Christian background. But then the A-line skirts were what my mom put me in to go to church and everything. Anyway it just looked really nice. As I watched television and saw those styles on some of those older shows that my parents let me watch, that is what I got drawn too, that sort of silhouette. (Donna, early 40s)The act of dressing in this way separates participants from the mainstream. Here fashion, in particular, differentiates this look from subcultural style. Dick Hebdige argued that subcultures are rooted in working class struggles, creating an alternate society away from the mainstream, where clothing becomes a critical identifier of group membership. Some participants extend their consumption of 1950s goods into areas such as homewares, cars and music. 1950s cars, particularly large American cars such as Cadillacs and Australian-made Holdens, are lovingly restored. Charlie, a mechanic by trade, has restored numerous cars for both himself and other people. Restoring cars can often be an expensive endeavour, locking out many would-be owners. A number of participants spoke of their desire to own an original car, even if it was out of their budget.Cars too are often modified from their original incarnation. Sometimes this is due to comfort, such as having modern day air-conditioning systems or power-steering installed. Other times this is due to legal requirements. It is not uncommon to see cars at festivals installed with child safety seats, when children during the actual 1950s often rode in cars without seatbelts even installed. Like clothing, it appears for cars that if the aesthetic is strongly reminiscent of the 1950s, then the underlying structural changes are acceptable.Identities and SpacesRetro festivals as liminal spaces provide the opportunity for participants to play at being in the actual 1950s. As a shared space they rely upon a critical mass of people to create and maintain this illusion. Participants who attended these events expressed a lot of enthusiasm for them:I just love the atmosphere, looking around, looking at the stalls and other people’s outfits. Listening to the music and having a dance. (Kathleen, early 20s)Oh, that’s my favourite weekend of the year … I’ve been to every single one since the first one. Yeah, I think this is the nineteenth year … And we all kind of, there’s a bunch of us that go and we stay near there and we are there for the whole thing. Yeah, and I’ve already started sewing my wardrobe. Planning my outfits. I don’t know, we just love it. There’s people that I only see once a year at Greazefest and I get to catch up with people. And I flit around like a social butterfly, like I’m running around, and I also have a thing where I call it the weekend of a thousand selfies. So I just take hundreds of selfies with people and myself and I do a big thing up every year. Yeah. But I love it, I love the music mainly. But it’s a good excuse, another good excuse, to make some nice outfits and get dressed up in something different. (Vicki, early 40s)So I’m at shows basically every weekend. Shows, swap meets and in the garage, there’s always something. And when you get into this car life, it drags the 50s in with you, if that is your decade. It just follows you in. (Ashleigh, early 20s)The festival space becomes liminal as it is not truly part of the past, but it is not of the present either. As Valerie Cumming's statement above notes, clothes from the past that are worn today are usually altered to suit modern sensibilities. So too are festivals which are designed and enacted within our contemporary paradigm. This can be seen in Pin-Up competitions which are present at many of the festivals. Rather than a parade of young beauties, modern interpretations feature a diverse vision of womanhood, representing a range of ages, body sizes, genders, and beauty ideals. For some participants this is an empowering liminal space.I went through a stage where I had severe depression and I found the thing that was making me happy was when I put on my 50s clothes and it’s an entire separate personality, because there is me, I’m a very quiet, normal person and there is Chevy Belle … and it’s this whole extra style, this extra confidence that I have and that was helping me through depression. (Ashleigh, early 20s)A Contested DreamIf the liminal space of a re-imagined 1950s is to succeed, members must negotiate, whether explicitly or implicitly, what constitutes this space. When is someone bending the rules, and when is someone breaking them? Throughout the interviews there was an undercurrent of controversy as to certain elements.The Pin-Up community was the most critiqued. Pin-Up style often references styles from both the forties and fifties, merging the two eras into one. Vicki questioned if their style was even 1950s at all:I don’t really understand where some of the pin-up looks come from. Like, sort of like, that’s not 50s. That’s not really 50s looking, so don’t call it 50s if it’s not … some of the hairstyles I sort of go “I don’t know what, what that is”. I’m not quite sure why everybody’s got victory … like got victory rolls when they’re not 1950s … I get a bit funny and I know it sounds really pretentious when I say it out loud. Yeah, I don’t know. I sound pretentious, I don’t want to sound pretentious. (Vicki, early 40s)Here Vicki is conflicted by her wish to be inclusive with her desire to be authentic. The critique continues into the use of tattoos and the type of people who entered these competitions:I found the pin-up competitions seem to be more for people, for the bigger ladies that wanted to wear the tattoos … rather than something that was just about the fashion ... (Simone, early 50s)Coinciding with Corrie Kiesel’s findings about Jane Austen festivals, “what constitutes the authentic for the festival community is still under negotiation”. The 1950s liminal space is a shared dream and subject to evolution as our changing contemporary norms and the desire for authenticity come into conflict and are temporarily resolved, before being challenged again.ConclusionVia 1950s fashion, cars, music, and festivals, the participants of this study show that there exist multiple liminal spaces in which identity and social boundaries are made malleable. As a result, there exists mostly inclusive spaces for the expression of an alternative social and cultural aesthetic. While engagement with 1950s culture, at least in this research, is predominantly feminine, men do participate albeit in different ways. Yet for both men and women, both are dreaming of a past that is constantly imaged and re-imagined, both on a personal level and on a social level.As the temporal distance between now and the actual 1950s expands, direct experience of the decade diminishes. This leaves the era open to re-interpretation as contemporary norms and values affect understandings of the past. Much of the focus in the interviews were upon the consumption of nostalgic goods rather than values. This conflict can be most strongly seen in the conflicted responses participants gave about pin-up competitions. For some participants the pin-ups were lacking in an essential authenticity, yet the pin-ups with their tattoos and reinterpretation of the past demonstrate how fluid and malleable a culture based on a past era can be. The 1950s scene promises to become more fluid as it undergoes further evolutionary steps in the future.ReferencesBennet, Andy, and Ian Woodward. “Festival Spaces, Identity, Experience and Belonging.” The Festivalization of Culture. Eds. Jodie Taylor and Andy Bennett. New York: Routledge, 2014. 25-40.Cole, Shaun. “Don We Now Our Gay Apparel”: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Berg, 2000.Cumming, Valerie. Understanding Fashion History. London: Batsford, 2004.Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979.Etchells, Nick, Lynda Kinkade, and Maciej Henneberg. "Growing Pains: We've All Heard about Australia's Obesity Crisis But the Truth Is, We're Getting Bigger in More Ways than One. 2014.Goulding, Chrintina. "Romancing the Past: Heritage Visiting and the Nostalgic Consumer." Psychology and Marketing 18.6 (2001). DOI: 10.1002/mar.1021.Goulding, Christina. “An Exploratory Studiy of Age Related Vicarious Nostalgia and Aesthetic Consumption.” NA-Advances in Consumer Research. Eds. Susan M. Broniarczyk and Kent Nakamoto. Valdosta, GA: Association for Consumer Research, 2002. 542-46.Gregson, Nicky, Kate Brooks, and Louise Crewe. “Bjorn Again? Rethinking 70s Revivalism through the Reappropriation of 70s Clothing.” Fashion Theory 5.1 (2001). DOI: 10.2752/136270401779045716.Hackett, Lisa J., and Denise N Rall. “The Size of the Problem with the Problem of Sizing: How Clothing Measurement Systems Have Misrepresented Women’s Bodies from the 1920s – Today.” Clothing Cultures 5.2 (2018): 263-83.Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Florence: Florence Taylor and Francis, 1979.Jenss, Heike. “Sixties Dress Only! The Consumption of the Past in a Retro Scene.” Old Clothers, New Looks: Second-Hand Fashion. Eds. Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark. Michigan: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005. 177-197.Kiesel, Corrie. “‘Jane Would Approve’: Gender and Authenticity at Louisiana’s Jane Austen Literary Festival.” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 33.1 (2012). 1 Mar. 2020 <http://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol33no1/kiesel.html>.Murphy, John. Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Cultre in Menzies’ Australia. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000.Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Lloyd Carpenter. “Intersections of History, Media and Culture.” M/C Journal 20.5 (2017). 1 Mar. 2020 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1323>.Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addition to Its Own Past. London: Faber & Faber, 2011.FundingLisa J. Hackett is supported by the Commonwealth of Australia through the Research Training Programme.

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This article uses a case study of a Melbourne-based youth media project called Youthworx to explore the processes at stake in cultural engagement for marginalised young people. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2010, I identify some ways in which the city is implicated in promoting or preventing access to socially valued spaces of creativity and intended social mobility. The ethnographic material presented here has both empirical and theoretical value. It reveals the important relationships between the experience of place, creativity, and social life, demonstrating potentialities and limits of creativity-focused development interventions for marginalised youth. The articulation of these relationships and processes taking place within a particular city setting has theoretical implications. It opens up an opportunity to consider "suburbs" as enacted by specific forms of access, contingencies, and opportunities for a particular demographic, rather than treating "suburbs" as abstract, analytical constructs. Finally, my empirically grounded discussion draws attention to cultural and social consequences that inhabiting certain social worlds and acts of travelling "to and beyond" them have for young people. Youthworx is a community-based youth media initiative employing pathway-based semi-formal creative practices to re-engage young people who have a history of drug or alcohol abuse or juvenile justice, who have been long disconnected from mainstream education, or who are homeless. The focus on media production allows it to tap into, and in fact leverage, popular creativity, tacit knowledge, and familiar media-based activities that young people bring to bear on their media training and work in this context. Underpinned by social and creative industry policy, Youthworx brings together social service agency The Salvation Army (TSA), educational provider Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT), youth community media organisation SYN Media, and researchers at Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University. Its day-to-day operation is run by contractual, part-time media facilitators, social workers (as part of TSA’s in-kind support), as well as media industry experts who provide casual media training. Youthworx is characterised by the diversity of its young demographic. One can differentiate between at least two groups of participants: those who join Youthworx because of the social opportunities, and those who put more value on its skill-development, or vocational creative industries orientation. This social organisation is, however, far from static. Over the two years of research (2008-2010) we observed evolving ideas about the identity of the program, its key social functions, and how they can be best served. This had proceeded with the construction of what the Youthworx staff term "a community of safe belonging" to a more "serious" media work environment, exemplified by the establishment of a social enterprise (Youthworx Productions) in 2010 that offers paid traineeships to the most capable and determined young creators. To accommodate the diversity of literacy levels, needs, and aspirations of its young participants, the project offers a tailored media education program with a mix of diversionary, educational, and commercial objectives. One-on-one media training sessions, accredited courses in Creative Industries (Media), and industry training within Youthworx Productions are provided to help young people develop a range of skills transferable into a variety of personal, social and professional contexts. Its creative studio, where learning occurs, is located in a former jeans factory warehouse in the heart of an industrial area of Melbourne’s northern inner-city suburb of Brunswick. Young people are referred to Youthworx by a range of social agencies, and they travel to Brunswick from across Melbourne. Some participants are known to spend over three hours commuting from outer suburbs such as Frankston or even regional towns such as King Lake. Unlike community-based creative programs reliant on established community structures within local suburbs (for example, ICE in Western Sydney), Youthworx moved into Tinning Street in Brunswick because its industry partner—The Salvation Army—had existing youth service infrastructure there. The program, however, was not tapping into an existing media “community of practice” (Lane and Wenger); it had to forge its own culture of media participation. In the early days of the program, there were necessary material resources and professional expertise (teachers/social workers/a creative venue), but it took a long while, and a high level of dedication, passion, and practical optimism on the part of the project managers and teaching staff, for young people to genuinely engage in media training and production. Now, Youthworx’s creative space is a “practised place” in de Certeau’s sense. As “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (De Certeau 117), so is the Youthworx space produced by practices of media learning and making by professional creative practitioners and young amateur creators (Raffo; for ideas on institutionalised co-creative practice see Spurgeon et al.). The Brunswick location is where our extensive ethnographic research has taken place, including regular participant observation and qualitative interviews with staff and young participants. The ethnographers frequently travelled with young people to other locations within Melbourne, accompanying them on their trips to youth community radio station SYN Media in the CBD, where they produce a weekly radio show, as well as to film shoots and public social events around the city. As an access learning program for marginalised youth from around Melbourne, Youthworx provides an interesting example to explore how the concerns of material and cultural capital, geographic and cultural distance intersect and shape processes of creative participation and social inclusion. I draw on our ethnographic material to illustrate how these metonymic relationships play out in the ways young participants “travel distance” (Dewson et. al.) on the project and across the city, both figuratively and literally. The idea of “distance travelled” is adapted here from evaluation literature (for other relevant references see Dowmunt et al.; Hayes and Edwards; Holdsworth et al.), and builds on the argument made previously (Podkalicka and Staley 5), to encompass both the geographical mobility and cultural transformation that young people are supported to undergo as an intended outcome of their involvement in Youthworx. This paper also takes inspiration from ethnographic approaches that study a productive and transformative relationship between material culture, spatial geography and processes of identity formation (see Miller). What happens to Youthworx young participants as they travel in a trivial, and at first sight perhaps inconsequential, way between the suburbs they live in, the Youthworx Brunswick location and the city is both experientially real and meaningful. “Suburban space” is then a cultural site that simultaneously refers to concrete, literal places as well as “a state of mind”—that is, identification and connections that are generative of a sense of identity and belonging (Ferber et al.). Youthworx is an intermediary point on these young people’s travels, rather than the final destination (Podkalicka and Staley 5). It provides access to various forms of new spatial, social, and creative experiences and modes of expression. Creating opportunities for highly disenfranchised young people to access and develop new social and creative experiences is an important aspect of Youthworx’s developmental agenda, and is played out at both philosophical and practical levels. On the one hand, a strength-based approach to youth work assumes respect for young people’s potential and knowledges—unlike public discourses that deny them agency due to an assumed lack of life experience (e.g., Poletti). In addition to the material provision of "food and shelter" typical of traditional social work, attention is paid the higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy of human needs, with creativity, self-esteem, and social connectedness at the top of the scale (see also Podkalicka and Campbell; Podkalicka and Thomas). Former Manager of The Salvation Army’s Brunswick Youth Services (BYS)—one of Youthworx’s partners—Craig Campbell argues: Things like truth and beauty are a higher order of dreams for these kids. And by truth I don’t mean the simple lies that can be told to get them out of trouble [but] is there a greater truth to life than a grinding existence in the impoverished neighbourhood, is there something like beauty and aesthetics that wakes us up in the morning and calls a larger life out of us? Most of those kids only faintly dream of such a thing, and this dream is rapidly being extinguished under the weight of drugs and alcohol, abusive family systems, savage interaction with law and justice system, and education as a toxic environment and experience. (Campbell) Campbell's articulate reflection captures the way the Youthworx project has been conceived. It is also a pertinent example of the many reflections on experience and practice at Youthworx that were recorded in my fieldwork, which illustrate the way these kinds of social projects can be understood, interpreted and evaluated. The following personal narrative and contextual description introduce some of the important issues at stake. (The names and other personal details of young people have been changed.) Nineteen-year-old Dave is temporarily staying in an inner-city refuge. Normally, however, like most Youthworx participants, he lives in Broadmeadows, a far northern suburb of Melbourne. To get to Brunswick, where he does his accredited media course three days a week, he either catches a train or waits for a mini-bus to drive him there. The early-morning pick-up for about ten young people is organised by the program’s partner—The Salvation Army. At the Youthworx creative studio, located in the heart of Brunswick, right next to railway tracks, young people produce an array of media products: live and pre-recorded radio programs, digital storytelling, mini-documentaries, and original music. Once at Youthworx, they share the local neighbourhood with other artists who have adapted warehouses into art workshops, studios and galleries. The suburb of Brunswick is well-known for its multicultural profile, a combination of industrial and residential estates, high rates of tertiary students due to its proximity to universities, and its place in the recent history of urban gentrification. However, Youthworx participants don’t seek out or engage with the existing, physically proximate creative base, even within the same street. On a couple of occasions, the opposite has been the case: Youthworx students have been involved in acts of vandalism of local residents’ property, including nearby parked cars. Their connections to the Brunswick neighbourhood remain poor, often reflecting their low social capital as a result of unstable residential situations, isolation, and fraught relationships with family. From Brunswick, they often travel to the city on their own, wander around, sit on the steps of Flinders Street train station—an inner-city hub and popular meeting place for locals and tourists alike. Youthworx plays an important role in these young people’s lives, as an important access point to not only creative digital media-based experiences and skill development, but also to greater and basic geographical mobility and experiences within the city. As one of the students commented: They are giving us chances that we wouldn’t usually get. Every day you’re getting to a place, where it’s pretty damn easy to get into; that’s what’s good about it. There are so many places where you have to do so much to get there and half the time, some people don’t even have the bloody bus ticket to get a [job] interview. But [at Youthworx/BYS], they will pick you up and drive you around if you need it. They are friends. It is reportedly a common practice for many young people at Youthworx and BYS to catch a train or a tram (rather than bus) without paying for a ticket. However, to be caught dodging a fare a few times has legal consequences and young people often face court as a result. The program responds by offering its young participants tickets for public transport, ready for pick-up after afternoon activities, or, if possible, "driving them around"—as some young people told me. The program’s social workers revealed that girls are particularly afraid to travel on their own, especially when catching trains to the outer northern suburbs, for fear of being harassed or attacked. These supported travels are as practical and necessary as they are meaningful for young people’s identity formation, and as such are recognised and built into the project’s design, co-ordination and delivery. At the most basic level, The Salvation Army’s social workers pick young people up from the Broadmeadows area in the mornings. Youthworx creative practitioners assist young people to make trips to SYN Media in the city. For most participants, this is either the first or sporadic experience of travelling to the city, something they enjoy very much but are also somewhat daunted by. Additionally, as part of the curriculum, Youthworx staff make a point of taking young people to inner-city movie theatres or public media events. The following vignette from the fieldwork highlights another important connection between physical journey and creative expression. There is an excitement in Dave’s voice when he talks about his favourite pastime: hanging out around the city. “Why would you walk around the streets?” a curious female friend interjects. Dave replies: “No, it’s not the streets, man. It’s just Federation Square, everywhere … There is just all these young wannabe criminals and sh*t. People don’t know what goes on; and I want to do a doco on the city, a little doco of the people there, because I know a lot of it.” Dave’s interest in exploring the city may be interpreted as a rather common, mundane routine shared by mildly adventurous adolescents of all walks. And yet, there is much more at stake in his account, and for Youthworx young participants more generally. As mentioned before, for many of these young people, it is the first opportunity to travel to the city. This experience then is crucial in a sense of self-exploration and self-discovery. As they overcome their fear of venturing out into the city on their own, they also learn that they have knowledge which others might lack. This moment of realisation is significant and empowering, and they want to communicate this knowledge to others. Youthworx assists them in learning how to translate this knowledge in a creative and constructive way, through an expression that weaves between the free individual and the social voice constructed to enable a dialogue or understanding (Podkalicka; Podkalicka and Campbell; Podkalicka and Thomas; also Soep and Chavez). For an effective communication to occur, a crafted social voice requires skills and a critical awareness of oneself and an audience, which is very different from the modes of expression that these young people might have accessed previously. Youthworx's young participants draw heavily on their life experiences, geographical locations, the suburbs they come from, and places they visit in the city: their cultural productions often reference their homes, music clubs and hang-out venues, inner city streets, Federation Square, and Youthworx’s immediate physical surroundings, with graffiti-covered narrow alleys and railway tracks. The frequent depiction of Youthworx in young people’s creative outputs is often a token of appreciation of the creative, educational and social opportunities it has offered them. Social and professional connections they make there are found to be very valuable. The existing creative industries literature emphasises the importance of social networks to existing communities of interest and practice for human capacity building. Value is argued to lie not only in specific content produced, but in participatory processes that establish a link between personal growth, individual skills and social and professional networks (Hearn and Bridgestock). In a similar vein, Carlo Raffo uses Granovetter’s concept of “weak ties” to suggest that access to “social relations that go beyond the immediate locality and hence their immediate experiences” can provide marginalised young people with “pathways for authentic and informal learning that go beyond the structuring influences of class, gender and ethnicity and into new and emerging economic experiences” (Raffo 11). But higher levels of confidence or social skills are required to make the most of vocational or professional opportunities beyond the supportive context of Youthworx. Connections between Youthworx participants and other creative practitioners within the creative locality of Brunswick have been absent thus far. Transitions into mainstream education and employment have also proven challenging for this group of heavily marginalised youth. As we found during our ongoing fieldwork, even the most talented students find it hard to get into mainstream education courses, or to get or keep jobs. The project serves as a social basis for young people to develop self-agency and determination so they can start engaging with new opportunities and social networks outside the program (Raffo 15). Indeed, the creative practitioners at Youthworx are key facilitators of connections between young people and the external world. They act as positive role models socially, and illustrate what is possible professionally in terms of media excellence and employment (see also Raffo). There are indications that this very supportive, gradual process of social learning is starting to bear fruit for individual students and the Youthworx community as a whole as they grow more confident with themselves, in interactions with others, and the media work they do. Media projects such as Youthworx are examples of what Leadbeater and Wong call “disruptive innovation,” as they provide new ways of learning for those alienated by formal education. The use of digital hands-on media production makes educational processes relevant and engaging for young people. However, as I demonstrate in this paper, there are tangible, material barriers to releasing creativity, or enhancing self-discovery and sociality. There are, as Leadbeater and Wong observe, persistent links between cultural environment, socio-economic status, corresponding attitudes to learning and educational success in the developed world. In the UK, for example, only small percent of those from the lowest socio-economic background go to university (Leadbeater and Wong 10). Youthworx provides an opportunity and motivation for young people to break a cycle of individual self-destructive behaviour (e.g. getting locked up every 6 months), intergenerational reliance on welfare, or entrenched negative attitudes to learning. At the basic level, it encourages and often insists that young people get up in the morning, with social workers often reporting to have to “knock at people’s houses and get them ready.” The involvement in Youthworx is often an important reason to start delineating between day and night, week and weekend. A couple of students commented: I slept a lot. Yeah, I was always sleeping during the day and out at night; I could have still been doing nothing with my life [were it not for Youthworx]. Now people ask if I want to go out during the week, and I just can’t be bothered. I just want to sleep and then go to [Youthworx] and then weekends are when you go out. It also offers a concrete means to begin exploring the city beyond the constraints of their local suburbs. This literal, geographical mobility is interlocked with potential for a changed perception of opportunities, individual transformation and, consequently, social mobility. Dave, as we have seen, is attracted to the idea of exploring the city but also has creative aspirations, and contemplates professional prospects in the creative industries. It is important to note that the participants are resilient in their negotiation between the suburban, Youthworx and inner city worlds they can inhabit. Accessing learning, despite previous negative schooling experiences, is for many of them very important, and reaffirming of life they aspire to. An opportunity to pursue dreams, creative forms of expression, social networks and education is a vital part of human existence. These aspects of social inclusion are recognised in the current articulation of social policy reconceptualised beyond material, economic equality. Creative industry policy, on the other hand, is concerned with fostering creative outputs and skills to generate engagement and employment opportunities in the knowledge-based economies for wide sections of the population. The value is located in human capacity building, involving basic social as well as vocational skills, and links to social networks. The Youthworx project merges these two policy frameworks of the social and creative to test in practice new collaborative approaches to youth development. The spatial and cultural practices of young people described here serve a basis for proposing a theoretical framework that can help understand the term "suburb" in an intrinsically relational, grounded way. The relationships at stake in cultural and social participation for marginalised young people lead me to suggest that the concept of ‘suburb’ takes on two tightly interwoven meanings. The first refers symbolically to a particular locale for popular creativity (Burgess) or even marginal creativity by a group of young people living at the periphery of the social system. The second meaning refers to the interlocked forms of material and cultural capital (and distance), as theorised in Bourdieu’s work (e.g., Bourdieu). It includes physical, spatial conditions and relations, as well as cultural resources and possibilities made available to young participants by the project (e.g., the instituted, supported travel across the city, or the employment of creative practitioners), and interlinked with everyday dispositions, practices, and status of young people (e.g., taste). This empirically-grounded discussion allows to theorise ‘suburbs’ as perceived and socially enacted by concrete, relational forms of access, contingencies, and opportunities for a particular demographic, rather than analytically pre-conceived, designated spaces within an urban system. The ethnographic material reveals that cultural participation for marginalised youth requires an integrated approach, with a parallel focus on material and creative opportunities made available within creative sites such as Youthworx or even the Brunswick creative area. The important material constraints exemplified in this paper concern socio-economic background, cultural disadvantage and geographical isolation and point to the limits of the creative industries-based interventions to address social inclusion if carried out in isolation. They tap into the very basis of risks for this specific demographic of marginalised youth or "youth at risk." The paper suggests that the productive emphasis on the role of media and communication for (youth) development needs to be contextualised and considered along with the actual realities of everyday existence that often limit young people’s educational and vocational prospects (see Bentley et al.; Leadbeater and Wong). On the other hand, an exclusive focus on material support risks cancelling out the possibilities for positive life transitions, such as those triggered by constructive, non-reductionist engagement with “beauty, aesthetics” (Campbell) and creativity. By exploring how participation in Youthworx engenders both the physical mobility between suburbs and the city, and identity transformation, we are able to gain insights into the nature of social exclusion, its meanings for the youth involved and the project managers and staff. Thinking about Youthworx not just as a hub of creative production but as a cultural site—“a space within a practiced place of identity” (De Certeau 117) in the suburb of Brunswick—opens up a discussion that combines the policy language of opportunity and necessity with concrete creative and material possibilities. Social inclusion objectives aimed at positive youth transitions need to be considered in the light of the connection—or disconnection—between the Youthworx Brunswick site itself, young participants’ suburbs, and, by extension, the trajectory between the inner city and other spaces that young people travel through and inhabit. Acknowledgment I would like to thank all the young participants, staff and industry partners involved in the Youthworx project. I also acknowledge the comments of anonymous peer reviewer which helped to strengthen the argument by foregrounding the value of the empirical material. The paper draws on the larger project funded by the Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation. Youthworx research team includes: Prof Denise Meredyth (CI); Prof Julian Thomas (CI); Ass/Prof David MacKenzie (CI); Ass/Prof Ellie Rennie; Chris Wilson (PhD candidate), and Jon Staley (Youthworx Manager and PhD candidate). References Bentley, Tom, and Kate Oakley. “The Real Deal: What Young People Think about Government, Politics and Social Exclusion.” Demos. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.demos.co.uk/files/theRealdeal.pdf›. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1987. Burgess, Jean. “Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling.” Continuum 20.2 (2006): 201–14. Campbell, Craig. Personal Interview. Melbourne, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Dewson, Sara, Judith Eccles, Nii Djan Tackey and Annabel Jackson. “Guide to Measuring Soft Outcomes and Distance Travelled.” The Institute for Employment Studies. 12 Jan. 2011‹http:// www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/distance.pdf›. Dowmunt, Tom, Mark Dunford, and N. van Hemert. Inclusion through Media. London: Open Mute, 2007. Ferber, Sarah, Chris Healy, and Chris McAuliffe. Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994. Hayes, Alan, Matthew Gray, and Ben Edwards. “Social Inclusion: Origins, Concepts and Key Themes.” Australian Institute of Family Studies, prepared for the Social Inclusion Unit, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. 2008.12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Documents/AIFS_SI_concepts_report_20April09.pdf›. Hearn, Gregory, and Ruth Bridgstock. “Education for the Creative Economy: Innovation, Transdisciplinarity, and Networks. Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation. Ed. Daniel Araya and Michael Peters. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 93–116. Holdsworth, Roger, Murray Lake, Kathleen Stacey, and John Safford. “Doing Positive Things: You Have to Go Out and Do It: Outcomes for Participants in Youth Development Programs.” Australian Youth Research Centre. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/5385FE14-A74C-4B24-98EA-D31EEA8447B2/21803/doing_positive_things1.pdf›. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Leadbeater, Charles, and Annika Wong. “Learning from the Extremes.” CISCO. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Documents/AIFS_SI_concepts_report_20April09.pdf›. Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Podkalicka, Aneta. “Young Listening: An Ethnography of Youthworx Media's Radio Project." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 561–72. ———, and Jon Staley. “Youthworx Media: Creative Media Engagement for ‘at Risk’ Young People.” 3CM 5 (2009). ———, and Julian Thomas. “The Skilled Social Voice: An Experiment in Creative Economy and Communication Rights.’’ International Communication Gazette 72.4–5 (2010): 395–406. ———, and Craig Campbell. “Understanding Digital Storytelling: Beyond the Politics of Voice in Youth Participation Programs.” seminar.net: Media Technology and Lifelong Learning 6.2 (2010). ‹http://www.seminar.net/index.php/home/75-current-issue/150-understanding-digital-storytelling-individual-voice-and-community-building-in-youth-media-programs›. Poletti, Anna. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008. Raffo, Carlo. "Mentoring Disenfranchised Young People: An Action Research Project on the Development of 'Weak Ties' and Social Capital Enhancement." Education and Industry in Partnership 6.3 (2000): 22–42. Soep, Elizabeth, and Vivian Chavez. Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Spurgeon, Christina, Jean Burgess, Helen Klaebe, Kelly McWilliam, Jo Tacchi, and Mimi Tsai. “Co-Creative Media: Theorising Digital Storytelling as a Platform for Researching and Developing Participatory Culture.” 2009 ANZC Conference Proceedings. 2009. 16 Nov. 2010 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/25811/2/25811.pdf›.

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Abstract:

The bodies of disordered women … offer themselves as an aggressively graphic text for the interpreter—a text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a statement about gender. (Bordo, 94)Violence is transgressive in fundamental ways. It erases boundaries, and imposes agency over others, or groups of others. The assumed social stance is to disapprove, morally and ethically, as a ‘good’ and ‘moral’ female subject. My current research has made me question the simplicity of this approach, to interrogate how aggression socialises power and how resistance to structural violence might look. I analyse three cultural practices to consider the social demarcations around aggression and gender, both within overt acts of violence and in less overt protocols. This research will focus on artistic practices as they offer unique embodied ways to “challenge our systems of representation and knowledge” (Szylak 2).The three creative works reviewed: the 2009 Swedish film the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the work Becoming an Image by Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils, and Gambit Lines, by artist Carolyn Craig, each contest gendered modes of normativity within the space of the Cultural Screen (Silverman). The character of Lisbeth Salander in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo subverts the aggressor female/femme fatale trope in Western cinema by confusing and expanding visual repertoires around aggression, while artists Cassils and Carolyn Craig re-draw how their biologically assigned female bodies perform power in the Cultural Screen by activating bodily feedback loops for the viewer’s gaze.The Aggressor ModeThe discussion of these three works will centre on the ‘female aggressor trope’, understood here as the static coda of visual practices of female power/aggression in the western gaze. This article considers how subverting such representations of aggression can trigger an “epistemic crisis that allows gender categories to change,” in particular in the way protocols of power are performed over female and trans subjectivities (Butler, Athletic 105). The tran/non-binary subject state in the work of Cassils is included in this discussion of the female aggressor trope as their work directly subverts the biological habitus of the female body, that is, the artist’s birth/biologically assigned gender (Bourdieu). The transgender state they perform – where the body is still visibly female but refusing its constraints - offers a radical framework to consider new aggressive stances for non-biologically male bodies.The Cultural Screen and Visual RepresentationsI consider that aggression, when performed through the mediated position of a creative visual practice (as a fictional site of becoming) can deconstruct the textual citations that form normative tropes in the Cultural Screen. The Screen, for this article, is considered asthe site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society, and is consequently responsible both for the way in which the inhabitants of that society experience the gaze’s effects, and for much of the seeming particularity of that society’s visual regime. (Silverman 135)The Screen functions as a suite of agreed metaphors that constitute a plane of ‘reality’ that defines how we perform the self (Goffman). It comprises bodily performance, our internal gaze (of self and other) and the visual artefacts a culture produces. Each of the three works discussed here purposely intervenes with this site of gender production within the Cultural Screen, by creating new visual artefacts that expand permissible aggressive repertoires for female assigned bodies. Deconstructing the Cultural ScreenThe history of images … can be read as a cultural history of the human body. (Belting 17)Cinematic representations play a key role in producing the visual primers that generate social ‘acts’. For this reason I examine the Swedish film Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, 2009), released as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for foreign audiences, as an example of an expanding range of female aggressor representations in film, and one of particular complexity in the way it expands on representational politics. I consider how specific scripting, dialogue and casting decisions in the lead female character of Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) serve to deconstruct the female aggressor trope (as criminal or sexual provocateur) to allow her character to engage in aggressive acts outside of the cliché of the deviant woman. This disrupts the fixity of assigned body protocols on the social grid to expand their gendered habitus (Bourdieu).Key semiotic relations in the film’s characterisation of Lisbeth prevent her performance of aggression from moving into the clichés of erotic or evil feminine typologies. Her character remains unfixed, moving between a continuous state of unfolding in response to necessity and desire. Here, she exhibits an agency usually denoting masculinity. This allows her violence a positive emancipatory affect, one that avoids the fixity of the representational tropes of the deviant woman or the femme fatale. Her character draws upon both tropes, but reformulates them into a postmodern hybridity, where aggression slips from its sexualised/deviant fetish state into an athletic political resistance. Signification is strategically confused as Lisbeth struts through the scaffolding of normalcy in her insurgent gender game. Her post-punk weaponised attire draws on the repertoire of super heroes, rock stars and bondage mistresses, without committing to any. The libidinal component of violence/aggression is not avoided, but acknowledged, both in its patriarchal formula and Lisbeth’s enactment of revenge as embodied pleasure.The visual representation of both lead actors is also of interest. Both Lisbeth and Mikael have visible acne scars. This small breach in aesthetic selection affects how we view and consume them as subjects and objects on the Screen. The standard social more for the appearance of male and female leads is to use faces modeled on ideas of symmetry and perfection. These tendencies draw upon the cultural legacies of physiognomy that linked moral character with attractiveness schedules and that continue to flourish in the Cultural Screen (Lavater; Principe and Langlois). This decision to feature faces with minor flaws appropriates the camera’s gaze to re-consider schedules of normalcy, in particular value and image index as they relate to gendered representations. This aesthetic erasure of the Western tradition of stereotyped representations permits transitional spaces to emerge within the binary onslaught. Technology is also appropriated in the film as a space for a performative ‘switching’ of the gender codes of fixity. In her role as undercover researcher, Lisbeth’s control of code gives her both a monetised agency and an informational agency. The way that she types takes on an almost aggressive assertion. Each stroke is active and purposeful, as she exerts control through her interface with digital space. This is made explicit early in the film when she appropriates the gaze of technology (a particularly male semiotic code) to extract agency from within the structural discourse of patriarchy itself. In this scene, she forces her guardian to watch footage of his own act of raping her. Here Lisbeth uses the apparatus of the gaze to re-inscribe it back over his body. This structural inversion of the devices of control is made even more explicit when Lisbeth then brands him with text. Here ‘writing on the body’ becomes manifest.The director also frames initial scenes of Lisbeth’s nude body in subtle ways that fracture the entrenched history of representations of women, where the female as object exists for the gaze of male desire (Berger). Initially all we see are her shoulders. They are powerful and she moves like a boxer, inhabiting space and flexing her sinew. When we do see her breasts, they are neutered from the dominant coda of the “breasted experience” (Young). Instead, they function as a necessary appendage that she acknowledges as part of the technology of her body, not as objectified male desire.These varied representational modes built within Lisbeth’s characterisation, inhabit and subvert the female aggressor trope (as deviant), to offer a more nuanced portrayal where the feminine is still worn, but as both a masquerade and an internal emancipatory dialogue. That is, the feminine is permitted to remain whilst the masculine (as aggressive code) is intertwined into non-binary relations of embodied agency. This fluidity refracts the male gaze from imposing spectatorial control via the gaze.Cassils The Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils also uses the body as semiotic technology to deny submission to the dominant code of the Cultural Screen. They re-image the self with bodybuilding, diet and steroids to exit their biologically female structural discourse into a more fluid gendered state. This state remains transitive as their body is not surgically ‘reassigned ‘ back into normative codes (male or female assignations) but instead inhabits the trans pronoun of ‘they/their’. This challenges the Cultural Screen’s dependence on fixed binary states through which to allocate privilege. This visible reshaping also permits entry into more aggressive bodily protocols via the gaze (through the spectorial viewpoint of self and other).Cassils ruptures the restrictive habitus of female/trans subjectivity to enable more expansive gestures in the social sphere, and a more assertive bodily performance. This is achieved by appropriating the citational apparatus of male aggression via a visual reframing of its actions. Through daily repetitive athletic training Cassils activates the proprioceptive loops that inform their gendered schema and the presentation of self (Goffman). This training re-scripts their socially inscribed gender code with semiotically switched gender ‘acts’. This altered subjectivity is made visible for the viewer through performance to destablise the Screen of representation further via the observers’ gaze.In their work Becoming an Image (2012- current), Cassils performs against a nine hundred kilogram lump of clay for twenty minutes in complete darkness, fractured only by an intermittent camera flash that documents the action. This performance contests the social processes that formulate the subject as ‘image’. By using bodily force (aggressive power) against an inert lump of clay, Cassils enacts the frustration and affect that the disenfranchised Other feels from their own gender shaping (Bhaba). The images taken by the camera during this performance reflect a ferocious refusal, an animal intent, a state of battle. The marks and residues of their bodily ‘acts’ shape the clay in an endurance archive of resistance, where the body’s trace/print forms the material itself along with the semiotic residue of the violence against transgender and female bodies. In some ways, the body of Cassils and the body of clay confront each other through Cassils’s aggressive remolding of the material of social discourse itself.The complicity of photography in sustaining representational discourse is highlighted within Cassils’s work through the intertextual rupturing of the performance with the camera flash and through the title of the work. To Become an Image invokes the processes of the darkroom itself, where the photographer controls image development, whilst the aggressive flash reflects the snapshot of violence, where the gendered subject is ‘imaged’ (formulated and confined) without permission by the observer schedules of patriarchy. The flash also leaves a residual trace in the retinas of the viewer, a kind of image burn, perhaps chosen to mimic the fear, intrusion and coercion that normalcy’s violence impinges over Othered subjects. The artist converts these flash generated images into wallpaper that is installed into the gallery space, usually the day after the performance. Thus, Cassils’s corporeal space is re-inscribed onto the walls of the institutional archive of representations – to evoke both the domestic (wallpaper as home décor), the public domain (the white walls of institutional rhetoric) and the Cultural Screen.Carolyn Craig The work of Carolyn Craig also targets representations that substantiate the Cultural Screen. She uses performative modes in the studio to unravel her own subjective habitus, in particular targeting the codes that align female aggression with deviancy. Her work isolates the action of making a fist to re-inscribe how the aggression code is ‘read’ as embodied knowledge by women. Two key articles by Thomas Schubert that investigated how making a fist is perceived differently between genders (in terms of interiorised power) informed her research. Both studies found that when males make a fist they experience an enhanced sense of power, while women did not. In fact, in the studies, they experienced a slight decrease in their sense of comfort in the world (their embodied sense of agency). Schubert surmised this reflected gender-based protocols in relation to the permissible display of aggression, as “men are culturally less discouraged to use bodily force, which will frequently be associated with success and power gain [whilst women] are culturally discouraged from using bodily force” (Schubert 758). These studies suggest how anchored gestures of aggression are to male power schemas and their almost inaccessibility to women. When artists re-formulate such (existing) input algorithms by inserting new representations of female aggression into the Cultural Screen, they sever the display of aggression from the exclusive domain of the masculine. This circulates and incorporates a broader visual code that informs conceptual relations of power.Craig performs the fisting action in the studio to neuter this existing code using endurance, repetition and parody (fig. 1). Parody activates a Bakhtian space of Carnivalesque, a unique space in the western cultural tradition that permits transgressive inversions of gender, power and normativity (Hutcheon). By making and remaking a fist through an absurdist lens, the social scaffolding attached to the action (fear, anxiety, transgression) is diluted. Repetition and humour breaks down the existing code, and integrates new perceptual schema through the body itself. Parody becomes a space of slippage, one that is a precursor to a process of (re)constitution within the social screen, so that Craig can “produce representation” rather than be (re)presentation (Schneider 51). This transitory state of Carnivalesque produces new relational fields (both bodily and visual) that are then projected back into the Screen of normativity to further dislodge gender fixity. Figure 1: Carolyn Craig, Gambit Lines (Angles of Incidence #1), 2016. Etchings from performance on folded aluminium, 25.5 x 34 x 21cm. This nullifies the power of the static image of deviancy (the woman as specimen) and ferments leakages into broader representational fields. Craig’s fisting actions target the proprioceptive feedback loops that make women fear their own bodies’ potential of violence, that make us retreat from the citational acts of aggression. Her work tilts embodied retreat (as fear) through the distorted mimesis of parody to initiate a Deleuzian space of agentic potential (Deleuze and Guattari). This is re-inserted into the Cultural Screen as suites of etchings grounded in the representational politics, and historical genealogy of printed matter, to bring the historical conditions of formation of knowledge into review.Conclusion The aggressor trope as used within the works discussed, produces a more varied representational subject. This fosters subjectivities outside the restraints of normativity and its imposed gendered habitus. The performance of aggression by bodies not permissibly branded to script such acts forces static representations embedded through the Cultural Screen into “an unstable and troubled terrain, a crisis of knowledge, a situation of not-knowing”. This state of representational confusion leads to a “risking of gender itself … that exposes our knowledge about gender as tenuous, contested, and ungrounded in a thorough and productively disturbing sense” (Butler, Athletic 110). Tropes that define binary privilege, when dislodged in such a way, become accessible to fluidity or erasure. This allows more nuanced gender allocation to schedules of power.The Cultural Screen produces and projects the metaphors we live by and its relations to power are concrete (Johnson and Lakoff). Even small-scale incursions into masculine domains of agency (such as the visual display of aggression) have a direct correlation to the allocation of resources, both spatial, economic and subjective. The use of the visual can re-train the conceptual parameters of the cultural matrix to chip small ways forward to occupy space with our bodies and intellects, to assume more aggressive stances in public, to speak over people if I feel the need, and to be rewarded for such actions in a social context. I still feel unable to propose direct violence as a useful action but I do admit to having a small poster of Phoolan Devi in my home and my admiration for such women is deep.ReferencesBelting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008.Bhaba, Homi. "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures. Eds. Russell Ferguson and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. 71-89.Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy et al. New York: Colombia UP, 1997. 90-110.Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.Butler, Judith. “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism.” Stanford Humanities Review 6 (1998): 103-111.———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal (1988): 519–31.Cassils. Becoming an Image. ONE Archive, Los Angeles. Original performance. 2012.Craig, Carolyn. “Gambit Lines." The Deviant Woman. POP Gallery, Brisbane. 2016.Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Män Som Hatar Kvinnor]. Dir. Niels Arden Oplev. Stockholm: Yellowbird, 2009.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Allen Lane, 1969.Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985.Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.Lavater, John Caspar. Essays in Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind. Vol. 1. London: Murray and Highley, 1789.Principe, Connor, and Judith Langlois. "Shifting the Prototype: Experience with Faces Influences Affective and Attractiveness Preferences." Social Cognition 30.1 (2012): 109-120.Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.Schubert, Thomas W., and Sander L. Koole. “The Embodied Self: Making a Fist Enhances Men’s Power-Related Self-Conceptions.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45.4 (2009): 828–834.Schubert, Thomas W. “The Power in Your Hand: Gender Differences in Bodily Feedback from Making a Fist.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30.6 (2004): 757–769.Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.Szylak, Aneta. The Field Is to the Sky, Only Backwards. Brooklyn, NY: International Studio and Curatorial Program, 2013.Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.” On Female Body Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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IntroductionThis article addresses the experience of designing and conducting life-writing workshops for a group of clients with severe mental illness; the aim of this pilot study was to begin to determine whether such writing about the self can aid in individual ‘recovery’, as that term is understood by contemporary health professionals. A considerable amount has been written about the potential of creative writing in mental health therapy; the authors of this article provide a brief summary of that literature, then of the concept of ‘recovery’ in a psychology and arts therapy context. There follows a first-hand account by one of the authors of being an arts therapy workshop facilitator in the role of a creative practitioner. This occurred in consultation with, and monitored by, experienced mental health professionals. Life-Writing as ‘Therapeutic’ Life-story or life-writing can be understood in this context as involving more than disclosure or oral expression of a subject’s ‘story’ as in psycho-therapy – life-story is understood as a written, structured narrative. In 2001, Wright and Chung published a review of the literature in which they claimed that writing therapy had been “restimulated by the development of narrative approaches” (278). Pennebaker argues that “catharsis or the venting of emotions” without “cognitive processing” has little therapeutic value and people need to “build a coherent narrative that explains some past experience” in order to benefit from writing” (Pennebaker, Telling Stories 10–11). It is claimed in the Clinical Psychology Review that life-writing has the therapeutic benefits of, for example, “striking physical health and behaviour change” (Esterling et al. 84). The reasons are still unclear, but it is possible that the cognitive and linguistic processing of problematic life-events through narrative writing may help the subject assimilate such problems (Alschuler 113–17). As Pennebaker and Seagal argue in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, the life-writing processallows one to organise and remember events in a coherent fashion while integrating thoughts and feelings ... This gives individuals a sense of predictability and control over their lives. Once an experience has structure and meaning, it would follow that the emotional effects of that experience are more manageable. (1243)It would seem reasonable to suggest that life-writing which constructs a positive recovery narrative can have a positive therapeutic effect, providing a sense of agency, connectedness and creativity, in a similar, integrating manner. Humans typically see their lives as stories. Paul Eakin stresses the link between narrative and identity in both this internal life-story and in outwardly constructed autobiography:narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self – the self of autobiographical discourse - does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. (Making Selves 100)So both a self-in-time and a socially viable identity may depend on such narrative. The term ‘dysnarrativia’ has been coined to describe the documented inability to construct self-narrative by those suffering amnesia, autism, severe child abuse or brain damage. The lack of ability to achieve narrative construction seems to be correlated with identity disorders (Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography 124). (For an overview of the current literature on creative and life-writing as therapy see Murphy & Neilsen). What is of particular relevance to university creative writing practitioners/teachers is that there is evidence, for example from Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman and creative writing academic Vicki Linder, that life-narratives are more therapeutically effective if guided to be written according to fundamental ‘effective writing’ aesthetic conventions – such as having a regard to coherent structure in the narrative, the avoidance of cliché, practising the ‘demonstrate don’t state’ dictum, and writing in one’s own voice, for example. Defining ‘Recovery’There remains debate as to the meaning of recovery in the context of mental health service delivery, but there is agreement that recovery entails significantly more than symptom remission or functional improvement (Liberman & Kopelowicz). In a National Consensus Statement, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) unit of the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2005 described recovery (in general terms) as being achieved by the enabling of a person with a mental illness to live meaningfully in a chosen community, while also attempting to realize individual potential. ‘Recovery’ as a central concept behind rehabilitation can be understood both as objective recovery – that is, in terms of noting a reduction in objective indicators of illness and disability (such as rates of hospital usage or unemployment) and a greater degree of social functioning – and also as subjective recovery. Subjective recovery can be ascertained by listening closely to what clients themselves have said about their own experiences. It has been pointed out (King, Lloyd & Meehan 2) that there is not always a correspondence between objective indicators of recovery and the subjective, lived experience of recovery. The experience of mental illness is not just one of symptoms and disability but equally importantly one of major challenge to sense of self. Equally, recovery from mental illness is experienced not just in terms of symptoms and disability but also as a recovery of sense of self … Recovery of sense of self and recovery with respect to symptoms and disability may not correspond. (King, Lloyd & Meehan; see also Davidson & Strauss)Symptoms of disability can persist, but a person can have a much stronger sense of self or empowerment – that is still recovery. Illness dislocates the sense of self as part of a community and of a self with skills and abilities. Restoring this sense of empowerment is an aim of arts therapy. To put it another way, recovery is a complex process by which a client with a mental illness develops a sense of identity and agency as a citizen, as distinct from identification with illness and disability and passivity as a ‘patient’. The creative arts have gone well beyond being seen as a diversion for the mentally ill. In a comprehensive UK study of creative arts projects for clients with mental illness, Helen Spandler et al. discovered strong evidence that participation in creative activity promoted a sense of purpose and meaning, and assisted in “rediscovering or rebuilding an identity within and beyond that of someone with mental health difficulties” (795). Recovery is aided by people being motivated to achieve self-confidence through mastery and competence; by learning and achieving goals. Clearly this is where arts therapy could be expected or hoped to be effective. The aim of the pilot study was not to measure ‘creativity’, but whether involvement in what is commonly understood as a creative process (life-writing) can have flow-on benefits in terms of the illness of the workshop participant. The psychologists involved, though more familiar with visual arts therapy (reasonably well-established in Australia – in 2006, the ANZAT began publishing the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art Therapy), thought creative writing could also be valuable. Preparation for and Delivery of the Workshops I was acutely aware that I had no formal training in delivering a program to clients with mental health illness. I was counselled during several meetings with experienced psychologists and a social worker that the participants in the three workshops over two weeks would largely be people who had degrees of difficulty in living independently, and could well have perceptual problems, could misjudge signals from outside and inside the group, and be on medication that could affect their degree of engagement. Some clients could have impaired concentration and cognition, and a deficit in volition. Participants needed to be free to leave and rejoin the workshops during the afternoon sessions. Attendance might well fall as the workshops progressed. Full ethical clearance was attained though the University of Queensland medical faculty (after detailed description of the content and conduct of the proposed workshops) and consent forms prepared for participants. My original workshop ‘kit’ to be distributed to participants underwent some significant changes as I was counselled and prepared for the workshops. The major adjustment to my usual choice of material and approach was made in view of the advice that recounting traumatic events can have a negative effect on some patients – at least in the short term. For the sake of both the individuals and the group as a whole this was to be avoided. I changed my initial emphasis on encouraging participants to recount their traumatic experiences in a cathartic way (as suggested by the narrative psychology literature), to encouraging them to recount positive narratives from their lives – narratives of ‘recovery’ – as I explain in more detail below. I was also counselled that clients with mental health problems might dwell on retelling their story – their case history – rather than reflecting upon it or using their creative and imaginative ability to shape a life-story that was not a catalogue of their medical history. Some participants did demonstrate a desire to retell their medical history or narrative – including a recurring theme of the difficulty in gaining continuity with one trusted medical professional. I gently guided these participants back to fashioning a different and more creative narrative, with elements of scene creation, description and so on, by my first listening intently to and acknowledging their medical narrative for a few minutes and then suggesting we try to move beyond that. This simple strategy was largely successful; several participants commented explicitly that they were tired of having to retell their medical history to each new health professional they encountered in the hospital system, for example. My principal uncertainty was whether I should conduct the workshops at the same level of complexity that I had in the past with groups of university students or community groups. While in both of those cohorts there will often be some participants with mental health issues, for the most part this possibility does not affect the level or kind of content of material discussed in workshops. However, within this pilot group all had been diagnosed with moderate to severe mental illness, mostly schizophrenia, but also bipolar disorder and acute depression and anxiety disorders. The fact that my credentials were only as a published writer and teacher of creative writing, not as a health professional, was also a strong concern to me. But the clients readily accepted me as someone who knew the difficulty of writing well and getting published. I stressed to them that my primary aim was to teach effective creative writing as an end in itself. That it might be beneficial in health terms was secondary. It was a health professional who introduced me and briefly outlined the research aims of the workshop – including some attempt to measure qualitatively any possible benefits. It was my impression that the participants did not have a diminished sense of my usefulness because I was not a health professional. Their focus was on having the opportunity to practice creative writing and/or participate in a creative group activity. As mentioned above, I had prepared a workshop ‘kit’ for the participants of 15 pages. It contained the usual guidelines for effective writing – extracts from professional writers’ published work (including an extract from my own published work – a matter of equity, since they were allowing me to read their work), and a number of writing exercises (using description, concrete and abstract words, narrative point of view, writing in scenes, show don’t tell). The kit contained extracts from memoirs by Hugh Lunn and Bill Bryson, as well as a descriptive passage from Charles Dickens. An extract from Inga Clendinnen’s 2006 account in Agamemnon’s Kiss: selected essays of her positive interaction with fellow cancer patients (a narrative with the underlying theme of recovery) was also valuable for the participants. I stressed to the group that this material was very similar to that used with beginning writers among university students. I described the importance of life-writing as follows: Life-writing is simply telling a story from your life and perhaps musing or commenting on it at the same time. When you write a short account of something chosen from your life, you are making a pattern, using your memory, using your powers of description – you are being creative. You are being a story-teller. And story-telling is one very important thing that makes us humans different from all other animals – and it is a way in which we find a lot of meaning in our lives.My central advice in the kit was: “Just try to be as honest as you can – and to remember as well as you can … being honest and direct is both the best and the easiest way to write memoir”. The only major difference between my approach with these clients and that with a university class was in the selection of possible topics offered. In keeping with the advice of the psychologists who were experts in the theory of ‘recovery’, the topics were predominantly positive, though one or two topics gave the opportunity to recount and/or explore a negative experience if the participant wanted to do so: A time when I was able to help another personA time when I realised what really mattered in lifeA time when I overcame a major difficultyA time when I felt part of a group or teamA time when I knew what I wanted to do with my lifeA time when someone recognised a talent or quality of mineA time I did something that I was proud of A time when I learned something important to meA memorable time when I lived in a certain house or suburbA story that begins: “Looking back, I now understand that …”The group expressed satisfaction with these topics, though they had the usual writing students’ difficulty in choosing the one that best suited them. In the first two workshops we worked our way through the kit; in the third workshop, two weeks later, each participant read their own work to the group and received feedback from their peers and me. The feedback was encouraged to be positive and constructive, and the group spontaneously adopted a positive reinforcement approach, applauding each piece of writing. Workshop DynamicsThe venue for the workshops was a suburban house in the Logan area of Brisbane used as a drop-in centre for those with mental illness, and the majority of the participants would be familiar with it. It had a large, breezy deck on which a round-table configuration of seating was arranged. This veranda-type setting was sheltered enough to enable all to be heard easily and formal enough to emphasise a learning event was taking place; but it was also open enough to encourage a relaxed atmosphere. The week before the first workshop I visited the house to have lunch with a number of the participants. This gave me a sense of some of the participants’ personalities and degree of engagement, the way they related to each other, and in turn enabled them to begin to have some familiarity with me and ask questions. As a novice at working with this kind of client, I found this experience extremely valuable, especially as it suggested that a relatively high degree of communication and cognition would be possible, and it reduced the anxiety I had about pitching the workshops at an appropriate level. In the course of the first workshop, the most initially sceptical workshop participant ended up being the most engaged contributor. A highly intelligent woman, she felt it would be too upsetting to write about negative events, but ultimately wrote a very effective piece about the empowerment she gained from caring for a stray cat and locating the owner. Her narrative also expressed her realisation that the pet was partly a replacement for spending time with her son, who lived interstate. Another strong participant previously had written a book-length narrative of her years of misdiagnoses and trauma in the hospital system before coming under the care of her present health professionals. The participant who had the least literacy skills was accepted by the group as an equal and after a while contributed enthusiastically. Though he refused to sign the consent form at the outset, he asked to do so at the close of the first afternoon. The workshop was comprised of clients from two health provider organisations; at first the two groups tended to speak with those they already knew (as in any such situation in the broader community), but by the third workshop a sense of larger group identity was being manifested in their comments, as they spoke of what ‘the group’ would like in the future – such as their work being published in some form. It was clear that, as in a university setting, part of the beneficial effect of the workshops came from group and face to face interaction. It would be more difficult to have this dimension of benefit achieved via a web-based version of the workshops, though a chat room scenario would presumably go some way towards establishing a group feeling. Web-based delivery would certainly suit participants who lacked mobility or who lived in the regions. Clearly the Internet is a vital social networking tool, and an Internet-based version of the workshops could well be attempted in the future. My own previous experience of community digital storytelling workshops (Neilsen, Digital Storytelling as Life-writing) suggests that a high degree of technical proficiency can not be expected across such a cohort; but with adequate technical support, a program (the usual short, self-written script, recorded voice-over and still images scanned from the participants’ photo albums, etc) could make digital storytelling a further dimension of therapeutic life-writing for clients with mental illness. One of the most useful teaching techniques in a class room setting is the judicious use of humour – to create a sense of sharing a perspective, and simply to make material more entertaining. I tested the waters at the outset by referring to the mental health worker sitting in the background, and declaring (with some comic exaggeration) my concern that if I didn’t run the workshop well he would report adversely on me. There was general laughter and this expression of my vulnerability seemed to defuse anxiety on the part of some participants. As the workshop progressed I found I could use both humorous extracts of life-writing and ad hoc comic comments (never at the expense of a participant) as freely as in a university class. Participants made some droll comments in the overall context of encouraging one another in their contributions, both oral and written. Only one participant exhibited some temporary distress during one of the workshops. I was allowing another participant the freedom to digress from the main topic and the participant beside me displayed agitation and sharply demanded we get back to the point. I apologised and acknowledged I had not stayed as focused as I should and returned to the topic. I suspect I had a fortunate first experience of such arts therapy workshops – and that this was largely due to the voluntary nature of the study and that most of the participants brought a prior positive experience of the workshop scenario, and prior interest in creative writing, to the workshops. Outcomes A significantly positive outcome was that only one of the nine participants missed a session (through ill-health) and none left during workshops. The workshops tended to proceed longer than the three hours allotted on each occasion. Post-workshop interviews were conducted by a psychologist with the participants. Detailed data is not available yet – but there was a clear indication by almost all participants that they felt the workshops were beneficial and that they would like to participate in further workshops. All but one agreed to have their life-writing included in a newsletter produced by one of the sponsors of the workshops. The positive reception of the workshops by the participants has encouraged planning to be undertaken for a wide-ranging longitudinal study by means of a significant number of workshops in both life-writing and visual arts in more than one city, conducted by a team of health professionals and creative practitioners – this time with sophisticated measurement instruments to gauge the effectiveness of art therapy in aiding ‘recovery’. Small as the workshop group was, the pilot study seems to validate previous research in the UK and US as we have summarised above. The indications are that significant elements of recovery (in particular, feelings of enhanced agency and creativity), can be achieved by life-writing workshops that are guided by creative practitioners; and that it is the process of narrative construction within life-writing that engages with or enhances a sense of self and identity. NoteWe are indebted, in making the summary of the concept of ‘recovery’ in health science terms, to work in progress by the following research team: Robert King, Tom O'Brien and Claire Edwards (School of Medicine, University of Queensland), Margot Schofield and Patricia Fenner (School of Public Health, Latrobe University). We are also grateful for the generous assistance of both this group and Seiji Humphries from the Richmond Queensland Fellowship, in providing preparation for the workshops. ReferencesAlschuler, Mari. “Lifestories – Biography and Autobiography as Healing Tools for Adults with Mental Illness.” Journal of Poetry Therapy 11.2 (1997): 113–17.Davidson, Larry and John Strauss. “Sense of Self in Recovery from Severe Mental Illness.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 65 (1992): 31–45.Eakin, Paul. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies of the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.———. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.Esterling, B.A., L. L’Abate., E.J. Murray, and J.W. Pennebaker. “Empirical Foundations for Writing in Prevention and Psychotherapy: Mental and Physical Health Outcomes.” Clinical Psychology Review 19.1 (1999): 79–96.Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.King, Robert, Chris Lloyd, and Tom Meehan. Handbook of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.Liberman, Robert, and Alex Kopelowicz. “Recovery from Schizophrenia: A Criterion-Based Definition.” In Ralph, R., and P. Corrigan (eds). Recovery in Mental Illness: Broadening Our Understanding of Wellness. Washington, DC: APA, 2005.Linder, Vicki. “The Tale of two Bethanies: Trauma in the Creative Writing Classroom.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 1.1 (2004): 6–14Murphy, Ffion, and Philip Neilsen. “Recuperating Writers – and Writing: The Potential of Writing Therapy.” TEXT 12.1 (Apr. 2008). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april08/murphy_neilsen.htm›.Neilsen, Philip. “Digital Storytelling as Life-Writing: Self-Construction, Therapeutic Effect, Textual Analysis Leading to an Enabling ‘Aesthetic’ for the Community Voice.” ‹http://www.speculation2005.qut.edu.au/papers/Neilsen.pdf›.Pennebaker, James W., and Janel D. Seagal. “Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative.” Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55.10 (1999): 1243–54.Pennebaker, James W. “Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative.” Literature and Medicine 19.1 (2000): 3–18.Spandler, H., J. Secker, L. Kent, S. Hacking, and J. Shenton. “Catching Life: The Contribution of Arts Initiatives to ‘Recovery’ Approaches in Mental Health.” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 14.8 (2007): 791–799.Wright, Jeannie, and Man Cheung Chung. “Mastery or Mystery? Therapeutic Writing: A Review of the Literature.” British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 29.3 (2001): 277–91.

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Critique of Ability In July 2008, we could be on the eve of an enormously important shift in disability in Australia. One sign of change is the entry into force on 3 May 2008 of the United Nations convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which will now be adopted by the Rudd Labor government. Through this, and other proposed measures, the Rudd government has indicated its desire for a seachange in the area of disability. Bill Shorten MP, the new Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services has been at pains to underline his commitment to a rights-based approach to disability. In this inaugural speech to Parliament, Senator Shorten declared: I believe the challenge for government is not to fit people with disabilities around programs but for programs to fit the lives, needs and ambitions of people with disabilities. The challenge for all of us is to abolish once and for all the second-class status that too often accompanies Australians living with disabilities. (Shorten, “Address in reply”; see also Shorten, ”Speaking up”) Yet if we listen to the voices of people with disability, we face fundamental issues of justice, democracy, equality and how we understand the deepest aspects of ourselves and our community. This is a situation that remains dire and palpably unjust, as many people with disabilities have attested. Elsewhere I have argued (Goggin and Newell) that disability constitutes a systemic form of exclusion and othering tantamount to a “social apartheid” . While there have been improvements and small gains since then, the system that reigns in Australia is still fundamentally oppressive. Nonetheless, I would suggest that through the rise of the many stranded movements of disability, the demographic, economic and social changes concerning impairment, we are seeing significant changes in how we understand impairment and ability (Barnes, Oliver and Barton; Goggin and Newell, Disability in Australia; Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson; Shakespeare; Stiker). There is now considerable, if still incomplete, recognition of disability as a category that is constituted through social, cultural, and political logics, as well as through complex facets of impairment, bodies (Corker and Shakespeare), experiences, discourses (Fulcher), and modes of materiality and subjectivity (Butler), identity and government (Tremain). Also there is growing awareness of the imbrication of disability and other categories such as sex and gender (Fine and Asch; Thomas), race, age, culture, class and distribution of wealth (Carrier; Cole; Davis, Bending over Backwards, and Enforcing Normalcy; Oliver; Rosenblum and Travis), ecology and war (Bourke; Gerber; Muir). There are rich and wide-ranging debates that offer fundamental challenges to the suffocating grip of the dominant biomedical model of disability (that conceives disability as individual deficit — for early critiques see: Borsay; Walker), as well as the still influential and important (if at times limiting) social model of disability (Oliver; Barnes and Mercer; Shakespeare). All in all,there have been many efforts to transform the social and political relations of disability. If disability has been subject to considerable examination, there has not yet been an extended, concomitant critique of ability. Nor have we witnessed a thoroughgoing recognition of unmarked, yet powerful operations of ability in our lives and thought, and the potential implications of challenging these. Certainly there have been important attempts to reframe the relationship between “ability” and “disability” (for example, see Jones and Mark). And we are all familiar with the mocking response to some neologisms that seek to capture this, such as the awkward yet pointed “differently-abled.” Despite such efforts we lack still a profound critique of ability, an exploration of “able”, the topic that this special issue invites us to consider. If we think of the impact and significance of “whiteness”, as a way to open up space for how to critically think about and change concepts of race; or of “masculinity” as a project for thinking about gender and sexuality — we can see that this interrogation of the unmarked category of “able” and “ability” is much needed (for one such attempt, see White). In this paper I would like to make a small contribution to such a critique of ability, by considering what the concept of innovation and its contemporary rhetorics have to offer for reframing disability. Innovation is an important discourse in contemporary life. It offers interesting possibilities for rethinking ability — and indeed disability. And it is this relatively unexplored prospect that this paper seeks to explore. Beyond Access, Equity & Diversity In this scene of disability, there is attention being given to making long over-due reforms. Yet the framing of many of these reforms, such as the strengthening of national and international legal frameworks, for instance, also carry with them considerable problems. Disability is too often still seen as something in need of remediation, or special treatment. Access, equity, and anti-discrimination frameworks offer important resources for challenging this “special” treatment, so too do the diversity approaches which have supplemented or supplanted them (Goggin and Newell, “Diversity as if Disability Mattered”). In what new ways can we approach disability and policies relevant to it? In a surprisingly wide range of areas, innovation has featured as a new, cross-sectoral approach. Innovation has been a long-standing topic in science, technology and economics. However, its emergence as master-theme comes from its ability to straddle and yoke together previously diverse fields. Current discussions of innovation bring together and extend work on the information society, the knowledge economy, and the relationships between science and technology. We are now familiar for instance with arguments about how digital networked information and communications technologies and their consumption are creating new forms of innovation (Benkler; McPherson; Passiante, Elia, and Massari). Innovation discourse has extended to many other unfamiliar realms too, notably the area of social and community development, where a new concept of social innovation is now proposed (Mulgan), often aligned with new ideas of social entrepreneurship that go beyond earlier accounts of corporate social responsibility. We can see the importance of innovation in the ‘creative industries’ discourses and initiatives which have emerged since the 1990s. Here previously distinct endeavours of arts and culture have become reframed in a way that puts their central achievement of creativity to the fore, and recognises its importance across all sorts of service and manufacturing industries, in particular. More recently, theorists of creative industries, such as Cunningham, have begun to talk about “social network markets,” as a way to understand the new hybrid of creativity, innovation, digital technology, and new economic logics now being constituted (Cunningham and Potts). Innovation is being regarded as a cardinal priority for societies and their governments. Accordingly, the Australian government has commissioned a Review of The National Innovation System, led by Dr Terry Cutler, due to report in the second half of 2008. The Cutler review is especially focussed upon gaps and weaknesses in the Australian innovation system. Disability has the potential to figure very strongly in this innovation talk, however there has been little discussion of disability in the innovation discourse to date. The significance of disability in relation to innovation was touched upon some years ago, in a report on Disablism from the UK Demos Foundation (Miller, Parker and Gillinson). In a chapter entitled “The engine of difference: disability, innovation and creativity,” the authors discuss the area of inclusive design, and make the argument for the “involvement of disabled people to create a stronger model of user design”:Disabled people represented a market of 8.6 million customers at the last count and their experiences aren’t yet feeding through into processes of innovation. But the role of disabled people as innovators can and should be more active; we should include disabled people in the design process because they are good at it. (57) There are two reasons given for this expertise of disabled people in design. Firstly, “disabled people are often outstanding problem solvers because they have to be … life for disabled people at the moment is a series of challenges to be overcome” (57). Secondly, “innovative ideas are more likely to come from those who have a new or different angle on old problems” (57). The paradox in this argument is that as life becomes more equitable for people with disabilities, then these ‘advantages’ should disappear” (58). Accordingly, Miller et al. make a qualified argument, namely that “greater participation of disabled people in innovation in the short term may just be the necessary trigger for creating an altogether different, and better, system of innovation for everyone in the future” (58). The Demos Disablism report was written at a time when rhetorics of innovation were just beginning to become more generalized and mainstream. This was also at a time in the UK, when there was hope that new critical approaches to disability would see it become embraced as a part of the diverse society that Blair’s New Labor Britain had been indicating. The argument Disablism offers about disability and innovation is in some ways a more formalized version of vernacular theory (McLaughlin, 1996). In the disability movement we often hear, with good reason, that people with disability, by dint of their experience and knowledge are well positioned to develop and offer particular kinds of expertise. However, Miller et al. also gesture towards a more generalized account of disability and innovation, one that would intersect with the emerging frameworks around innovation. It is this possibility that I wish to take up and briefly explore here. I want to consider the prospects for a fully-fledged encounter between disability and innovation. I would like to have a better sense of whether this is worth pursuing, and what it would add to our understanding of both disability and innovation? Would the disability perspective be integrated as a long-term part of our systems of innovation rather than, as Miller et al. imply, deployed temporarily to develop better innovation systems? What pitfalls might be bound up with, or indeed be the conditions of, such a union between disability and innovation? The All-Too-Able User A leading area where disability figures profoundly in innovation is in the field of technology — especially digital technology. There is now a considerable literature and body of practice on disability and digital technology (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability; National Council on Disability), however for my purposes here I would like to focus upon the user, the abilities ascribed to various kinds of users, and the user with disability in particular. Digital technologies are replete with challenges and opportunities; they are multi-layered, multi-media, and global in their manifestation and function. In Australia, Britain, Canada, the US, and Europe, there have been some significant digital technology initiatives which have resulted in improved accessibility for many users and populations (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; National Council on Disability) . There are a range of examples of ways in which users with disability are intervening and making a difference in design. There is also a substantial body of literature that clarifies why we need to include the perspective of the disabled if we are to be truly innovative in our design practices (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, “Disability, Identity and Interdependence”). I want to propose, however, that there is merit in going beyond recognition of the role of people with disability in technology design (vital and overlooked as it remains), to consider how disability can enrich contemporary discourses on innovation. There is a very desirable cross-over to be promoted between the emphasis on the user-as-expert in the sphere of disability and technology, and on the integral role of disability groups in the design process, on the one hand, and the rise of the user in digital culture generally, on the other. Surprisingly, such connections are nowhere near as widespread and systematic as they should be. It may be that contemporary debates about the user, and about the user as co-creator, or producer, of technology (Haddon et al.; von Hippel) actually reinstate particular notions of ability, and the able user, understood with reference to notions of disability. The current emphasis on the productive user, based as it is on changing understandings of ability and disability, provides rich material for critical revision of the field and those assumptions surrounding ability. It opens up possibilities for engaging more fully with disability and incorporating disability into the new forms and relations of digital technology that celebrate the user (Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability). While a more detailed consideration of these possibilities require more time than this essay allows, let us consider for a moment the idea of a genuine encounter between the activated user springing from the disability movement, and the much feted user in contemporary digital culture and theories of innovation. People with disability are using these technologies in innovative ways, so have much to contribute to wider discussions of digital technology (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra). The Innovation Turn Innovation policy, the argument goes, is important because it stands to increase productivity, which in turn leads to greater international competitiveness and economic benefit. Especially with the emergence of capitalism (Gleeson), productivity has strong links to particular notions of which types of production and produce are valued. Productivity is also strongly conditioned by how we understand ability and, last in a long chain of strong associations, how we as a society understand and value those kinds of people and bodies believed to contain and exercise the ordained and rewarded types of ability, produce, and productivity. Disability is often seen as antithetical to productivity (a revealing text on the contradictions of disability and productivity is the 2004 Productivity Commission Review of the Disability Discrimination Act). When we think about the history of disability, we quickly realize that productivity, and by extension, innovation, are strongly ideological. Ideological, that is, in the sense that these fields of human endeavour and our understanding of them are shaped by power relations, and are built upon implicit ‘ableist’ assumptions about productivity. In this case, the power relations of disability go right to the heart of the matter, highlighting who and what are perceived to be of value, contributing economically and in other ways to society, and who and what are considered as liabilities, as less valued and uneconomical. A stark recent example of this is the Howard government workplace and welfare reforms, which further disenfranchised, controlled, and impoverished people with disability. If we need to rethink our ideas of productivity and ability in the light of new notions of disability, then so too do we need to rethink our ideas about innovation and disability. Here the new discourses of innovation may actually be useful, but also contain limited formulations and assumptions about ability and disability that need to be challenged. The existing problems of a fresh approach to disability and innovation can be clearly observed in the touchstones of national science and technology “success.” Beyond One-Sided Innovation Disability does actually feature quite prominently in the annals of innovation. Take, for instance, the celebrated case of the so-called “bionic ear” (or cochlear implant) hailed as one of Australia’s great scientific inventions of the past few decades. This is something we can find on display in the Powerhouse Museum of Technology and Design, in Sydney. Yet the politics of the cochlear implant are highly controversial, not least as it is seen by many (for instance, large parts of the Deaf community) as not involving people with disabilities, nor being informed by their desires (Campbell, also see “Social and Ethical Aspects of Cochlear Implants”). A key problem with the cochlear implant and many other technologies is that they are premised on the abolition or overcoming of disability — rather than being shaped as technology that acknowledges and is informed by disabled users in their diverse guises. The failure to learn the lessons of the cochlear implant for disability and innovation can be seen in the fact that we are being urged now to band together to support the design of a “bionic eye” by the year 2020, as a mark of distinction of achieving a great nation (2020 Summit Initial Report). Again, there is no doubting the innovation and achievement in these artefacts and their technological systems. But their development has been marked by a distinct lack of consultation and engagement with people with disabilities; or rather the involvement has been limited to a framework that positions them as passive users of technology, rather than as “producer/users”. Further, what notions of disability and ability are inscribed in these technological systems, and what do they represent and symbolize in the wider political and social field? Unfortunately, such technologies have the effect of reproducing an ableist framework, “enforcing normalcy” (Davis), rather than building in, creating and contributing to new modes of living, which embrace difference and diversity. I would argue that this represents a one-sided logic of innovation. A two-sided logic of innovation, indeed what we might call a double helix (at least) of innovation would be the sustained, genuine interaction between different users, different notions of ability, disability and impairment, and the processes of design. If such a two-sided (or indeed many-sided logic) is to emerge there is good reason to think it could more easily do so in the field of digital cultures and technologies, than say, biotechnology. The reason for this is the emphasis in digital communication technologies on decentralized, participatory, user-determined governance and design, coming from many sources. Certainly this productive, democratic, participatory conception of the user is prevalent in Internet cultures. Innovation here is being reshaped to harness the contribution and knowledge of users, and could easily be extended to embrace pioneering efforts in disability. Innovating with Disability In this paper I have tried to indicate why it is productive for discourses of innovation to consider disability; the relationship between disability and innovation is rich and complex, deserving careful elaboration and interrogation. In suggesting this, I am aware that there are also fundamental problems that innovation raises in its new policy forms. There are the issues of what is at stake when the state is redefining its traditional obligations towards citizens through innovation frameworks and discourses. And there is the troubling question of whether particular forms of activity are normatively judged to be innovative — whereas other less valued forms are not seen as innovative. By way of conclusion, however, I would note that there are now quite basic, and increasingly accepted ways, to embed innovation in design frameworks, and while they certainly have been adopted in the disability and technology area, there is much greater scope for this. However, a few things do need to change before this potential for disability to enrich innovation is adequately realized. Firstly, we need further research and theorization to clarify the contribution of disability to innovation, work that should be undertaken and directed by people with disability themselves. Secondly, there is a lack of resources for supporting disability and technology organisations, and the development of training and expertise in this area (especially to provide viable career paths for experts with disability to enter the field and sustain their work). If this is addressed, the economic benefits stand to be considerable, not to mention the implications for innovation and productivity. Thirdly, we need to think about how we can intensify existing systems of participatory design, or, better still, introduce new user-driven approaches into strategically important places in the design processes of ICTs (and indeed in the national innovation system). Finally, there is an opportunity for new approaches to governance in ICTs at a general level, informed by disability. New modes of organising, networking, and governance associated with digital technology have attracted much attention, also featuring recently in the Australia 2020 Summit. Less well recognised are new ideas about governance that come from the disability community, such as the work of Queensland Advocacy Incorporated, Rhonda Galbally’s Our Community, disability theorists such as Christopher Newell (Newell), or the Canadian DIS-IT alliance (see, for instance, Stienstra). The combination of new ideas in governance from digital culture, new ideas from the disability movement and disability studies, and new approaches to innovation could be a very powerful co*cktail indeed.Dedication This paper is dedicated to my beloved friend and collaborator, Professor Christopher Newell AM (1964-2008), whose extraordinary legacy will inspire us all to continue exploring and questioning the idea of able. 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“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them [...] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (Garcia Marquez 165) Introduction The refugee experience is, at heart, one of rebirth. Just as becoming a new, distinctive being—biological birth—necessarily involves the physical separation of mother and infant, so becoming a refugee entails separation from a "mother country." This mother country may or may not be a recognised nation state; the point is that the refugee transitions from physical connectedness to separation, from insider to outsider, from endemic to alien. Like babies, refugees may have little control over the timing and conditions of their expulsion. Successful resettlement requires not one rebirth but multiple rebirths—resettlement is a lifelong process (Layton)—which in turn require hope, imagination, and energy. In rebirthing themselves over and over again, people who have fled or been forced from their homelands become both mother and child. They do not go through this rebirthing alone. A range of agencies and individuals may be there to assist, including immigration officials, settlement services, schools and teachers, employment agencies and employers, English as a Second Language (ESL) resources and instructors, health-care providers, counsellors, diasporic networks, neighbours, church groups, and other community organisations. The nature, intensity, and duration of these “midwives’” interventions—and when they occur and in what combinations—vary hugely from place to place and from person to person, but there is clear evidence that post-migration experiences have a significant impact on settlement outcomes (Fozdar and Hartley). This paper draws on qualitative research I did in 2012 in a regional town in New South Wales to illuminate some of the ways in which settlement aides ease, or impede, refugees’ rebirth as fully recognised and participating Australians. I begin by considering what it means to be resilient before tracing some of the dimensions of the resettlement process. In doing so, I draw on data from interviews and focus groups with former refugees, service providers, and other residents of the town I shall call Easthaven. First, though, a word about Easthaven. As is the case in many rural and regional parts of Australia, Easthaven’s population is strongly dominated by Anglo Celtic and Saxon ancestries: 2011 Census data show that more than 80 per cent of residents were born in Australia (compared with a national figure of 69.8 per cent) and about 90 per cent speak only English at home (76.8 per cent). Almost twice as many people identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as the national figure of 2.5 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics). For several years Easthaven has been an official “Refugee Welcome Zone”, welcoming hundreds of refugees from diverse countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as from Myanmar. This reflects the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s drive to settle a fifth of Australia’s 13,750 humanitarian entrants a year directly in regional areas. In Easthaven’s schools—which is where I focused my research—almost all of the ESL students are from refugee backgrounds. Defining Resilience Much of the research on human resilience is grounded in psychology, with a capacity to “bounce back” from adverse experiences cited in many definitions of resilience (e.g. American Psychological Association). Bouncing back implies a relatively quick process, and a return to a state or form similar to that which existed before the encounter with adversity. Yet resilience often requires sustained effort and significant changes in identity. As Jerome Rugaruza, a former UNHCR refugee, says of his journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia: All the steps begin in the burning village: you run with nothing to eat, no clothes. You just go. Then you get to the refugee camp […] You have a little bread and you thank god you are safe. Then after a few years in the camp, you think about a future for your children. You arrive in Australia and then you learn a new language, you learn to drive. There are so many steps and not everyone can do it. (Milsom) Not everyone can do it, but a large majority do. Research by Graeme Hugo, for example, shows that although humanitarian settlers in Australia face substantial barriers to employment and initially have much higher unemployment rates than other immigrants, for most nationality groups this difference has disappeared by the second generation: “This is consistent with the sacrifice (or investment) of the first generation and the efforts extended to attain higher levels of education and English proficiency, thereby reducing the barriers over time.” (Hugo 35). Ingrid Poulson writes that “resilience is not just about bouncing. Bouncing […] is only a reaction. Resilience is about rising—you rise above it, you rise to the occasion, you rise to the challenge. Rising is an active choice” (47; my emphasis) I see resilience as involving mental and physical grit, coupled with creativity, aspiration and, crucially, agency. Dimensions of Resettlement To return to the story of 41-year-old Jerome Rugaruza, as related in a recent newspaper article: He [Mr Rugaruza] describes the experience of being a newly arrived refugee as being like that of a newborn baby. “You need special care; you have to learn to speak [English], eat the different food, create relationships, connections”. (Milsom) This is a key dimension of resettlement: the adult becomes like an infant again, shifting from someone who knows how things work and how to get by to someone who is likely to be, for a while, dependent on others for even the most basic things—communication, food, shelter, clothing, and social contact. The “special care” that most refugee arrivals need initially (and sometimes for a long time) often results in their being seen as deficient—in knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities as well as material goods (Keddie; Uptin, Wright and Harwood). As Fozdar and Hartley note: “The tendency to use a deficit model in refugee resettlement devalues people and reinforces the view of the mainstream population that refugees are a liability” (27). Yet unlike newborns, humanitarian settlers come to their new countries with rich social networks and extensive histories of experience and learning—resources that are in fact vital to their rebirth. Sisay (all names are pseudonyms), a year 11 student of Ethiopian heritage who was born in Kenya, told me with feeling: I had a life back in Africa [her emphasis]. It was good. Well, I would go back there if there’s no problems, which—is a fact. And I came here for a better life—yeah, I have a better life, there’s good health care, free school, and good environment and all that. But what’s that without friends? A fellow student, Celine, who came to Australia five years ago from Burundi via Uganda, told me in a focus group: Some teachers are really good but I think some other teachers could be a little bit more encouraging and understanding of what we’ve gone through, because [they] just look at you like “You’re year 11 now, you should know this” […] It’s really discouraging when [the teachers say] in front of the class, “Oh, you shouldn’t do this subject because you haven’t done this this this this” […] It’s like they’re on purpose to tell you “you don’t have what it takes; just give up and do something else.” As Uptin, Wright and Harwood note, “schools not only have the power to position who is included in schooling (in culture and pedagogy) but also have the power to determine whether there is room and appreciation for diversity” (126). Both Sisay and Celine were disheartened by the fact they felt some of their teachers, and many of their peers, had little interest in or understanding of their lives before they came to Australia. The teachers’ low expectations of refugee-background students (Keddie, Uptin, Wright and Harwood) contrasted with the students’ and their families’ high expectations of themselves (Brown, Miller and Mitchell; Harris and Marlowe). When I asked Sisay about her post-school ambitions, she said: “I have a good idea of my future […] write a documentary. And I’m working on it.” Celine’s response was: “I know I’m gonna do medicine, be a doctor.” A third girl, Lily, who came to Australia from Myanmar three years ago, told me she wanted to be an accountant and had studied accounting at the local TAFE last year. Joseph, a father of three who resettled from South Sudan seven years ago, stressed how important getting a job was to successful settlement: [But] you have to get a certificate first to get a job. Even the job of cleaning—when I came here I was told that somebody has to go to have training in cleaning, to use the different chemicals to clean the ground and all that. But that is just sweeping and cleaning with water—you don’t need the [higher-level] skills. Simple jobs like this, we are not able to get them. In regional Australia, employment opportunities tend to be limited (Fozdar and Hartley); the unemployment rate in Easthaven is twice the national average. Opportunities to study are also more limited than in urban centres, and would-be students are not always eligible for financial assistance to gain or upgrade qualifications. Even when people do have appropriate qualifications, work experience, and language proficiency, the colour of their skin may still mean they miss out on a job. Tilbury and Colic-Peisker have documented the various ways in which employers deflect responsibility for racial discrimination, including the “common” strategy (658) of arguing that while the employer or organisation is not prejudiced, they have to discriminate because of their clients’ needs or expectations. I heard this strategy deployed in an interview with a local businesswoman, Catriona: We were advertising for a new technician. And one of the African refugees came to us and he’d had a lot of IT experience. And this is awful, but we felt we couldn't give him the job, because we send our technicians into people's houses, and we knew that if a black African guy rocked up at someone’s house to try and fix their computer, they would not always be welcomed in all—look, it would not be something that [Easthaven] was ready for yet. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (Refugees and Employment) note that while Australia has strict anti-discrimination legislation, this legislation may be of little use to the people who, because of the way they look and sound (skin colour, dress, accent), are most likely to face prejudice and discrimination. The researchers found that perceived discrimination in the labour market affected humanitarian settlers’ sense of satisfaction with their new lives far more than, for example, racist remarks, which were generally shrugged off; the students I interviewed spoke of racism as “expected,” but “quite rare.” Most of the people Colic-Peisker and Tilbury surveyed reported finding Australians “friendly and accepting” (33). Even if there is no active discrimination on the basis of skin colour in employment, education, or housing, or overt racism in social situations, visible difference can still affect a person’s sense of belonging, as Joseph recounts: I think of myself as Australian, but my colour doesn’t [laughs] […] Unfortunately many, many Australians are expecting that Australia is a country of Europeans … There is no need for somebody to ask “Where do you come from?” and “Do you find Australia here safe?” and “Do you enjoy it?” Those kind of questions doesn’t encourage that we are together. This highlights another dimension of resettlement: the journey from feeling “at home” to feeling “foreign” to, eventually, feeling at home again in the host country (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, Refugees and Employment). In the case of visibly different settlers, however, this last stage may never be completed. Whether the questions asked of Joseph are well intentioned or not, their effect may be the same: they position him as a “forever foreigner” (Park). A further dimension of resettlement—one already touched on—is the degree to which humanitarian settlers actively manage their “rebirth,” and are allowed and encouraged to do so. A key factor will be their mastery of English, and Easthaven’s ESL teachers are thus pivotal in the resettlement process. There is little doubt that many of these teachers have gone to great lengths to help this cohort of students, not only in terms of language acquisition but also social inclusion. However, in some cases what is initially supportive can, with time, begin to undermine refugees’ maturity into independent citizens. Sharon, an ESL teacher at one of the schools, told me how she and her colleagues would give their refugee-background students lifts to social events: But then maybe three years down the track they have a car and their dad can drive, but they still won’t take them […] We arrive to pick them up and they’re not ready, or there’s five fantastic cars in the driveway, and you pick up the student and they say “My dad’s car’s much bigger and better than yours” [laughs]. So there’s an expectation that we’ll do stuff for them, but we’ve created that [my emphasis]. Other support services may have more complex interests in keeping refugee settlers dependent. The more clients an agency has, the more services it provides, and the longer clients stay on its books, the more lucrative the contract for the agency. Thus financial and employment imperatives promote competition rather than collaboration between service providers (Fozdar and Hartley; Sidhu and Taylor) and may encourage assumptions about what sorts of services different individuals and groups want and need. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (“‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”) have developed a typology of resettlement styles—“achievers,” “consumers,” “endurers,” and “victims”—but stress that a person’s style, while influenced by personality and pre-migration factors, is also shaped by the institutions and individuals they come into contact with: “The structure of settlement and welfare services may produce a victim mentality, leaving members of refugee communities inert and unable to see themselves as agents of change” (76). The prevailing narrative of “the traumatised refugee” is a key aspect of this dynamic (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”; Fozdar and Hartley; Keddie). Service providers may make assumptions about what humanitarian settlers have gone through before arriving in Australia, how they have been affected by their experiences, and what must be done to “fix” them. Norah, a long-time caseworker, told me: I think you get some [providers] who go, “How could you have gone through something like that and not suffered? There must be—you must have to talk about this stuff” […] Where some [refugees] just come with the [attitude] “We’re all born into a situation; that was my situation, but I’m here now and now my focus is this.” She cited failure to consider cultural sensitivities around mental illness and to recognise that stress and anxiety during early resettlement are normal (Tilbury) as other problems in the sector: [Newly arrived refugees] go through the “happy to be here” [phase] and now “hang on, I’ve thumped to the bottom and I’m missing my own foods and smells and cultures and experiences”. I think sometimes we’re just too quick to try and slot people into a box. One factor that appears to be vital in fostering and sustaining resilience is social connection. Norah said her clients were “very good on the mobile phone” and had links “everywhere,” including to family and friends in their countries of birth, transition countries, and other parts of Australia. A 2011 report for DIAC, Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals, found that humanitarian entrants to Australia were significantly more likely to be members of cultural and/or religious groups than other categories of immigrants (Australian Survey Research). I found many examples of efforts to build both bonding and bridging capital (Putnam) in Easthaven, and I offer two examples below. Several people told me about a dinner-dance that had been held a few weeks before one of my visits. The event was organised by an African women’s group, which had been formed—with funding assistance—several years before. The dinner-dance was advertised in the local newspaper and attracted strong interest from a broad cross-section of Easthaveners. To Debbie, a counsellor, the response signified a “real turnaround” in community relations and was a big boon to the women’s sense of belonging. Erica, a teacher, told me about a cultural exchange day she had organised between her bush school—where almost all of the children are Anglo Australian—and ESL students from one of the town schools: At the start of the day, my kids were looking at [the refugee-background students] and they were scared, they were saying to me, "I feel scared." And we shoved them all into this tiny little room […] and they had no choice but to sit practically on top of each other. And by the end of the day, they were hugging each other and braiding their hair and jumping and playing together. Like Uptin, Wright and Harwood, I found that the refugee-background students placed great importance on the social aspects of school. Sisay, the girl I introduced earlier in this paper, said: “It’s just all about friendship and someone to be there for you […] We try to be friends with them [the non-refugee students] sometimes but sometimes it just seems they don’t want it.” Conclusion A 2012 report on refugee settlement services in NSW concludes that the state “is not meeting its responsibility to humanitarian entrants as well as it could” (Audit Office of New South Wales 2); moreover, humanitarian settlers in NSW are doing less well on indicators such as housing and health than humanitarian settlers in other states (3). Evaluating the effectiveness of formal refugee-centred programs was not part of my research and is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I have sought to reveal some of the ways in which the attitudes, assumptions, and everyday practices of service providers and members of the broader community impact on refugees' settlement experience. What I heard repeatedly in the interviews I conducted was that it was emotional and practical support (Matthews; Tilbury), and being asked as well as told (about their hopes, needs, desires), that helped Easthaven’s refugee settlers bear themselves into fulfilling new lives. References Audit Office of New South Wales. Settling Humanitarian Entrants in New South Wales—Executive Summary. May 2012. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/245/02_Humanitarian_Entrants_2012_Executive_Summary.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011 Census QuickStats. Mar. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0>. Australian Survey Research. Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals—Report of Findings. Apr. 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/settlement-outcomes-new-arrivals.pdf>. Brown, Jill, Jenny Miller, and Jane Mitchell. “Interrupted Schooling and the Acquisition of Literacy: Experiences of Sudanese Refugees in Victorian Secondary Schools.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29.2 (2006): 150-62. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement: The Influence of Supporting Services and Refugees’ Own Resources on Resettlement Style.” International Migration 41.5 (2004): 61-91. ———. Refugees and Employment: The Effect of Visible Difference on Discrimination—Final Report. Perth: Centre for Social and Community Research, Murdoch University, 2007. Fozdar, Farida, and Lisa Hartley. “Refugee Resettlement in Australia: What We Know and Need To Know.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 4 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=fozdar&submit=yes&x=0&y=0>. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Harris, Vandra, and Jay Marlowe. “Hard Yards and High Hopes: The Educational Challenges of African Refugee University Students in Australia.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23.2 (2011): 186-96. Hugo, Graeme. A Significant Contribution: The Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants—Summary of Findings. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2011. Keddie, Amanda. “Pursuing Justice for Refugee Students: Addressing Issues of Cultural (Mis)recognition.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16.12 (2012): 1295-1310. Layton, Robyn. "Building Capacity to Ensure the Inclusion of Vulnerable Groups." Creating Our Future conference, Adelaide, 28 Jul. 2012. Milsom, Rosemarie. “From Hard Luck Life to the Lucky Country.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/national/from-hard-luck-life-to-the-lucky-country-20130619-2oixl.html>. Park, Gilbert C. “’Are We Real Americans?’: Cultural Production of Forever Foreigners at a Diversity Event.” Education and Urban Society 43.4 (2011): 451-67. Poulson, Ingrid. Rise. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sidhu, Ravinder K., and Sandra Taylor. “The Trials and Tribulations of Partnerships in Refugee Settlement Services in Australia.” Journal of Education Policy 24.6 (2009): 655-72. Tilbury, Farida. “‘I Feel I Am a Bird without Wings’: Discourses of Sadness and Loss among East Africans in Western Australia.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14.4 (2007): 433-58. ———, and Val Colic-Peisker. “Deflecting Responsibility in Employer Talk about Race Discrimination.” Discourse & Society 17.5 (2006): 651-76. Uptin, Jonnell, Jan Wright, and Valerie Harwood. “It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 40.1 (2013): 125-37.

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As a specialist in culture and communication studies, teaching in a school of business, I realised that the notion of interdisciplinarity is usually explored in the comfort of one's own discipline. Meanwhile, the practice of interdisciplinarity is something else. The very notion of disciplinarity implies a regime of discursive practices, but in the zone between disciplines, there is often no adequate language. This piece of writing is a brief analysis of an example of the language of business studies when business studies thinks about culture. It looks at how business studies approaches cultural difference in context of intercultural contact. Geert Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (1991) This article is a brief and very selective critique of Geert Hofstede's notion of culture in Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Hofstede has been publishing his work on cross-cultural management since the 1960s. His work is routinely used in reference to cross/multi/intercultural issues in business studies (a term I use to include commerce, finance, management, and marketing). Before I begin, I must insist that Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind is a very useful text for business studies students, as it introduces them to useful concepts in relation to culture, like culture shock, acculturation (not enculturation -- I suppose managers are repatriated before that happens), and training for successful cross-cultural communication. It is worth including here a brief note on the subtitle of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. This "software of the mind" is clearly analogous to computer programming. However, Hofstede disavows the analogy, which is central to his thesis, saying that people are not programmed the way computers are. So they are, but not really. Hofstede claims that in order to learn something different, one "must unlearn ... (the) ... patterns of thinking, feeling, and potential acting which were learned throughout (one's) lifetime". And it is this thinking/feeling/acting function he calls the "software of the mind" (4). So, is the body the hardware? Thinking and feeling are abstract and could, with a flight of fancy, be seen as "software". However, acting is visible, tangible, and often visceral. I am suggesting that "acting" either represents or is just about all we have as culture. Acting (in the fullest sense, including speech, gesture, manners, textual production, etc.) is not evidence of culture, it is culture. Also, computer technology, like every other technology, is part of culture, as evident in this journal. Culture I share Clifford Geertz's concept of culture as a semiotic one, where interpretation is a search for meaning, and where meaning lies in social relations. Geertz writes that to claim that culture consists in brute patterns of behaviour in some identifiable community is to reduce it (the community and the notion of culture). Human behaviour is symbolic action. Culture is not just patterned conduct, a frame of mind which points to some sort of ontological status. Culture is public, social, relational, and contextual. To quote Geertz: "culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context" (14). Culture is not an ontological essence or set of behaviours. Culture is made up of webs of relationships. That Hofstede locates culture in the mind is probably the most problematic aspect of his writing. Culture is difficult for any discipline to describe because different disciplines have their own view of social reality. They operate in their own paradigms. Hofstede uses a behaviourist psychological approach to culture, which looks at what he calls national character and typical behaviours. Even though Hofstede is aware of being, as an observer of human behaviour, an integral part of his object of analysis (other cultures), he nevertheless continuously equates the observed behaviour to particular kinds of national thinking and feeling where national is often collapsed into cultural. Hofstede uses an empirical behaviourist paradigm which measures certain behaviours, as if the observer is outside the cultural significance attributed to behaviours, and attributes them to culture. Hofstede's Notion of Culture Hofstede's work is based on quantitative data gathered from questionnaires administered to IBM corporation employees in various countries. He looked at 72 national subsidiaries, 38 occupations, 20 languages, and at two points in time (1968 and 1972), and continued his commentary on that data into the 1990s. He claims that because the entire sample has a common corporate culture, the only thing that can account for systematic and consistent differences between national groups within a hom*ogeneous multinational organisation is nationality itself. It is as if corporate culture is outside, has nothing to do with, national culture (itself a complex and dynamic concept). Hofstede's work does not account for the fact that IBM is an American multinational corporation and, as such, whatever attributes are used to measure cultural difference, those found in American corporate culture will set the benchmark for whatever other cultures are measured. This view is supported in business studies in general where American management practices are seen as universal and normal, even when they are described as 'Western'. The areas Hofstede's IBM survey looked at are: 1. Social inequality, including the relationship with authority (also described as power distance); 2. The relationship between the individual and the group (also described as individualism versus collectivism); 3. Concepts of masculinity and femininity: the social implications of having been born as a boy or a girl (also described as masculinity versus femininity); 4. Ways of dealing with uncertainty, relating to the control of aggression and the expression of emotions (also described as uncertainty avoidance). These concepts are in themselves culturally specific and have become structurally embedded in organisational theory. Hofstede writes that these four dimensions of culture are aspects of culture that can be measured relative to other cultures. What these four dimensions actually do is not to combine to give us a four-dimensional (complex?) appreciation of culture. Rather, they map onto each other and reinforce a politically conservative, Eurocentric view of culture. Hofstede does admit to having had "a 'Western' way of thinking", but he inevitably goes back to "the mind" as a place or goal. He refers to a questionnaire composted by "Eastern', in this case Chinese minds ... [which] ... are programmed according to their own particular cultural framework" (171). So there is this constant reference to culturally programmed minds that determine certain behaviours. In his justification of using typologies to categorise people and their behaviour (minds?) Hofstede also admits that most people / cultures are hybrids. And he admits that rules are made arbitrarily in order to classify people / cultures (minds?). However, he insists that the statistical clusters he ends up with are an empirical typology. Such a reduction of "culture" to this kind of radical realism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative. And, the more Hofstede is quoted as an authority on doing business across cultures, the more truth value his work accrues. The sort of language Hofstede uses to describe culture attributes intrinsic meanings and, as a result, points to difference rather than diversity. Languages of difference are based on binaristic notions of masculine/feminine, East/West, active/passive, collective/individual, and so on. In this opposition of activity and passivity, the East (feminine, collectivist) is the weaker partner of the West (masculine, individualist). There is a nexus of knowledge and power that constructs cultural difference along such binaristic lines. While a language of diversity take multiplicity as a starting point, or the norm, Hofstede's hegemonic and instrumentalist language of difference sees multiplicity as problematic. This problem is flagged at the very start of Cultures and Organizations. 12 Angry Men: Hofstede Interprets Culture and Ignores Gender In the opening page of Cultures and Organizations there is a brief passage from Reginald Rose's play 12 Angry Men (1955). (For a good review of the film see http://www.film.u- net.com/Movies/Reviews/Twelve_Angry.html. The film was recently remade.) Hofstede uses it as an example of how twelve different people with different cultural backgrounds "think, feel and act differently". The passage describes a confrontation between what Hofstede refers as "a garage owner" and "a European-born, probably Austrian, watchmaker". Such a comparison flags, right from the start, a particular way of categorising and distinguishing between two people, in terms of visible and audible signs and symbols. Both parties are described in terms of their occupation. But then the added qualification of one of the parties as being "European-born, probably Austrian" clearly indicates that the unqualified party places him in the broad category "American". In other words, the garage owner's apparently neutral ethnicity implies a normative "American", against which all markers of cultural difference are measured. Hofstede is aware of this problem. He writes that "cultural relativism does not imply normlessness for oneself, nor for one's society" (7). However, he still uses the syntax of binaristic classification which repeats and perpetuates the very problems he is apparently addressing. One of the main factors that makes 12 Angry Men such a powerful drama is that each man carries / inscribes different aspects of American culture. And American culture is idealised in the justice system, where rationality and consensus overcomes prejudice and social pressure. Each man has a unique make-up, which includes class, occupation, ethnicity, personality, intelligence, style and experience. But 12 Angry Men is also an interesting exploration of masculinity. Because Hofstede has included a category of "masculine/feminine" in his study of national culture, it is an interesting oversight that he does not comment on this powerful element of the drama. People identify along various lines, in terms of ethnicities, languages, histories, sexuality, politics and nationalism. Most people do have multiple and varied aspects to their identity. However, Hofstede sees multiple lines of identification as causing "conflicting mental programs". Hofstede claims that identification on the gender level of his hierarchy is determined "according to whether a person was born as a girl or as a boy" (10). Hofstede misses the crucial point that whilst whether one is born female or male determines one's sex, whether one is enculturated as and identifies as feminine or masculine indicates one's gender. Sex and gender are not the same thing. Sex is biological (natural) and gender is ideological (socially constructed and naturalised). This sort of blindness to the ideological component of identity is a fundamental flaw in Hofstede's thesis. Hofstede takes ideological constructions as given, as natural. For example, in endnote 1 of Chapter 4, "He, she, and (s)he", he writes "My choice of the terms (soft feminine and hard masculine) is based on what is in virtually all societies, not on what anybody thinks should be (107, his italics). He reinforces the notion of gendered essences, or essences which constitute national identity. Indeed, the world is not made up of entities or essences that are masculine or feminine, Western or Eastern, active or passive. And the question is not so much about empirical accuracy along such lines, but rather what are the effects of always reinscribing cultures as Western or Eastern, masculine or feminine, collectivist or individualist. In an era of globalism and mass, interconnected communication, identities are multiple, and terms like East and West, masculine and feminine, active and passive, should be used as undecidable codes that, at the most, flag fragments of histories and ideologies. Identity East and West are concepts that did not come out of a political or cultural vacuum. They are categories, or concepts, that originated and flourished with European expansionism from the 17th century. They underwrote imperialism and colonisation. They are not inert labels that merely point to something "out there". East and West, like masculine and feminine or any other binary pair, indicate an imaginary relationship that prioritises one of the pair over the other. People and cultures cannot be separated into static Western and Eastern essences. Culture itself is always diverse and dynamic. It is marked by migration, diaspora, and exile, not to mention historical change. There are no "original" cultures. The sort of discourse Hofstede uses to describe cultures is based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between East and West. Culture is not something invisible or intangible. Culture is not something obscure that is in the mind (whatever or wherever that is) which manifests itself in peculiar behaviours. Culture is what and how we communicate, whether that takes the form of speech, gestures, novels, plays, architecture, style, or art. And, as such, communication includes the objects we produce and exchange and the symbols to which we give meaning. So, when Hofstede writes that the Austrian watchmaker acts the way he does because he cannot behave otherwise. After many years in his new home country, he still behaves the way he was raised. He carries within himself an indelible pattern of behaviour he is attributing a whole range of qualities which are frequently given by dominant cultures to their cultural "others" (1). Hofstede attributes politeness, tradition, and, above all, stasis, to the European-Austrian watchmaker. The phrase "after many years in his new home country" is contradictory. If so many years have passed, why is "home" still "new"? And, indeed, the watchmaker might still behave the way he was raised, but it would be safe to assume that the garage owner also behaves the way he was raised. One of the main points made in 12 Angry Men is that twelve American men are all very different to each other in terms of values and behaviour. All this is represented in the dialogue and behaviour of twelve men in a closed room. If we are concerned with different kinds of social behaviour, and we are not concerned with pathological behaviour, then how can we know what anyone carries within themselves? Why do we want to know what anyone carries within themselves? From a cultural studies perspective, the last question is political. However, from a business studies perspective, that question is naïve. The radical economic rationalist would want to know as much as possible about cultural differences so that we can better target consumer groups and be more successful in cross-cultural negotiations. In colonial days, foreigners often wielded absolute power in other societies and they could impose their rules on it [sic]. In these postcolonial days, foreigners who want to change something in another society will have to negotiate their interventions. (7) Those who wielded absolute power in the colonies were the non-indigenous colonisers. It was precisely the self-legitimating step of making a place a colony that ensured an ongoing presence of the colonising power. The impetus behind learning about the Other in the colonial times was a combination of spiritual salvation (as in the "mission civilisatrice") and economic exploitation (colonies were seen as resources for the benefit of the European and later American centres). And now, the impetus behind learning about cultural difference is that "negotiation is more likely to succeed when the parties concerned understand the reasons for the differences in viewpoints" (7). Culture as Commerce What, in fact, happens, is that business studies simultaneously wants to "do" components of cross-cultural studies, as it is clearly profitable, while shunning the theoretical discipline of cultural studies. A fundamental flaw in a business studies perspective, which is based on Hofstede's work, is a blindness to the ideological and historical component of identity. Business studies has picked up just enough orientalism, feminism, marxism, deconstruction and postcolonialism to thinly disavow any complicity with dominant (and dominating) discourses, while getting on with business-as-usual. Multiculturalism and gender are seen as modern categories to which one must pay lip service, only to be able to get on with business-as-usual. Negotiation, compromise and consensus are desired not for the sake of success in civil processes, but for the material value of global market presence, acceptance and share. However, civil process and commercial interests are not easily separable. To refer to a cultural economy is not just to use a metaphor. The materiality of business, in the various forms of commercial transactions, is itself part of one's culture. That is, culture is the production, consumption and circulation of objects (including less easily definable objects, like performance, language, style and manners). Also, culture is produced and consumed socially (in the realm of the civil) and circulates through official and unofficial social and commercial mechanisms. Culture is a material and social phenomenon. It's not something hidden from view that only reveals itself in behaviours. Hofstede rightly asserts that culture is learned and not inherited. Human nature is inherited. However, it is very difficult to determine exactly what human nature is. Most of what we consider to be human nature turns out to be, upon close inspection, ideological, naturalised. Hofstede writes that what one does with one's human nature is "modified by culture" (5). I would argue that whatever one does is cultural. And this includes taking part in commercial transactions. Even though commercial transactions (including the buying and selling of services) are material, they are also highly ritualistic and highly symbolic, involving complex forms of communication (verbal and nonverbal language). Culture as Mental Programming Hofstede's insistent ontological reference to 'the sources of one's mental programs' is problematic for many reasons. There is the constant ontological as well as epistemological distinction being made between cultures, as if there is a static core to each culture and that we can identify it, know what it is, and deal with it. It is as if culture itself is a knowable essence. Even though Hofstede pays lip service to culture as a social phenomenon, saying that "the sources of one's mental programs lie within the social environments in which one grew up and collected one's life experiences" (4), and that past theories of race have been largely responsible for massive genocides, he nevertheless implies a kind of biologism simply by turning the mind (a radical abstraction) into something as crude as computer software, where data can be stored, erased or reconfigured. In explaining how culture is socially constructed and not biologically determined, Hofstede says that one's mental programming starts with the family and goes on through the neighbourhood, school, social groups, the work place, and the community. He says that "mental programs vary as much as the social environments in which they were acquired", which is nothing whatsoever like computer software (4-5). But he carries on to claim that "a customary term for such mental software is culture" (4, my italics). Before the large-scale changes which took place in the second half of the twentieth century in disciplines like anthropology, history, linguistics, and psychology, culture was seen to be a recognisable, determined, contained, consistent way of living which had deep psychic roots. Today, any link between mental processes and culture (formerly referred to as "race") cannot be sustained. We must be cautious against presuming to understand the relationship between mental process and social life and also against concluding that the content of the mind in each racial (or, if you like, ethnic or cultural) group is of a peculiar kind, because it is this kind of reductionism that feeds stereotypes. And it is the accumulation of knowledge about cultural types that implies power over the very types that are thus created. Conclusion A genuinely interdisciplinary approach to communication, commerce and culture would make business studies more theoretical and more challenging. And it would make cultural studies take commerce more seriously, beyond a mere celebration of shopping. This article has attempted to reveal some of the cracks in how business studies accounts for cultural diversity in an age of global commercial ambitions. It has also looked at how Hofstede's writings, as exemplary of the business studies perspective, papers over those cracks with a very thin layer of pluralist cultural relativism. This article is an invitation to open up a critical dialogue which dares to go beyond disciplinary traditionalisms in order to examine how meaning, communication, culture, language and commerce are embedded in each other. References Carothers, J.C. Mind of Man in Africa. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Degabriele, Maria. Postorientalism: Orientalism since "Orientalism". Ph.D. Thesis. Perth: Murdoch University, 1997. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Hofstede, Geert. Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind. Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1991. Moore, Charles A., ed. The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture. Honolulu: East-West Centre, U of Hawaii, 1967. Patai, Raphael. The Arab Mind. New York: Scribner, 1983. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock: A Study of Mass Bewildernment in the Face of Accelerating Change. Sydney: Bodley Head, 1970. 12 Angry Men. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Orion-Nova, USA. 1957. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Maria Degabriele. "Business as Usual: How Business Studies Thinks Culture." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] Chicago style: Maria Degabriele, "Business as Usual: How Business Studies Thinks Culture," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), ([your date of access]). APA style: Maria Degabriele. (2000) Business as usual: how business studies thinks culture. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). ([your date of access]).

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One of the most distinct places the politics of affect have played out in Australia of late has been in the struggles around the mandatory detention of undocumented migrants; specifically, in arguments about the amount of compassion border control practices should or do entail. Indeed, in 1990 the newly established Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM) published its first report, Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Contemporaneous, thought not specifically concerned, with the establishment of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, this report helped shape the context in which detention policy developed. As the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research put it in their summary of the report, “the Committee endorsed a tough stance regarding all future illegal entrants but a more compassionate stance regarding those now in Australia” (24). It would be easy now to frame this report in a narrative of decline. Under a Labor government the JSCM had at least some compassion to offer; since the 1996 conservative Coalition victory any such compassion has been in increasingly short supply, if not an outright political liability. This is a popular narrative for those clinging to the belief that Labor is still, in some residual sense, a social-democratic party. I am more interested in the ways the report’s subtitle effectively predicted the framework in which debates about detention have since been constructed: control vs. compassion, with balance as the appropriate mediating term. Control and compassion are presented as the poles of a single governmental project insofar as they can be properly calibrated; but at the same time, compassion is presented as an external balance to the governmental project (control), an extra-political restriction of the political sphere. This is a very formal way to put it, but it reflects a simple, vernacular theory that circulates widely among refugee activists. It is expressed with concision in Peter Mares’ groundbreaking book on detention centres, Borderlines, in the chapter title “Compassion as a vice”. Compassion remains one of the major themes and demands of Australian refugee advocates. They thematise compassion not only for the obvious reasons that mandatory detention involves a devastating lack thereof, and that its critics are frequently driven by intense emotional connections both to particular detainees and TPV holders and, more generally, to all who suffer the effects of Australian border control. There is also a historical or conjunctural element: as Ghassan Hage has written, for the last ten years or so many forms of political opposition in Australia have organised their criticisms in terms of “things like compassion or hospitality rather than in the name of a left/right political divide” (7). This tendency is not limited to any one group; it ranges across the spectrum from Liberal Party wets to anarchist collectives, via dozens of organised groups and individuals varying greatly in their political beliefs and intentions. In this context, it would be tendentious to offer any particular example(s) of compassionate activism, so let me instead cite a complaint. In November 2002, the conservative journal Quadrant worried that morality and compassion “have been appropriated as if by right by those who are opposed to the government’s policies” on border protection (“False Refugees” 2). Thus, the right was forced to begin to speak the language of compassion as well. The Department of Immigration, often considered the epitome of the lack of compassion in Australian politics, use the phrase “Australia is a compassionate country, but…” so often they might as well inscribe it on their letterhead. Of course this is hypocritical, but it is not enough to say the right are deforming the true meaning of the term. The point is that compassion is a contested term in Australian political discourse; its meanings are not fixed, but constructed and struggled over by competing political interests. This should not be particularly surprising. Stuart Hall, following Ernesto Laclau and others, famously argued that no political term has an intrinsic meaning. Meanings are produced – articulated, and de- or re-articulated – through a dynamic and partisan “suturing together of elements that have no necessary or eternal belongingness” (10). Compassion has many possible political meanings; it can be articulated to diverse social (and antisocial) ends. If I was writing on the politics of compassion in the US, for example, I would be talking about George W. Bush’s slogan of “compassionate conservatism”, and whatever Hannah Arendt meant when she argued that “the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men [sic] of all revolutions” (65), I think she meant something very different by the term than do, say, Rural Australians for Refugees. As Lauren Berlant has written, “politicized feeling is a kind of thinking that too often assumes the obviousness of the thought it has” (48). Hage has also opened this assumed obviousness to question, writing that “small-‘l’ liberals often translate the social conditions that allow them to hold certain superior ethical views into a kind of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a matter of will” (8-9). These social conditions are complex – it isn’t just that, as some on the right like to assert, compassion is a product of middle class comfort. The actual relations are more dynamic and open. Connections between class and occupational categories on the one hand, and social attitudes and values on the other, are not given but constructed, articulated and struggled over. As Hall put it, the way class functions in the distribution of ideologies is “not as the permanent class-colonization of a discourse, but as the work entailed in articulating these discourses to different political class practices” (139). The point here is to emphasise that the politics of compassion are not straightforward, and that we can recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings. For example, a politics that takes compassion as its basis seems ill-suited to think through issues it can’t put a human face to – that is, the systematic and structural conditions for mandatory detention and border control. Compassion’s political investments accrue to specifiable individuals and groups, and to the harms done to them. This is not, as such, a bad thing, particularly if you happen to be a specifiable individual to whom a substantive harm has been done. But compassion, going one by one, group by group, doesn’t cope well with situations where the form of the one, or the form of the disadvantaged minority, constitutes not only a basis for aid or emancipation, but also violently imposes particular ideas of modern western subjectivity. How does this violence work? I want to answer by way of the story of an Iranian man who applied for asylum in Australia in 2004. In the available documents he is referred to as “the Applicant”. The Applicant claimed asylum based on his hom*osexuality, and his fear of persecution should he return to Iran. His asylum application was rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal because the Tribunal did not believe he was really gay. In their decision they write that “the Tribunal was surprised to observe such a comprehensive inability on the Applicant’s part to identify any kind of emotion-stirring or dignity-arousing phenomena in the world around him”. The phenomena the Tribunal suggest might have been emotion-stirring for a gay Iranian include Oscar Wilde, Alexander the Great, Andre Gide, Greco-Roman wrestling, Bette Midler, and Madonna. I can personally think of much worse bases for immigration decisions than Madonna fandom, but there is obviously something more at stake here. (All quotes from the hearing are taken from the High Court transcript “WAAG v MIMIA”. I have been unable to locate a transcript of the original RRT decision, and so far as I know it remains unavailable. Thanks to Mark Pendleton for drawing my attention to this case, and for help with references.) Justice Kirby, one of the presiding Justices at the Applicant’s High Court appeal, responded to this with the obvious point, “Madonna, Bette Midler and so on are phenomena of the Western culture. In Iran, where there is death for some people who are hom*osexuals, these are not in the forefront of the mind”. Indeed, the High Court is repeatedly critical and even scornful of the Tribunal decision. When Mr Bennett, who is appearing for the Minister for Immigration in the appeal begins his case, he says, “your Honour, the primary attack which seems to be made on the decision of the –”, he is cut off by Justice Gummow, who says, “Well, in lay terms, the primary attack is that it was botched in the Tribunal, Mr Solicitor”. But Mr Bennett replies by saying no, “it was not botched. If one reads the whole of the Tribunal judgement, one sees a consistent line of reasoning and a conclusion being reached”. In a sense this is true; the deep tragicomic weirdness of the Tribunal decision is based very much in the unfolding of a particular form of hom*ophobic rationality specific to border control and refugee determination. There have been hundreds of applications for protection specifically from hom*ophobic persecution since 1994, when the first such application was made in Australia. As of 2002, only 22% of those applications had been successful, with the odds stacked heavily against lesbians – only 7% of lesbian applicants were successful, against a shocking enough 26% of gay men (Millbank, Imagining Otherness 148). There are a number of reasons for this. The Tribunal has routinely decided that even if persecution had occurred on the basis of hom*osexuality, the Applicant would be able to avoid such persecution if she or he acted ‘discreetly’, that is, hid their sexuality. The High Court ruled out this argument in 2003, but the Tribunal maintains an array of effective techniques of hom*ophobic exclusion. For example, the Tribunal often uses the Spartacus International Gay Guide to find out about local conditions of lesbian and gay life even though it is a tourist guide book aimed at Western gay men with plenty of disposable income (Dauvergne and Millbank 178-9). And even in cases which have found in favour of particular lesbian and gay asylum seekers, the Tribunal has often gone out of its way to assert that lesbians and gay men are, nevertheless, not the subjects of human rights. States, that is, violate no rights when they legislate against lesbian and gay identities and practices, and the victims of such legislation have no rights to protection (Millbank, Fear 252-3). To go back to Madonna. Bennett’s basic point with respect to the references to the Material Girl et al is that the Tribunal specifically rules them as irrelevant. Mr Bennett: The criticism which is being made concerns a question which the Tribunal asked and what is very much treated in the Tribunal’s judgement as a passing reference. If one looks, for example, at page 34 – Kirby J: This is where Oscar, Alexander and Bette as well as Madonna turn up? Mr Bennett: Yes. The very paragraph my learned friend relies on, if one reads the sentence, what the Tribunal is saying is, “I am not looking for these things”. Gummow J: Well, why mention it? What sort of training do these people get in decision making before they are appointed to this body, Mr Solicitor? Mr Bennett: I cannot assist your Honour on that. Gummow J: No. Well, whatever it is, what happened here does not speak highly of the results of it. To gloss this, Bennett argues that the High Court are making too much of an irrelevant minor point in the decision. Mr Bennett: One would think [based on the High Court’s questions] that the only things in this judgement were the throwaway references saying, “I wasn’t looking for an understanding of Oscar Wilde”, et cetera. That is simply, when one reads the judgement as a whole, not something which goes to the centre at all… There is a small part of the judgement which could be criticized and which is put, in the judgement itself, as a subsidiary element and prefaced with the word “not”. Kirby J: But the “not” is a bit undone by what follows when I think Marilyn [Monroe] is thrown in. Mr Bennett: Well, your Honour, I am not sure why she is thrown in. Kirby J: Well, that is exactly the point. Mr Bennett holds that, as per Wayne’s World, the word “not” negates any clause to which it is attached. Justice Kirby, on the other hand, feels that this “not” comes undone, and that this undoing – and the uncertainty that accrues to it – is exactly the point. But the Tribunal won’t be tied down on this, and makes use of its “not” to hold gay stereotypes at arm’s length – which is still, of course, to hold them, at a remove that will insulate hom*ophobia against its own illegitimacy. The Tribunal defends itself against accusations of hom*ophobia by announcing specifically and repeatedly, in terms that consciously evoke culturally specific gay stereotypes, that it is not interested in those stereotypes. This unconvincing alibi works to prevent any inconvenient accusations of bias from butting in on the routine business of heteronormativity. Paul Morrison has noted that not many people will refuse to believe you’re gay: “Claims to normativity are characteristically met with scepticism. Only parents doubt confessions of deviance” (5). In this case, it is not a parent but a paternalistic state apparatus. The reasons the Tribunal did not believe the applicant [were] (a) because of “inconsistencies about the first sexual experience”, (b) “the uniformity of relationships”, (c) the “absence of a “gay” circle of friends”, (d) “lack of contact with the “gay” underground” and [(e)] “lack of other forms of identification”. Of these the most telling, I think, are the last three: a lack of gay friends, of contact with the gay underground, or of unspecified other forms of identification. What we can see here is that even if the Tribunal isn’t looking for the stereotypical icons of Western gay culture, it is looking for the characteristic forms of Western gay identity which, as we know, are far from universal. The assumptions about the continuities between sex acts and identities that we codify with names like lesbian, gay, hom*osexual and so on, often very poorly translate the ways in which non-Western populations understand and describe themselves, if they translate them at all. Gayatri Gopinath, for example, uses the term “queer diaspor[a]... in contradistinction to the globalization of “gay” identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all other sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity” (11). I can’t assess the accuracy of the Tribunal’s claims regarding the Applicant’s social life, although I am inclined to scepticism. But if the Applicant in this case indeed had no gay friends, no contact with the gay underground and no other forms of identification with the big bad world of gaydom, he may obviously, nevertheless, have been a Man Who Has Sex With Men, as they sometimes say in AIDS prevention work. But this would not, either in the terms of Australian law or the UN Convention, qualify him as a refugee. You can only achieve refugee status under the terms of the Convention based on membership of a ‘specific social group’. Lesbians and gay men are held to constitute such groups, but what this means is that there’s a certain forcing of Western identity norms onto the identity and onto the body of the sexual other. This shouldn’t read simply as a moral point about how we should respect diversity. There’s a real sense that our own lives as political and sexual beings are radically impoverished to the extent we fail to foster and affirm non-Western non-heterosexualities. There’s a sustaining enrichment that we miss out on, of course, in addition to the much more serious forms of violence others will be subject to. And these are kinds of violence as well as forms of enrichment that compassionate politics, organised around the good refugee, just does not apprehend. In an essay on “The politics of bad feeling”, Sara Ahmed makes a related argument about national shame and mourning. “Words cannot be separated from bodies, or other signs of life. So the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some more than others represent the nation in mourning), and it might get attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation)” (73). At one level, these points are often made with regard to compassion, especially as it is racialised in Australian politics; for example, that there would be a public outcry were we to detain hypothetical white boat people. But Ahmed’s point stretches further – in the necessary relation between words and bodies, she asks not only which bodies do the describing and which are described, but which are permitted a relation to language at all? If “words cannot be separated from bodies”, what happens to those bodies words fail? The queer diasporic body, so reductively captured in that phrase, is a case in point. How do we honour its singularity, as well as its sociality? How do we understand the systematicity of the forces that degrade and subjugate it? What do the politics of compassion have to offer here? It’s easy for the critic or the cynic to sneer at such politics – so liberal, so sentimental, so wet – or to deconstruct them, expose “the violence of sentimentality” (Berlant 62), show “how compassion towards the other’s suffering might sustain the violence of appropriation” (Ahmed 74). These are not moves I want to make. A guiding assumption of this essay is that there is never a unilinear trajectory between feelings and politics. Any particular affect or set of affects may be progressive, reactionary, apolitical, or a combination thereof, in a given situation; compassionate politics are no more necessarily bad than they are necessarily good. On the other hand, “not necessarily bad” is a weak basis for a political movement, especially one that needs to understand and negotiate the ways the enclosures and borders of late capitalism mass-produce bodies we can’t put names to, people outside familiar and recognisable forms of identity and subjectivity. As Etienne Balibar has put it, “in utter disregard of certain borders – or, in certain cases, under covers of such borders – indefinable and impossible identities emerge in various places, identities which are, as a consequence, regarded as non-identities. However, their existence is, none the less, a life-and-death question for large numbers of human beings” (77). Any answer to that question starts with our compassion – and our rage – at an unacceptable situation. But it doesn’t end there. References Ahmed, Sara. “The Politics of Bad Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1.1 (2005): 72-85. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics.” Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Ed. Jodi Dean. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000. 42-62. Bureau of Immigration and Population Research. Illegal Entrants in Australia: An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994. Dauvergne, Catherine and Jenni Millbank. “Cruisingforsex.com: An Empirical Critique of the Evidentiary Practices of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.” Alternative Law Journal 28 (2003): 176-81. “False Refugees and Misplaced Compassion” Editorial. Quadrant 390 (2002): 2-4. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto, 2003. Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Joint Standing Committee on Migration. Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Canberra: The Committee, 1990. Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001. Millbank, Jenni. “Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia.” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 144-77. ———. “Fear of Persecution or Just a Queer Feeling? Refugee Status and Sexual orientation in Australia.” Alternative Law Journal 20 (1995): 261-65, 299. Morrison, Paul. The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Pendleton, Mark. “Borderline.” Bite 2 (2004): 3-4. “WAAG v MIMIA [2004]. HCATrans 475 (19 Nov. 2004)” High Court of Australia Transcripts. 2005. 17 Oct. 2005 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/HCATrans/2004/475.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGrath, Shane. "Compassionate Refugee Politics?." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>. APA Style McGrath, S. (Dec. 2005) "Compassionate Refugee Politics?," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>.

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To Remember‘The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural hom*ogenisation and cultural heterogenisation.’ (Appadurai 49)While this statement has been made more than twenty years, it remains more relevant than ever. The current age is one of widespread global migrations and dis-placement. The phenomenon of globalisation is the first and major factor for this newly created shift of ground, of transmigration as defined by its etymological meaning. However, a growing number of migrations also result from social or political oppression and war as we witness the current flow of refugees from Africa or Syria to Europe and with growing momentum, from climate change, the people of Tokelau or Nauru migrating as a result of the rise of sea levels in their South Pacific homeland. Such global migrations lead to an intense co-habitation of various cultures, ethnicities and religions in host societies. In late twentieth century Giddens explains this complexity and discusses how globalisation requires a re-organisation of time and space in social and cultural life of both the host and the migrant (Giddens 14). In the host country, Appadurai terms the physical consequences of this phenomenon as the new ‘ethnoscape’ (Appadurai 51). This fact is particularly relevant to New Zealand, a country that is currently seeing an unprecedented level of immigration from various and numerous ethnic groups which is evidently influencing the makeup of its entire population.For the migrant, according to Xavier & Rosaldo, social life following migration re-establishes itself on two fronts: the first is the pre-modern manner of being present through participation in localised activities at specific locales; the second is about fostering relationships with absent others through media and across the world. These “settings for distanced relations – for relations at a distance, [are] stretched out across time and space” (Xavier & Rosaldo 8). Throughout the world, people in dis-placement reorganise their societies in both of these fronts.Dis-placement is ‘a potentially traumatic event that is collectively experienced" (Norris 128). Disaster and trauma related dis-placement as stressors happen to entire communities, not just individuals, families and neighbourhoods. Members are exposed together and it has been argued, must, therefore, recover together, (Norris 145). On one hand, in the situation of collective trauma some attachment to a new space ‘increases the likelihood that a community as a whole has the will to rebuild’ (Norris 145). On the other, it is suggested that for the individual, place attachment makes the necessary relocation much harder. It is in re-location however that the will to recreate or reproduce will emerge. Indeed part of the recovery in the case of relocation can be the reconstruction of place. The places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad. The will and ability to reimagine and re-materialise (Gupta & Ferguson 70) the lost heritage is motivational and defines resilience.This is something a great deal of communities such as the displaced Coptic community in New Zealand look to achieve, re-constructing a familiar space, where rituals and meaning can reaffirm their ideal existence, the only form of existence they have ever known before relocation. In this instance it is the reconstruction and reinterpretation of a traditional Coptic Orthodox church. Resilience can be examined as a ‘sense of community’, a concept that binds people with shared values. Concern for community and respect for others can transcend the physical and can bind disparate individuals in ways that otherwise might require more formal organisations. It has been noted that trauma due to displacement and relocation can enhance a sense of closeness and stronger belonging (Norris 139). Indeed citizen participation is fundamental to community resilience (Norris 139) and it entails the engagement of community members in formal organisations, including religious congregations (Perkins et al. 2002; Norris 139) and collective gatherings around cultural rituals. However, the displacement also strengthens the emotional ties at the individual level to the homeland, to kinfolk and to the more abstract cultural mores and ideas.Commitment and AttachmentRecalling places of collective events and rituals such as assembly halls and spaces of worship is crucially important for dis-placed communities. The attachment to place exposes the challenges and opportunities for recollecting the spirit of space in the situation of a people abroad. This in turn, raises the question of memory and its representation in re-creating the architectural qualities of the cultural space from its original context. This article offers the employ of visual representation (drawings) as a strategy of recall. To explore these ideas further, the situation of the Egyptian community of Coptic Orthodox faith, relocated, displaced and living ‘abroad’ in New Zealand is being considered. This small community that emigrated to New Zealand firstly in the 1950s then in the 1970s represents in many ways the various ethnicities and religious beliefs found in New Zealand.Rituals and congregations are held in collective spaces and while the attachment to the collective is essential, the question to be addressed here relates to the role of the physical community space in forming or maintaining the attachment to community (Pretty, Chipuer, and Bramston 78). Groups or societies use systems of shared meanings to interpret and make sense of the world. However, shared meanings have traditionally been tied to the idea of a fixed territory (Manzo & Devine-Wright 335, Xavier & Rosaldo 10). Manzo and Perkins further suggest that place attachments provide stability and are integral to self-definitions (335-350). Image by Vioula Said.Stability and self-definition and ultimately identity are in turn, placed in jeopardy with the process of displacement and de-territorilisation. Shared meanings are shifted and potentially lost when the resultant instability occurs. Norris finds that in the strongest cases, individuals, neighbourhoods and communities lose their sense of identity and self-definition when displaced due to the destruction of natural and built environments (Norris 139). This comment is particularly relevant to people who are emigrating to New Zealand as refugees from climate change such as Pasifika or from wars and oppression such as the Coptic community. This loss strengthens the requirement for something greater than just a common space of congregation, something that transcends the physical. The sense of belonging and identity in the complexity of potential cultural heterogenisation is at issue. The role of architecture in dis-placement is thereby brought into question seeking answers to how it should facilitate a space of attachment for resilience, for identity and for belonging.A unity of place and people has long been assumed in the anthropological concept of culture (Gupta & Ferguson: 75). According to Xavier & Rosaldo the historical tendency has been to connect the realm of constructing meaning to the particularities of place (Xavier & Rosaldo 10). Thereby, cultural meanings are intrinsically linked to place. Therefore, place attachment to the reproduced or re-interpreted place is crucially important for dis-placed societies in re-establishing social and cultural content. Architectural spaces are the obvious holders of cultural, social and spiritual content for such enterprises. Hillier suggests that all "architecture is, in essence, the application of speculative and abstract thought to the non-discursive aspects of building, and because it is so, it is also its application to the social and cultural contents of buildings” (Hillier 3).To Re-ImagineAn attempt to reflect the history, stories and the cultural mores of the Coptic community in exile by privileging material and design authenticity, merits attention. An important aspect of the Coptic faith lies within its adherence to symbolism and rituals and strict adherence to the traditional forms and configurations of space may reflect some authenticity of the customary qualities of the space (Said 109). However, the original space is itself in flux, changing with time and environmental conditions; as are the memories of those travelling abroad as they come from different moments in time. Experience has shown that a communities’ will to re-establish social and cultural content through their traditional architecture on new sites has not always resurrected their history and reignited their original spirit. The impact of the new context’s reality on the reproduction or re interpretation of place may not fully enable its entire community’s attachment to it. There are significant implications from the displacement of site that lead to a disassociation from the former architectural language. Consequently there is a cultural imperative for an approach that entails the engagement of community in the re-making of a cultural space before responding to the demands of site. Cultures come into conflict when the new ways of knowing and acting are at odds with the old. Recreating a place without acknowledging these tensions may lead to non-attachment. Facing cultural paradox and searching for authenticity explains in part, the value of intangible heritage and the need to privilege it over its tangible counterpart.Intangible HeritageThe intangible qualities of place and the memory of them are anchors for a dis-placed community to reimagine and re-materialise its lost heritage and to recreate a new place for attachment. This brings about the notion of the authenticity of cultural heritage, it exposes the uncertain value of reconstruction and it exhibits the struggles associated with de-territorilisation in such a process.In dealing with cultural heritage and contemporary conservation practice with today’s wider understanding of the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies, several authors discuss the relevance and applicability of the 1964 Venice Charter on architectural heritage. Glendinning argues that today’s heritage practices exploit the physical remains of the past for useful modern and aesthetic purposes as they are less concerned with the history they once served (Glendinning 3). For example, the act of modernising and restoring a historic museum is counterbalanced by its ancient exhibits thereby highlighting modern progress. Others support this position by arguing that relationships, associations and meanings that contribute to the value of a site should not be dismissed in favour of physical remains (Hill 21). Smith notes that the less tangible approaches struggle to gain leverage within conventional practice, and therefore lack authenticity. This can be evidenced in so many of our reconstructed heritage sites. This leads to the importance of the intangible when dealing with architectural heritage. Image by Vioula Said.In practice, a number of different methods and approaches are employed to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. In order to provide a common platform for considering intangible heritage, UNESCO developed the 2003 ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’. Rather than simply addressing physical heritage, this convention helped to define the intangible and served to promote its recognition. Intangible cultural heritage is defined as expressions, representations, practices, skills and knowledge that an individual a community or group recognise as their cultural heritage.Safeguarding intangible heritage requires a form of translation, for example, from the oral form into a material form, e.g. archives, inventories, museums and audio or film records. This ‘freezing’ of intangible heritage requires thoughtfulness and care in the choosing of the appropriate methods and materials. At the same time, the ephemeral aspects of intangible heritage make it vulnerable to being absorbed by the typecast cultural models predominant at any particular time. This less tangible characteristic of history and the pivotal role it plays in conveying a dialogue between the past and the present demands alternative methods. At a time when the identity of dis-placed people is in danger of being diminished by dominant host societies, the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage is critically important in re-establishing social and cultural content.Recent news has shown the destruction of many Coptic churches in Egypt, through fire at increasing rates since 2011 or by bombings such as the ones witnessed in April 2017. For this particular problem of the Coptic Community, the authors propose that visual representation of spiritual spaces may aid in recollecting and re-establishing such heritage. The illustrations in this article present the personal journey of an artist of Egyptian Copt descent drawing from her memories of a place and time within the sphere of religious rituals. As Treib suggests, “Our recollections are situational and spatialised memories; they are memories attached to places and events” (Treib 22). The intertwining of real and imagined memory navigates to define the spirit of place of a lost time and community.The act of remembering is a societal ritual and in and of itself is part of the globalised world we live in today. The memories lodged in physical places range from incidents of personal biography to the highly refined and extensively interpreted segments of cultural lore (Treib 63). The act of remembering allows for our sense of identity and reflective cultural distinctiveness as well as shaping our present lives from that of our past. To remember is to celebrate or to commemorate the past (Treib 25).Memory has the aptitude to generate resilient links between self and environment, self and culture, as well as self and collective. “Our access to the past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness or a narrator, or by the eye of a photographer. We will not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it” (van Alphen 11). This statement aligns with Smith’s critical analysis of heritage and identity, not as a set of guidelines but as a performance experienced through the imagination, “experienced within a layering of performative qualities that embody remembrance and commemoration and aim to construct a sense of place and understanding within the present”(van Alphen 11). Heritage is hereby investigated as a re-constructed experience; attempting to identify a palette of memory-informed qualities that can be applied to the re-establishing of the heritage lost. Here memory will be defined as Aristotle’s Anamnesis, to identify the capacity to stimulate a range of physical and sensory experiences in the retrieval of heritage that may otherwise be forgotten (Cubitt 75; Huyssen 80). In architectural terms, Anamnesis, refers to the process of retrieval associated with intangible heritage, as a performance aimed at the recovery of memory, experienced through the imagination (Said 143). Unfortunately, when constructing an experience aimed at the recovery of memory, the conditions of a particular moment do not, once passed, move into a state of retirement from which they can be retrieved at a later date. Likewise, the conditions and occurrences of one moment can never be precisely recaptured, Treib describes memory as an interventionist:it magnifies, diminishes, adjusts, darkens, or illuminates places that are no longer extant, transforming the past anew every time it is called to mind, shorn or undesirable reminiscence embellished by wishful thinking, coloured by present concerns. (Treib 188)To remember them, Cubitt argues, we must reconstruct them; “not in the sense of reassembling something that has been taken to pieces and carefully stored, but in the sense of imaginatively configuring something that can no longer have the character of actuality” (Cubitt 77). Image by Vioula Said.Traditionally, history and past events have been put in writing to preserve their memory within the present. However, as argued by Treib, this mode of representation is inherently linear and static; contributing to a flattening of history. Similarly, Nelson states; “I consider how a visual mode of representation – as opposed to textual or oral – helps to shape memory” (Nelson 37). The unflattening of past events can occur by actively engaging with culture and tradition through the mechanism of reconstruction and representation of the intangible heritage (Said 145). As memory becomes crucial in affirming collective identity, place also becomes crucial in anchoring such experience. Interactive exhibition facilitates this act using imagery, interpretation and physical engagement while architectural place gives distinctiveness to cultural products and practices. Architectural space is always intrinsically bound with cultural practice. Appadurai says that where a groups’ past increasingly becomes part of museums, exhibits and collection, its culture becomes less a realm of reproducible practices and more an arena of choices and cultural reproduction (59). When place is shifted (de-territorilisation in migration) the loss of territorial roots brings “an erosion of the cultural distinctiveness of places, a de-territorilisation of identity” (Gupta & Ferguson 68). According to Gupta & Ferguson, “remembered places have …. often served as symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people” (Gupta & Ferguson 69).To Re-MakeIn the context of de-territorialisation the intangible qualities of the original space offer an avenue for the creation and experience of a new space in the spirit of its source. Simply reproducing a traditional building layout in the new territory or recollecting artefacts does not suffice in recalling the essence of place, nor does descriptive writing no matter how compelling. Issues of authenticity and identity underpin both of these strategies. Accepting the historical tendency to reconnect the realm of constructing meaning to the particularities of place requires an investigation on those ‘particularities of place’. Intangible heritage can bridge the problems of being out of one’s country, overseas, or ‘abroad’. While architecture can be as Hillier suggests, “in essence, the application of speculative and abstract thought to the non-discursive aspects of building” (Hillier 3). Architecture should not be reproduced but rather re-constructed as a holder or facilitator of recollection and collective performance. It is within the performance of intangible heritage in the ‘new’ architecture that a sense of belonging, identity and reconnection with home can be experienced abroad. Its visual representation takes centre stage in the process. The situation of the Egyptian community of Coptic faith in New Zealand is here looked at as an illustration. The intangibility of architectural heritage is created through one of the author’s graphic work here presented. Image by Vioula Said.The concept of drawing as an anchor for memory and drawing as a method to inhabit space is exposed and this presents a situation where drawing has an experiential nature in itself.It has been argued that a drawing is simply an image that compresses an entire experience of temporality. Pallasmaa suggests that “every drawing is an excavation into the past and memory of its creator” (Pallasmaa 91). The drawing is considered as a process of both observation and expression, of receiving and giving. The imagined or the remembered space turns real and becomes part of the experiential reality of the viewer and of the image maker. The drawing as a visual representation of the remembered experience within the embrace of an interior space is drawn from the image maker’s personal experience. It is the expression of their own recollection and not necessarily the precise realityor qualities perceived or remembered by others. This does not suggest that such drawing has a limited value. This article promotes the idea that such visual representation has potentially a shared transformative role. The development of drawings in this realm of intangible heritage exposes the fact that the act of drawing memory may provide an intimate relationship between architecture, past events within the space, the beholder of the memory and eventually the viewer of the drawing. The drawings can be considered a reminder of moments past, and an alternative method to the physical reproduction or preservation of the built form. It is a way to recollect, express and give new value to the understanding of intangible heritage, and constructs meaning.From the development of a personal spatial and intuitive recall to produce visual expressions of a remembered space and time, the image author optimistically seeks others to deeply engage with these images of layered memories. They invite the viewer to re-create their own memory by engaging with the author’s own perception. Simply put, drawings of a personal memory are offered as a convincing representation of intangible heritage and as an authentic expression of the character or essence of place to its audience. This is offered as a method of reconstructing what is re-membered, as a manifestation of symbolic anchor and as a first step towards attachment to place. The relevance of which may be pertinent for people in exile in a foreign land.ReferencesAppadurai, A. “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography.” The Geography of Identity. Ed. Patricia Yaeger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997. 40–58. Brown, R.H., and B. Brown. “The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museum in the Construction of National Consciousness.” History of Human Sciences 11.4 (1993): 17–32.Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. London: Oxford UP, 2013.Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants. Ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006.Glendinning, Miles. The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation: Antiquity to Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013.Hill, Jennifer. The Double Dimension: Heritage and Innovation. Canberra: The Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 2004.Hillier, Bill, Space Is the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge UP, 1996.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Lira, Sergio, and Rogerio Amoeda. Constructing Intangible Heritage. Barcelos, Portugal: Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development, 2010.Manzo, Lynne C., and Douglas Perkins. “Finding Common Ground: The Importance of Place Attachment to Community Participation and Planning.” Journal of Planning Literature 20 (2006): 335–350. Manzo, Lynne C., and Patrick Devine-Wright. Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. London: Routledge. 2013.Nelson, Robert S., and Margaret Olin. Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003.Norris, F.H., S.P. Stevens, B. Pfefferbaum, KF. Wyche, and R.L. Pfefferbaum. “Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities and Strategy for Disaster Readiness.” American Journal of Community Psychology 41 (2008): 127–150.Perkins, D.D., J. Hughey, and P.W. Speer. “Community Psychology Perspectives on Social Capital Theory and Community Development Practice.” Journal of the Community Development Society 33.1 (2002): 33–52.Pretty, Grace, Heather H. Chipuer, and Paul Bramston. “Sense of Place Amongst Adolescents and Adults in Two Rural Australian Towns: The Discriminating Features of Place Attachment, Sense of Community and Place Dependence in Relation to Place Identity.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 23.3 (2003): 273–87.Said, Vioula. Coptic Ruins Reincarnated. Thesis. Master of Interior Architecture. Victoria University of Wellington, 2014.Smith, Laura Jane. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2006.Treib, Marc. Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2013.UNESCO. “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Human Heritage.” 2003. 15 Aug. 2017 <http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention>.Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.Xavier, Jonathan, and Renato Rosaldo. “Thinking the Global.” The Anthropology of Globalisation. Eds. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo. Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2002.

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By most accounts, “resilience” is a pretty resilient concept. Or policy instrument. Or heuristic tool. It’s this last that really concerns us here: resilience not as a politics, but rather as a descriptive device for attempts in the humanities—particularly in rhetoric and cultural studies—to adequately describe a discursive event. Or rather, to adequately describe a class of discursive events: those that involve rhetorical resistance by victimised subjects. I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Descriptive; Reading) that Peircean semiosis, inflected by a rhetorical postulate of genre, equips us well to closely describe a discursive event. Here, I want briefly to suggest that resilience—“discursive” resilience, to coin a term—might usefully supplement these hypotheses, at least from time to time. To support this suggestion, I’ll signal some uses of resilience before turning briefly to a case study: a sensational Argentine homicide case, which occurred in October 2002, and came to be known as the caso Belsunce. At the time, Argentina was wracked by economic crises and political instability. The imposition of severe restrictions on cash withdrawals from bank deposits had provoked major civil unrest. Between 21 December 2001 and 2 January 2002, Argentines witnessed a succession of five presidents. “Resilient” is a term that readily comes to mind to describe many of those who endured this catastrophic period. To describe the caso Belsunce, however—to describe its constitution and import as a discursive event—we might appeal to some more disciplinary-specific understandings of resilience. Glossing Peircean semiosis as a teleological process, Short notes that “one and the same thing […] may be many different signs at once” (106). Any given sign, in other words, admits of multiple interpretants or uptakes. And so it is with resilience, which is both a keyword in academic disciplines ranging from psychology to ecology and political science, and a buzzword in several corporate domains and spheres of governmental activity. It’s particularly prevalent in the discourses of highly networked post-9/11 Anglophone societies. So what, pray tell, is resilience? To the American Psychological Association, resilience comprises “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity.” To the Resilience Solutions Group at Arizona State University, resilience is “the capacity to recover fully from acute stressors, to carry on in the face of chronic difficulties: to regain one’s balance after losing it.” To the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience amounts to the “capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds,” while to the Resilience Alliance, resilience is similarly “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt xiii). The adjective “resilient” is thus predicated of those entities, individuals or collectivities, which exhibit “resilience”. A “resilient Australia,” for example, is one “where all Australians are better able to adapt to change, where we have reduced exposure to risks, and where we are all better able to bounce back from disaster” (Australian Government). It’s tempting here to synthesise these statements with a sense of “ordinary language” usage to derive a definitional distillate: “resilience” is a capacity attributed to an entity which recovers intact from major injury. This capacity is evidenced in a reaction or uptake: a “resilient” entity is one which suffers some insult or disturbance, but whose integrity is held to have been maintained, or even enhanced, by its resistive or adaptive response. A conjecturally “resilient” entity is thus one which would presumably evince resilience if faced with an unrealised aversive event. However, such abstractions ignore how definitional claims do rhetorical work. On any given occasion, how “resilience” and its cognates are construed and what they connote are a function, at least in part, of the purposes of rhetorical agents and the protocols and objects of the disciplines or genres in which these agents put these terms to work. In disciplines operating within the same form of life or sphere of activity—disciplines sharing general conventions and broad objects of inquiry, such as the capacious ecological sciences or the contiguous fields of study within the ambit of applied psychology—resilience acts, at least at times, as a something of a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer). Correlatively, across more diverse and distant fields of inquiry, resilience can work in more seemingly exclusive or contradictory ways (see Handmer and Dovers). Rhetorical aims and disciplinary objects similarly determine the originary tales we are inclined to tell. In the social sciences, the advent of resilience is often attributed to applied psychology, indebted, in turn, to epidemiology (see Seery, Holman and Cohen Silver). In environmental science, by contrast, resilience is typically taken to be a theory born in ecology (indebted to engineering and to the physical sciences, in particular to complex systems theory [see Janssen, Schoon, Ke and Börner]). Having no foundational claim to stake and, moreover, having different purposes and taking different objects, some more recent uptakes of resilience, in, for instance, securitisation studies, allow for its multidisciplinary roots (see Bourbeau; Kaufmann). But if resilience is many things to many people, a couple of commonalities in its range of translations should be drawn out. First, irrespective of its discipline or sphere of activity, talk of resilience typically entails construing an object of inquiry qua system, be that system an individual, a community of circ*mstance, a state, a socio-ecological unit or some differently delimited entity. This bounded system suffers some insult with no resulting loss of structural, relational, functional or other integrity. Second, resilience is usually marshalled to promote a politics. Resilience talk often consorts with discourses of meliorative action and of readily quantifiable practical effects. When the environmental sciences take the “Earth system” and the dynamics of global change as their objects of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the elaboration and implementation of natural resource management policy. Proponents of socio-ecological resilience see the resilience hypothesis as enabling a demonstrably more enlightened stewardship of the biosphere (see Folke et al.; Holling; Walker and Salt). When applied psychology takes the anomalous situation of disadvantaged, at-risk individuals triumphing over trauma as its declared object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the positing and identification of personal and environmental resources or protective factors which would enable the overcoming of adversity. Proponents of psychosocial resilience see this concept as enabling the elaboration and implementation of interventions to foster individual and collective wellbeing (see Goldstein and Brooks; Ungar). Similarly, when policy think-tanks and government departments and agencies take the apprehension of particular threats to the social fabric as their object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience—or of a lack thereof—is critical to the elaboration and implementation of urban infrastructure, emergency planning and disaster management policies (see Drury et al.; Handmer and Dovers). However, despite its often positive connotations, resilience is well understood as a “normatively open” (Bourbeau 11) concept. This openness is apparent in some theories and practices of resilience. In limnological modelling, for example, eutrophication can result in a lake’s being in an undesirable, albeit resilient, turbid-water state (see Carpenter et al.; Walker and Meyers). But perhaps the negative connotations or indeed perverse effects of resilience are most apparent in some of its political uptakes. Certainly, governmental operationalisations of resilience are coming under increased scrutiny. Chief among the criticisms levelled at the “muddled politics” (Grove 147) of and around resilience is that its mobilisation works to constitute a particular neoliberal subjectivity (see Joseph; Neocleous). By enabling a conservative focus on individual responsibility, preparedness and adaptability, the topos of resilience contributes critically to the development of neoliberal governmentality (Joseph). In a practical sense, this deployment of resilience silences resistance: “building resilient subjects,” observe Evans and Reid (85), “involves the deliberate disabling of political habits. […] Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions.” It’s this prospect of practical acquiescence that sees resistance at times opposed to resilience (Neocleous). “Good intentions not withstanding,” notes Grove (146), “the effect of resilience initiatives is often to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo.” There’s much to commend in these analyses of how neoliberal uses of resilience constitute citizens as highly accommodating of capital and the state. But such critiques pertain to the governmental mobilisation of resilience in the contemporary “advanced liberal” settings of “various Anglo-Saxon countries” (Joseph 47). There are, of course, other instances—other events in other times and places—in which resilience indisputably sorts with resistance. Such an event is the caso Belsunce, in which a rhetorically resilient journalistic community pushed back, resisting some of the excesses of a corrupt neoliberal Argentine regime. I’ll turn briefly to this infamous case to suggest that a notion of “discursive resilience” might afford us some purchase when it comes to describing discursive events. To be clear: we’re considering resilience here not as an anticipatory politics, but rather as an analytic device to supplement the descriptive tools of Peircean semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre. As such, it’s more an instrument than an answer: a program, perhaps, for ongoing work. Although drawing on different disciplinary construals of the term, this use of resilience would be particularly indebted to the resilience thinking developed in ecology (see Carpenter el al.; Folke et al.; Holling; Walker et al.; Walker and Salt). Things would, of course, be lost in translation (see Adger; Gallopín): in taking a discursive event, rather than the dynamics of a socio-ecological system, as our object of inquiry, we’d retain some topological analogies while dispensing with, for example, Holling’s four-phase adaptive cycle (see Carpenter et al.; Folke; Gunderson; Gunderson and Holling; Walker et al.). For our purposes, it’s unlikely that descriptions of ecosystem succession need to be carried across. However, the general postulates of ecological resilience thinking—that a system is a complex series of dynamic relations and functions located at any given time within a basin of attraction (or stability domain or system regime) delimited by thresholds; that it is subject to multiple attractors and follows trajectories describable over varying scales of time and space; that these trajectories are inflected by exogenous and endogenous perturbations to which the system is subject; that the system either proves itself resilient to these perturbations in its adaptive or resistive response, or transforms, flipping from one domain (or basin) to another may well prove useful to some descriptive projects in the humanities. Resilience is fundamentally a question of uptake or response. Hence, when examining resilience in socio-ecological systems, Gallopín notes that it’s useful to consider “not only the resilience of the system (maintenance within a basin) but also coping with impacts produced and taking advantage of opportunities” (300). Argentine society in the early-to-mid 2000s was one such socio-political system, and the caso Belsunce was both one such impact and one such opportunity. Well-connected in the world of finance, 57-year-old former stockbroker Carlos Alberto Carrascosa lived with his 50-year-old sociologist turned charity worker wife, María Marta García Belsunce, close to their relatives in the exclusive gated community of Carmel Country Club, Pilar, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. At 7:07 pm on Sunday 27 October 2002, Carrascosa called ambulance emergencies, claiming that his wife had slipped and knocked her head while drawing a bath alone that rainy Sunday afternoon. At the time of his call, it transpired, Carrascosa was at home in the presence of intimates. Blood was pooled on the bathroom floor and smeared and spattered on its walls and adjoining areas. María Marta lay lifeless, brain matter oozing from several holes in her left parietal and temporal lobes. This was the moment when Carrascosa, calm and coherent, called emergency services, but didn’t advert the police. Someone, he told the operator, had slipped in the bath and bumped her head. Carrascosa described María Marta as breathing, with a faint pulse, but somehow failed to mention the holes in her head. “A knock with a tap,” a police source told journalist Horacio Cecchi, “really doesn’t compare with the five shots to the head, the spillage of brain matter and the loss of about half a litre of blood suffered by the victim” (Cecchi and Kollmann). Rather than a bathroom tap, María Marta’s head had met with five bullets discharged from a .32-calibre revolver. In effect, reported Cecchi, María Marta had died twice. “While perhaps a common conceit in fiction,” notes Cecchi, “in reality, dying twice is, by definition, impossible. María Marta’s two obscure endings seem to unsettle this certainty.” Her cadaver was eventually subjected to an autopsy, and what had been a tale of clumsiness and happenstance was rewritten, reinscribed under the Argentine Penal Code. The autopsy was conducted 36 days after the burial of María Marta; nine days later, she was mentioned for the second time in the mainstream Argentine press. Her reappearance, however, was marked by a shift in rubrics: from a short death notice in La Nación, María Marta was translated to the crime section of Argentina’s dailies. Until his wife’s mediatic reapparition, Carroscosa and other relatives had persisted with their “accident” hypothesis. Indeed, they’d taken a range of measures to preclude the sorts of uptakes that might ordinarily be expected to flow, under functioning liberal democratic regimes, from the discovery of a corpse with five projectiles lodged in its head. Subsequently recited as part of Carrascosa’s indictment, these measures were extensively reiterated in media coverage of the case. One of the more notorious actions involved the disposal of the sixth bullet, which was found lying under María Marta. In the course of moving the body of his half-sister, John Hurtig retrieved a small metallic object. This discovery was discussed by a number of family members, including Carrascosa, who had received ballistics training during his four years of naval instruction at the Escuela Nacional de Náutica de la Armada. They determined that the object was a lug or connector rod (“pituto”) used in library shelving: nothing, in any case, to indicate a homicide. With this determination made, the “pituto” was duly wrapped in lavatory paper and flushed down the toilet. This episode occasioned a range of outraged articles in Argentine dailies examining the topoi of privilege, power, corruption and impunity. “Distinguished persons,” notes Viau pointedly, “are so disposed […] that in the midst of all that chaos, they can locate a small, hard, steely object, wrap it in lavatory paper and flush it down the toilet, for that must be how they usually dispose of […] all that rubbish that no longer fits under the carpet.” Most often, though, critical comment was conducted by translating the reporting of the case to the genres of crime fiction. In an article entitled Someone Call Agatha Christie, Quick!, H.A.T. writes that “[s]omething smells rotten in the Carmel Country; a whole pile of rubbish seems to have been swept under its plush carpets.” An exemplary intervention in this vein was the work of journalist and novelist Vicente Battista, for whom the case (María Marta) “synthesizes the best of both traditions of crime fiction: the murder mystery and the hard-boiled novels.” “The crime,” Battista (¿Hubo Otra Mujer?) has Rodolfo observe in the first of his speculative dialogues on the case, “seems to be lifted from an Agatha Christie novel, but the criminal turns out to be a copy of the savage killers that Jim Thompson usually depicts.” Later, in an interview in which he correctly predicted the verdict, Battista expanded on these remarks: This familiar plot brings together the English murder mystery and the American hard-boiled novels. The murder mystery because it has all the elements: the crime takes place in a sealed room. In this instance, sealed not only because it occurred in a house, but also in a country, a sealed place of privilege. The victim was a society lady. Burglary is not the motive. In classic murder mystery novels, it was a bit unseemly that one should kill in order to rob. One killed either for a juicy sum of money, or for revenge, or out of passion. In those novels there were neither corrupt judges nor fugitive lawyers. Once Sherlock Holmes […] or Hercule Poirot […] said ‘this is the murderer’, that was that. That’s to say, once fingered in the climactic living room scene, with everyone gathered around the hearth, the perpetrator wouldn’t resist at all. And everyone would be happy because the judges were thought to be upright persons, at least in fiction. […] The violence of the crime of María Marta is part of the hard-boiled novel, and the sealed location in which it takes place, part of the murder mystery (Alarcón). I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Belsunce) that the translation of the case to the genres of crime fiction and their metaanalysis was a means by which a victimised Argentine public, represented by a disempowered and marginalised fourth estate, sought some rhetorical recompense. The postulate of resilience, however, might help further to describe and contextualise this notorious discursive event. A disaffected Argentine press finds itself in a stability domain with multiple attractors: on the one hand, an acquiescence to ever-increasing politico-juridical corruption, malfeasance and elitist impunity; on the other, an attractor of increasing contestation, democratisation, accountability and transparency. A discursive event like the caso Belsunce further perturbs Argentine society, threatening to displace it from its democratising trajectory. Unable to enforce due process, Argentina’s fourth estate adapts, doing what, in the circ*mstances, amounts to the next best thing: it denounces the proceedings by translating the case to the genres of crime fiction. In so doing, it engages a venerable reception history in which the co-constitution of true crime fiction and investigative journalism is exemplified by the figure of Rodolfo Walsh, whose denunciatory works mark a “politicisation of crime” (see Amar Sánchez Juegos; El sueño). Put otherwise, a section of Argentina’s fourth estate bounced back: by making poetics do rhetorical work, it resisted the pull towards what ecology calls an undesirable basin of attraction. Through a show of discursive resilience, these journalists worked to keep Argentine society on a democratising track. References Adger, Neil W. “Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related?” Progress in Human Geography 24.3 (2000): 347-64. Alarcón, Cristina. “Lo Único Real Que Tenemos Es Un Cadáver.” 2007. 12 July 2007 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/subnotas/87986-28144-2007-07-12.html>. Amar Sánchez, Ana María. “El Sueño Eterno de Justicia.” Textos De Y Sobre Rodolfo Walsh. Ed. Jorge Raúl Lafforgue. Buenos Aires: Alianza, 2000. 205-18. ———. Juegos De Seducción Y Traición. Literatura Y Cultura De Masas. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. American Psychological Association. “What Is Resilience?” 2013. 9 Aug 2013 ‹http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience.aspx>. Australian Government. “Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy.” 2009. 9 Aug 2013 ‹http://www.tisn.gov.au/Documents/Australian+Government+s+Critical+Infrastructure+Resilience+Strategy.pdf>. Battista, Vicente. “¿Hubo Otra Mujer?” Clarín 2003. 26 Jan. 2003 ‹http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/01/26/s-03402.htm>. ———. “María Marta: El Relato Del Crimen.” Clarín 2003. 16 Jan. 2003 ‹http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/01/16/o-01701.htm>. Bourbeau, Philippe. “Resiliencism: Premises and Promises in Securitisation Research.” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 3-17. Carpenter, Steve, et al. “From Metaphor to Measurement: Resilience of What to What?” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 765-81. Cecchi, Horacio. “Las Dos Muertes De María Marta.” Página 12 (2002). 12 Dec. 2002 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-14095-2002-12-12.html>. Cecchi, Horacio, and Raúl Kollmann. “Un Escenario Sigilosamente Montado.” Página 12 (2002). 13 Dec. 2002 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-14122-2002-12-13.html>. Drury, John, et al. “Representing Crowd Behaviour in Emergency Planning Guidance: ‘Mass Panic’ or Collective Resilience?” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 18-37. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. “Dangerously Exposed: The Life and Death of the Resilient Subject.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.2 (2013): 83-98. Folke, Carl. “Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social-Ecological Systems Analyses.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 253-67. Folke, Carl, et al. “Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability.” Ecology and Society 15.4 (2010). Gallopín, Gilberto C. “Linkages between Vulnerability, Resilience, and Adaptive Capacity.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 293-303. Goldstein, Sam, and Robert B. Brooks, eds. Handbook of Resilience in Children. New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2006. Grove, Kevin. “On Resilience Politics: From Transformation to Subversion.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.2 (2013): 146-53. Gunderson, Lance H. “Ecological Resilience - in Theory and Application.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 31 (2000): 425-39. Gunderson, Lance H., and C. S. Holling, eds. Panarchy Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington: Island, 2002. Handmer, John W., and Stephen R. Dovers. “A Typology of Resilience: Rethinking Institutions for Sustainable Development.” Organization & Environment 9.4 (1996): 482-511. H.A.T. “Urgente: Llamen a Agatha Christie.” El País (2003). 14 Jan. 2003 ‹http://historico.elpais.com.uy/03/01/14/pinter_26140.asp>. Holling, Crawford S. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1-23. Janssen, Marco A., et al. “Scholarly Networks on Resilience, Vulnerability and Adaptation within the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 240-52. Joseph, Jonathan. “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Governmentality Approach.” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 38-52. Kaufmann, Mareile. “Emergent Self-Organisation in Emergencies: Resilience Rationales in Interconnected Societies.” Resilience: Interational Policies, Practices and Discourses 1.1 (2013): 53-68. Munro, Andrew. “The Belsunce Case Judgement, Uptake, Genre.” Cultural Studies Review 13.2 (2007): 190-204. ———. “The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity.” Culture, Theory and Critique 53.1 (2012). ———. “Reading Austin Rhetorically.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 46.1 (2013): 22-43. Neocleous, Mark. “Resisting Resilience.” Radical Philosophy 178 March/April (2013): 2-7. Resilience Solutions Group, Arizona State U. “What Is Resilience?” 2013. 9 Aug. 2013 ‹http://resilience.asu.edu/what-is-resilience>. Seery, Mark D., E. Alison Holman, and Roxane Cohen Silver. “Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99.6 (2010): 1025-41. Short, Thomas L. “What They Said in Amsterdam: Peirce's Semiotic Today.” Semiotica 60.1-2 (1986): 103-28. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387-420. Stockholm Resilience Centre. “What Is Resilience?” 2007. 9 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/what-is-resilience.html>. Ungar, Michael ed. Handbook for Working with Children and Youth Pathways to Resilience across Cultures and Contexts. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005. 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Introduction In the following self-reflexive (examining my own experiences) piece I discuss the methodology of my PhD thesis which, completed in 2014 (Johnson On a Tightrope), focused on how women negotiate, reject and embody the expectations associated with contemporary pregnancy and mothering. In this qualitative research project I examined the types of pregnancy and parenting practices (defined as those practices undertaken to manage and maximise the success of women’s pregnancies and parenting) women engage in with reference to contemporary sources of information. Central to this, I studied the changing nature of pregnancy and mothering practices in the context of increasing digitalisation, with a particular focus on whether and how technologies enable new spaces for experiential learning and health responsibilisation. This also allowed me to query how various discourses work to inform particular ideas of ‘good’ or ‘appropriate’ mothering behaviours and mothering ideologies, and the expert patient ideal (Johnson Maternal Devices). An examination of the different resources and technologies women draw on during their transition to first-time motherhood reveals how dominant discourses are resisted, negotiated or differentially embodied by women facing first-time pregnancy and motherhood. Since the time I began my research, there has been an explosion of applications (apps) into the market. Pregnancy and mothering have been ‘appified’. Apps offer a unique way to order, engage with and reshape our bodies and biology today. They reflect wider cultural and social changes in the understanding of our identity, our ‘lifestyle’ and our body. In my study I drew on characterisations from participants in attempting to understand the affordances of apps and the role they may play during both pregnancy and new motherhood. I found that apps format motherhood and pregnancy in new ways, instituting new rules into new devices and offering templates which actively shape meanings and practices. They provide new ways to imagine or create foetal/child identity, to monitor child activity from a distance, to gather and interpret data and the enactment of “digital” helicopter parenting (Johnson Maternal Devices). Apps also represent a ‘tidbitisation’ of information which is delivered directly into the user’s intimate sphere, sometimes ‘pushed’ into this intimate sphere, no matter where they are. This ‘device-ification’ of mothering purports to turn it into an administrative and calculable activity, valuing data over subjective experiences and changing the meaning of what it is to mother and be a mother. Apps also represent the contemporary intersection between social media, medical advice, expectations of self-management and notions of convenience. They also creates new social relations and valuing practices, such as ‘likeability’ on Facebook, which have the potential to alter our understandings of health and identity. Increasing numbers of health initiatives are adopting apps in their promotional marketing campaigns and the appification of health means that medical knowledge is being increasingly incorporated into new sorts of social interactions. Ongoing research must consider the multiplicity of women’s engagement with these apps across the transition to first-time motherhood and for parents who are trying to manage child health. It would be productive to direct focus onto the lived experiences associated with apps rather than lauding or criticising the content of apps. Background The initial question that motivated my research was: ‘How do women draw on, weave together, and reject aspects of the dominant advice which configures contemporary perceptions of maternal subjectivity, encompassing specifically the transition to first-time motherhood?’ I was interested in what women in the transition to first-time motherhood experienced and how they reflected on and interpreted these experiences. The subjective accounts of women tell a particular story, so, rather than administering a survey to a large group of women I focused on in-depth, semi-structured but flexible interviews as a way of discovering participant experiences as expressed in their own words. Having only a small number of interview participants meant that I was able to analyse my data closely in a way that would be difficult with a larger sample. In total, I conducted twenty-two interviews with twelve women during January and September, 2012. This included two interviews with ten participants and one interview with the remaining two participants. The first interview was conducted during the third trimester of pregnancy, ranging from 32 to 38 weeks. The second interview was undertaken postnatally when the babies ranged from 3 to 7 months of age. For participant demographic information, please refer to earlier publications (Johnson Maternal Devices; Intimate Mothering Publics). Interviewing late in pregnancy and early in new motherhood provided a realistic sense of the changes, both positive and negative, which occur during this transition as well as the – at times – deep rift between experience and expectation. The time between interviews was important as it allowed women time to adjust somewhat to life as a new mum, allowed time for reflection on both the pregnancy and the early months of mothering. The interviews were conversational and relaxed in nature and allowed to flow in the direction the participant chose to take. The women were generous in sharing intimate details of their experiences from conception through to motherhood. Their responses revealed different ways of being pregnant, being supported and responsibilised during pregnancy, and the different ways women cope with stress, anxiety and more. The stories also demonstrate the amount of work, thought and often deliberate self-transformation which occurs throughout pregnancy, and as a new mother. I believe my personal biography influenced the data that I collected during the interviews. My age and sex advantaged my position as an interviewer. Being a relatively young female researcher it was easy to develop rapport with the participants. In addition, being a woman likely increased my access, as a researcher, to the intimate experiences women shared throughout the interviews, especially considering the gendered and personal nature of the research. It was also apparent that my absence of first-hand experience of pregnancy and mothering enhanced the depth of interview data, encouraging participants to provide access to details and feelings that they may have believed were unnecessary to discuss had I also been a mother. Rebecca Horn discusses a similar experience in her research with prison inmates and police staff, which she describes as being due to her projected image as an “innocent abroad” (96). It also meant that participants were more likely to share details because my lack of experience meant that I was not in a position to judge these experiences against my own. Throughout the interviews, the participants often wanted to know more about me, asking me questions like: How old are you? Have you ever been pregnant? Do you have a partner? Does doing this research turn you off having children? Does doing this research make you want to have children? What do you plan to do after you’ve finished your thesis? Similar to other researchers who discuss their interview experiences in self-reflexive pieces Edwards, Finch and Oakley, I found that by sharing some of my own personal experiences I was able to establish trust and develop rapport with the participants. Like Kasper I worked with the assumption that each interview is a collaborative and consensual enterprise among women. I focused on earning trust, displaying sensitivity and fairness, and showing support. The participants expressed genuine interest in my research and the findings it was generating, with most women keen to read any published findings from the research. Many participants asked to have a copy of their interview transcripts for posterity or to reflect on with friends or in future pregnancies. ‘Getting Personal’ Now that I am contemplating the extension of my research into the future I must think about how my position as a researcher has changed. As one of my key interests is the ways in which digital technologies impact on parenting I have to ask myself whether I will use this broad range of technologies myself, as a parent. If I do use these technologies, will I insert myself into my research asking questions about my own user experiences and considering whether my partner uses these technologies in a different way to myself? If so, how, and what are the implications of this? I also need to consider my child amongst this, as both a parent and a researcher. Am I comfortable with my child having a digital life from a young age? I have already contemplated this question and made the conscious decision not to discuss or mention my pregnancy on social media, Facebook in particular. This question will again be important when my partner and I make decisions around the different ways we choose to announce the birth of our first child. These questions will continue to be important to me as a parent in an increasingly digitalised world. Until I become a mother, (some time in the next five weeks) I believe I cannot answer these questions. Rather, this article functions as a sounding board, allowing me to begin contemplating these questions in my future dual role as a mother and a researcher. Becoming a mother will change my position as a researcher in other important ways. I will no longer be the inexperienced, childless researcher. I will continue to treat my participants as partners in my research but being a mother myself, intersubjectivity, “the acknowledgment of the reciprocal sharing of knowledge and experience between the researcher and the researched” (Shields and Dervin 67), will become all the more essential to my approach. In this way I would hope to continue to de-emphasise the conventional hierarchies and dichotomies of research by focusing on the dialectical relationship between myself and my research ‘partners’. It will be imperative that I not only listen to these women without judgement but that I also share the intricacies of my research project and my own experiences as a maternal subject. These women are the experts of their own lives (Kasper) and I am sure this research would benefit from their involvement from an early phase where they would be invited to share in the design of research questions and the collection and interpretation of results. This is particularly important when designing research on new technologies where the only experiences I can currently draw from are my own and perhaps those of friends, family and colleagues. Digital research methodologies are still in their infancy, as this special issue attests, and although research into the use of apps is growing, there continues to be little research into the user experiences of apps. Apps as Tools of Convenience? As noted above, apps create a “tidbitisation” of information (Johnson Maternal Devices), where information is convenient and accessible in small ‘tidbits’ that anyone can access anywhere, anytime on their smartphone. This is something I have already utilised during my pregnancy (checking symptoms, reading about baby’s development) and I am sure this will be useful for me as a new mum. I have also been using my smartphone for other baby-related resources such as gathering lists of lullabies and nursery rhymes. These few examples indicate that smartphones do offer a great number of conveniences to new parents. But, they could also appear worrisome – raising questions around smartphones as distractions from parenting or relying on smartphones to track health conditions or baby habits, and perhaps even the deferral of responsibility, for example, busy parents using apps to entertain children. At this stage we actually know very little about the user experience of apps for mothers and new parents and new research in this area needs to ask questions such as: Who uses apps and why? What are users paying attention to and what is ignored or ‘switched off’? Do push notifications actually work? Do they create a new form of responsibilisation and if so, what are the repercussions of this, particularly if these apps are directed towards women as new parents, rather than men? This last question is particularly important for a scholar such as myself in the field of Gender and Cultural Studies where questions of gender and gendering are often central to our research. I have found that, as apps continue to be developed at an alarming rate, those specific to parenting are, more often than not targeted to women rather than men. Those that are targeted to men are often patronising and poorly executed, lacking detailed information and emphasising gendered stereotypes (for examples, see Johnson Maternal Devices). This is important to note because I found in my study that app use constitutes part of the intimate relationship of parents-to-be and new parents. Male partners rarely read guidebooks or significant detail from other information sources and so apps played a role in their day-to-day gathering of knowledge, usually via their partner. Rather than reading a chapter of a book or googling a pregnancy symptom, quiet time chatting on the couch after work often included the sharing of information from apps or regular email updates on a variety of topics. Men used the same apps as women but this was usually on their partner’s phone, rather than their own. This raises another important question. How do we research indirect use of apps? Is this even possible? The obvious way to answer this question would be through the use of qualitative interviews. This is made difficult through the mere fact that we first must know who uses these apps indirectly before we recruit them into our research. Researching Digital Technologies through Discourse Analysis In my PhD the use of smartphones and apps only emerged as a theme of interest late into the research project. The constant mention of various apps during the interviews prompted me to examine a number of key pregnancy and parenting apps in terms of the discourses they mobilise and their functionality (Johnson Maternal Devices). As Dorothy Smith attests, we live in a textually mediated world. Pregnancy and parenting books, magazines, technologies such as apps and other forms of popular advice represent a mediated version of motherhood, parenthood and fatherhood. If these texts can influence and be influenced by patterns of parenting discourse then critical discourse analysis can contribute to an understanding of the ways in which mothering can be influenced or constructed by popular media and discourse. Thus, in my PhD research I applied discourse analysis to the study of apps. Discourse analysis examines how language constructs social phenomena and investigates the ways in which it produces certain social realities and expectations (Sunderland). Discourse analysis is valuable because of the questions it enables us to ask about the constructed nature of our experiences and the texts that we are exposed to. Smartphone apps, social media and the Internet are growing resources for women in the transition to first-time motherhood. These technologies require further research as they represent a particular way for women to engage with the neoliberal project of responsibilisation. Targeting first-time mothers and parents research allows access to users of digital technologies who most likely have a vested interest (i.e. the health and development of their children) in understanding the way new technologies are increasingly intervening in our everyday lives. Maternal subjects are likely to view such technologies as a means to monitor her pregnancies and her children’s health and development. A central aim of my research is to render visible the enduring nature of ideologies and expectations of motherhood – which include the ways in which women as mothers are responsibilised – and the ways in which different variants of mothering are inserted in new ways into tools of self-help, social media and new ‘pushy’ technologies (apps). This will reveal how discourse is constituted by mothers and how mothering discourse can work to constitute particular maternal practices and beliefs or expectations. Thus I argue that discourse analysis is central to the research of pregnancy/parenting apps. My research demonstrates how women draw on new technologies in rebellious, ironic or affirmative ways to enact different technologies of the self (Foucault). The texts can be viewed as disciplinary in a Foucauldian sense, and by analysing these different forms of advice it is possible to provide an ongoing demonstration of the difficulty of complying with the various demands of motherhood. Women’s interactions with a range of parenting discourses and attempts to create their own version of motherhood can be seen to constitute one component of the work of motherhood and the ways women practice and enact motherhood (this is discussed in detail in an article currently under review). Although researching the potential affordances of apps is important this research must be connected to user experience. In other words, are apps used in the ways we think they are? In order to move forward and ask questions such as: “Are women responsibilised and their conduct shaped in a new way via their smartphones in what I have characterised ‘push responsibilisation’?” we must move beyond discourse analysis and ask questions that focus on the user experience of apps. It would be useful to draw on existing research in other fields, which have started to develop a range of ethnographic methods and tools for research into computer-user interactions, applications and social media including Tinder, Grindr and Instagram. Other questions I wish to include in a future empirical study include: Who adopts these apps and why? Are there variations in the ways different generational users adopt apps? Who rejects these apps and why? Are push notifications ignored, considered obtrusive or do they prompt specific practices or actions? How are apps used? How do apps maintain already existing gender inequalities in parenting? In asking these questions I believe we could also begin to interrogate a much broader question, that is: “What can the use of devices during this particular ‘life stage’ tell us more broadly about mapping, tracking and quantifying the self?” This brings me again to the central question in this piece: How do we do this research? In this article I have not attempted to answer this question but rather to provoke discussion and encourage debate. In particular, I would like to consider new research methodologies which have the potential to extend our research capabilities and those whom we are able to involve in our research. An example would be conducting research online through pre-existing discussion forums. I have attended numerous academic events in the past two years where academics have started to ponder these questions more generally but my hope is that this article can act as encouragement for further debate. References Edwards, Rosalind. “Connecting Method and Epistimology: A White Woman Interviewing Black Women.” Women's Studies International Forum 13 (1990): 477-490. Finch, Janet. “It’s great to have someone to talk to”: The Ethics and Politics of Interviewing Women. Social Researching: Politics, Problems, Practice. Eds. Colin Bell and Helen Roberts. London: Routledge, 1984. Foucault, Michel. "Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault." Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Eds. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Horn, Rebecca. “Reflexivity in Placement: Women Interviewing Women.” Feminism & Psychology 5 (1995): 94-98. Johnson, Sophia. “On a Tightrope? Technologies of Motherhood in Neoliberal Society.” PhD Thesis. Sydney: Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, 2014. Johnson, Sophia. “‘Maternal Devices’, Social Media and the Self-Management of Pregnancy, Mothering and Child Health”. Societies 4.2 (2014): 330-350. Johnson, Sophia. “‘Intimate Mothering Publics’: Comparing Face-To-Face Support Groups and Internet Use for Women Seeking Information and Advice in the Transition to First-Time Motherhood.” Culture, Health and Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care 17.2 (2015): 237-251. Kasper, Anne. “A Feminist, Qualitative Methodology: A Study of Women with Breast Cancer.” Qualitative Sociology 17.3 (1994): 263-281. Oakley, Ann. “Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms.” Doing Feminist Research. Ed. Helen Roberts. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Shields, Vickie Rutledge, and Brenda Dervin. “Sense-Making in Feminist Social Science Research: A Call to Enlarge the Methodological Options of Feminist Studies.” Women's Studies International Forum 16.1 (1993): 65-81. Smith, Dorothy. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northern University Press, 1987. Sunderland, J. “'Parenting' or 'Mothering'? The Case of Modern Childcare Magazines.” Discourse & Society 17.4 (2006): 503-528.

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Although I'm a rich white guy, I'm also a feminist anti-racism activist who fights for the rights of the poor and oppressed. (Carl Kenner)Systemic bias is a scourge to the pillar of neutrality. (Cerejota)Count me in. Let's leave the bias to the mainstream media. (Orcar967)Because this is so important. (CuttingEdge)These are a handful of comments posted by online editors who have banded together in a virtual coalition to combat Western bias on the world’s largest digital encyclopedia, Wikipedia. This collective action by Wikipedians both acknowledges the inherent inequalities of a user-controlled information project like Wikpedia and highlights the potential for progressive change within that same project. These community members are taking the responsibility of social change into their own hands (or more aptly, their own keyboards).In recent years much research has emerged on Wikipedia from varying fields, ranging from computer science, to business and information systems, to the social sciences. While critical at times of Wikipedia’s growth, governance, and influence, most of this work observes with optimism that barriers to improvement are not firmly structural, but rather they are socially constructed, leaving open the possibility of important and lasting change for the better.WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) considers one such collective effort. Close to 350 editors have signed on to the project, which began in 2004 and itself emerged from a similar project named CROSSBOW, or the “Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias on Wikipedia.” As a WikiProject, the term used for a loose group of editors who collaborate around a particular topic, these editors work within the Wikipedia site and collectively create a social network that is unified around one central aim—representing the un- and underrepresented—and yet they are bound by no particular unified set of interests. The first stage of a multi-method study, this paper looks at a snapshot of WP:CSB’s activity from both content analysis and social network perspectives to discover “who” geographically this coalition of the unrepresented is inserting into the digital annals of Wikipedia.Wikipedia and WikipediansDeveloped in 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and academic Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is an online collaborative encyclopedia hosting articles in nearly 250 languages (Cohen). The English-language Wikipedia contains over 3.2 million articles, each of which is created, edited, and updated solely by users (Wikipedia “Welcome”). At the time of this study, Alexa, a website tracking organisation, ranked Wikipedia as the 6th most accessed site on the Internet. Unlike the five sites ahead of it though—Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube (owned by Google), and live.com (owned by Microsoft)—all of which are multibillion-dollar businesses that deal more with information aggregation than information production, Wikipedia is a non-profit that operates on less than $500,000 a year and staffs only a dozen paid employees (Lih). Wikipedia is financed and supported by the WikiMedia Foundation, a charitable umbrella organisation with an annual budget of $4.6 million, mainly funded by donations (Middleton).Wikipedia editors and contributors have the option of creating a user profile and participating via a username, or they may participate anonymously, with only an IP address representing their actions. Despite the option for total anonymity, many Wikipedians have chosen to visibly engage in this online community (Ayers, Matthews, and Yates; Bruns; Lih), and researchers across disciplines are studying the motivations of these new online collectives (Kane, Majchrzak, Johnson, and Chenisern; Oreg and Nov). The motivations of open source software contributors, such as UNIX programmers and programming groups, have been shown to be complex and tied to both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, including online reputation, self-satisfaction and enjoyment, and obligation to a greater common good (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann; Osterloh and Rota). Investigation into why Wikipedians edit has indicated multiple motivations as well, with community engagement, task enjoyment, and information sharing among the most significant (Schroer and Hertel). Additionally, Wikipedians seem to be taking up the cause of generativity (a concern for the ongoing health and openness of the Internet’s infrastructures) that Jonathan Zittrain notably called for in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Governance and ControlAlthough the technical infrastructure of Wikipedia is built to support and perhaps encourage an equal distribution of power on the site, Wikipedia is not a land of “anything goes.” The popular press has covered recent efforts by the site to reduce vandalism through a layer of editorial review (Cohen), a tightening of control cited as a possible reason for the recent dip in the number of active editors (Edwards). A number of regulations are already in place that prevent the open editing of certain articles and pages, such as the site’s disclaimers and pages that have suffered large amounts of vandalism. Editing wars can also cause temporary restrictions to editing, and Ayers, Matthews, and Yates point out that these wars can happen anywhere, even to Burt Reynold’s page.Academic studies have begun to explore the governance and control that has developed in the Wikipedia community, generally highlighting how order is maintained not through particular actors, but through established procedures and norms. Konieczny tested whether Wikipedia’s evolution can be defined by Michels’ Iron Law of Oligopoly, which predicts that the everyday operations of any organisation cannot be run by a mass of members, and ultimately control falls into the hands of the few. Through exploring a particular WikiProject on information validation, he concludes:There are few indicators of an oligarchy having power on Wikipedia, and few trends of a change in this situation. The high level of empowerment of individual Wikipedia editors with regard to policy making, the ease of communication, and the high dedication to ideals of contributors succeed in making Wikipedia an atypical organization, quite resilient to the Iron Law. (189)Butler, Joyce, and Pike support this assertion, though they emphasise that instead of oligarchy, control becomes encapsulated in a wide variety of structures, policies, and procedures that guide involvement with the site. A virtual “bureaucracy” emerges, but one that should not be viewed with the negative connotation often associated with the term.Other work considers control on Wikipedia through the framework of commons governance, where “peer production depends on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized rather than hierarchically assigned. Individuals make their own choices with regard to resources managed as a commons” (Viegas, Wattenberg and McKeon). The need for quality standards and quality control largely dictate this commons governance, though interviewing Wikipedians with various levels of responsibility revealed that policies and procedures are only as good as those who maintain them. Forte, Larco, and Bruckman argue “the Wikipedia community has remained healthy in large part due to the continued presence of ‘old-timers’ who carry a set of social norms and organizational ideals with them into every WikiProject, committee, and local process in which they take part” (71). Thus governance on Wikipedia is a strong representation of a democratic ideal, where actors and policies are closely tied in their evolution. Transparency, Content, and BiasThe issue of transparency has proved to be a double-edged sword for Wikipedia and Wikipedians. The goal of a collective body of knowledge created by all—the “expert” and the “amateur”—can only be upheld if equal access to page creation and development is allotted to everyone, including those who prefer anonymity. And yet this very option for anonymity, or even worse, false identities, has been a sore subject for some in the Wikipedia community as well as a source of concern for some scholars (Santana and Wood). The case of a 24-year old college dropout who represented himself as a multiple Ph.D.-holding theology scholar and edited over 16,000 articles brought these issues into the public spotlight in 2007 (Doran; Elsworth). Wikipedia itself has set up standards for content that include expectations of a neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and the publishing of no original research, but Santana and Wood argue that self-policing of these policies is not adequate:The principle of managerial discretion requires that every actor act from a sense of duty to exercise moral autonomy and choice in responsible ways. When Wikipedia’s editors and administrators remain anonymous, this criterion is simply not met. It is assumed that everyone is behaving responsibly within the Wikipedia system, but there are no monitoring or control mechanisms to make sure that this is so, and there is ample evidence that it is not so. (141) At the theoretical level, some downplay these concerns of transparency and autonomy as logistical issues in lieu of the potential for information systems to support rational discourse and emancipatory forms of communication (Hansen, Berente, and Lyytinen), but others worry that the questionable “realities” created on Wikipedia will become truths once circulated to all areas of the Web (Langlois and Elmer). With the number of articles on the English-language version of Wikipedia reaching well into the millions, the task of mapping and assessing content has become a tremendous endeavour, one mostly taken on by information systems experts. Kittur, Chi, and Suh have used Wikipedia’s existing hierarchical categorisation structure to map change in the site’s content over the past few years. Their work revealed that in early 2008 “Culture and the arts” was the most dominant category of content on Wikipedia, representing nearly 30% of total content. People (15%) and geographical locations (14%) represent the next largest categories, while the natural and physical sciences showed the greatest increase in volume between 2006 and 2008 (+213%D, with “Culture and the arts” close behind at +210%D). This data may indicate that contributing to Wikipedia, and thus spreading knowledge, is growing amongst the academic community while maintaining its importance to the greater popular culture-minded community. Further work by Kittur and Kraut has explored the collaborative process of content creation, finding that too many editors on a particular page can reduce the quality of content, even when a project is well coordinated.Bias in Wikipedia content is a generally acknowledged and somewhat conflicted subject (Giles; Johnson; McHenry). The Wikipedia community has created numerous articles and pages within the site to define and discuss the problem. Citing a survey conducted by the University of Würzburg, Germany, the “Wikipedia:Systemic bias” page describes the average Wikipedian as:MaleTechnically inclinedFormally educatedAn English speakerWhiteAged 15-49From a majority Christian countryFrom a developed nationFrom the Northern HemisphereLikely a white-collar worker or studentBias in content is thought to be perpetuated by this demographic of contributor, and the “founder effect,” a concept from genetics, linking the original contributors to this same demographic has been used to explain the origins of certain biases. Wikipedia’s “About” page discusses the issue as well, in the context of the open platform’s strengths and weaknesses:in practice editing will be performed by a certain demographic (younger rather than older, male rather than female, rich enough to afford a computer rather than poor, etc.) and may, therefore, show some bias. Some topics may not be covered well, while others may be covered in great depth. No educated arguments against this inherent bias have been advanced.Royal and Kapila’s study of Wikipedia content tested some of these assertions, finding identifiable bias in both their purposive and random sampling. They conclude that bias favoring larger countries is positively correlated with the size of the country’s Internet population, and corporations with larger revenues work in much the same way, garnering more coverage on the site. The researchers remind us that Wikipedia is “more a socially produced document than a value-free information source” (Royal & Kapila).WikiProject: Countering Systemic BiasAs a coalition of current Wikipedia editors, the WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) attempts to counter trends in content production and points of view deemed harmful to the democratic ideals of a valueless, open online encyclopedia. WP:CBS’s mission is not one of policing the site, but rather deepening it:Generally, this project concentrates upon remedying omissions (entire topics, or particular sub-topics in extant articles) rather than on either (1) protesting inappropriate inclusions, or (2) trying to remedy issues of how material is presented. Thus, the first question is "What haven't we covered yet?", rather than "how should we change the existing coverage?" (Wikipedia, “Countering”)The project lays out a number of content areas lacking adequate representation, geographically highlighting the dearth in coverage of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe. WP:CSB also includes a “members” page that editors can sign to show their support, along with space to voice their opinions on the problem of bias on Wikipedia (the quotations at the beginning of this paper are taken from this “members” page). At the time of this study, 329 editors had self-selected and self-identified as members of WP:CSB, and this group constitutes the population sample for the current study. To explore the extent to which WP:CSB addressed these self-identified areas for improvement, each editor’s last 50 edits were coded for their primary geographical country of interest, as well as the conceptual category of the page itself (“P” for person/people, “L” for location, “I” for idea/concept, “T” for object/thing, or “NA” for indeterminate). For example, edits to the Wikipedia page for a single person like Tony Abbott (Australian federal opposition leader) were coded “Australia, P”, while an edit for a group of people like the Manchester United football team would be coded “England, P”. Coding was based on information obtained from the header paragraphs of each article’s Wikipedia page. After coding was completed, corresponding information on each country’s associated continent was added to the dataset, based on the United Nations Statistics Division listing.A total of 15,616 edits were coded for the study. Nearly 32% (n = 4962) of these edits were on articles for persons or people (see Table 1 for complete coding results). From within this sub-sample of edits, a majority of the people (68.67%) represented are associated with North America and Europe (Figure A). If we break these statistics down further, nearly half of WP:CSB’s edits concerning people were associated with the United States (36.11%) and England (10.16%), with India (3.65%) and Australia (3.35%) following at a distance. These figures make sense for the English-language Wikipedia; over 95% of the population in the three Westernised countries speak English, and while India is still often regarded as a developing nation, its colonial British roots and the emergence of a market economy with large, technology-driven cities are logical explanations for its representation here (and some estimates make India the largest English-speaking nation by population on the globe today).Table A Coding Results Total Edits 15616 (I) Ideas 2881 18.45% (L) Location 2240 14.34% NA 333 2.13% (T) Thing 5200 33.30% (P) People 4962 31.78% People by Continent Africa 315 6.35% Asia 827 16.67% Australia 175 3.53% Europe 1411 28.44% NA 110 2.22% North America 1996 40.23% South America 128 2.58% The areas of the globe of main concern to WP:CSB proved to be much less represented by the coalition itself. Asia, far and away the most populous continent with more than 60% of the globe’s people (GeoHive), was represented in only 16.67% of edits. Africa (6.35%) and South America (2.58%) were equally underrepresented compared to both their real-world populations (15% and 9% of the globe’s population respectively) and the aforementioned dominance of the advanced Westernised areas. However, while these percentages may seem low, in aggregate they do meet the quota set on the WP:CSB Project Page calling for one out of every twenty edits to be “a subject that is systematically biased against the pages of your natural interests.” By this standard, the coalition is indeed making headway in adding content that strategically counterbalances the natural biases of Wikipedia’s average editor.Figure ASocial network analysis allows us to visualise multifaceted data in order to identify relationships between actors and content (Vego-Redondo; Watts). Similar to Davis’s well-known sociological study of Southern American socialites in the 1930s (Scott), our Wikipedia coalition can be conceptualised as individual actors united by common interests, and a network of relations can be constructed with software such as UCINET. A mapping algorithm that considers both the relationship between all sets of actors and each actor to the overall collective structure produces an image of our network. This initial network is bimodal, as both our Wikipedia editors and their edits (again, coded for country of interest) are displayed as nodes (Figure B). Edge-lines between nodes represents a relationship, and here that relationship is the act of editing a Wikipedia article. We see from our network that the “U.S.” and “England” hold central positions in the network, with a mass of editors crowding around them. A perimeter of nations is then held in place by their ties to editors through the U.S. and England, with a second layer of editors and poorly represented nations (Gabon, Laos, Uzbekistan, etc.) around the boundaries of the network.Figure BWe are reminded from this visualisation both of the centrality of the two Western powers even among WP:CSB editoss, and of the peripheral nature of most other nations in the world. But we also learn which editors in the project are contributing most to underrepresented areas, and which are less “tied” to the Western core. Here we see “Wizzy” and “Warofdreams” among the second layer of editors who act as a bridge between the core and the periphery; these are editors with interests in both the Western and marginalised nations. Located along the outer edge, “Gallador” and “Gerrit” have no direct ties to the U.S. or England, concentrating all of their edits on less represented areas of the globe. Identifying editors at these key positions in the network will help with future research, informing interview questions that will investigate their interests further, but more significantly, probing motives for participation and action within the coalition.Additionally, we can break the network down further to discover editors who appear to have similar interests in underrepresented areas. Figure C strips down the network to only editors and edits dealing with Africa and South America, the least represented continents. From this we can easily find three types of editors again: those who have singular interests in particular nations (the outermost layer of editors), those who have interests in a particular region (the second layer moving inward), and those who have interests in both of these underrepresented regions (the center layer in the figure). This last group of editors may prove to be the most crucial to understand, as they are carrying the full load of WP:CSB’s mission.Figure CThe End of Geography, or the Reclamation?In The Internet Galaxy, Manuel Castells writes that “the Internet Age has been hailed as the end of geography,” a bold suggestion, but one that has gained traction over the last 15 years as the excitement for the possibilities offered by information communication technologies has often overshadowed structural barriers to participation like the Digital Divide (207). Castells goes on to amend the “end of geography” thesis by showing how global information flows and regional Internet access rates, while creating a new “map” of the world in many ways, is still closely tied to power structures in the analog world. The Internet Age: “redefines distance but does not cancel geography” (207). The work of WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias emphasises the importance of place and representation in the information environment that continues to be constructed in the online world. This study looked at only a small portion of this coalition’s efforts (~16,000 edits)—a snapshot of their labor frozen in time—which itself is only a minute portion of the information being dispatched through Wikipedia on a daily basis (~125,000 edits). Further analysis of WP:CSB’s work over time, as well as qualitative research into the identities, interests and motivations of this collective, is needed to understand more fully how information bias is understood and challenged in the Internet galaxy. The data here indicates this is a fight worth fighting for at least a growing few.ReferencesAlexa. “Top Sites.” Alexa.com, n.d. 10 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.alexa.com/topsites>. Ayers, Phoebe, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. San Francisco, CA: No Starch, 2008.Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Butler, Brian, Elisabeth Joyce, and Jacqueline Pike. Don’t Look Now, But We’ve Created a Bureaucracy: The Nature and Roles of Policies and Rules in Wikipedia. Paper presented at 2008 CHI Annual Conference, Florence.Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.Cohen, Noam. “Wikipedia.” New York Times, n.d. 12 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/info/wikipedia/>. Doran, James. “Wikipedia Chief Promises Change after ‘Expert’ Exposed as Fraud.” The Times, 6 Mar. 2007 ‹http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1480012.ece>. Edwards, Lin. “Report Claims Wikipedia Losing Editors in Droves.” Physorg.com, 30 Nov 2009. 12 Feb. 2010 ‹http://www.physorg.com/news178787309.html>. Elsworth, Catherine. “Fake Wikipedia Prof Altered 20,000 Entries.” London Telegraph, 6 Mar. 2007 ‹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1544737/Fake-Wikipedia-prof-altered-20000-entries.html>. Forte, Andrea, Vanessa Larco, and Amy Bruckman. “Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance.” Journal of Management Information Systems 26 (2009): 49-72.Giles, Jim. “Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head.” Nature 438 (2005): 900-901.Hansen, Sean, Nicholas Berente, and Kalle Lyytinen. “Wikipedia, Critical Social Theory, and the Possibility of Rational Discourse.” The Information Society 25 (2009): 38-59.Hertel, Guido, Sven Niedner, and Stefanie Herrmann. “Motivation of Software Developers in Open Source Projects: An Internet-Based Survey of Contributors to the Linex Kernel.” Research Policy 32 (2003): 1159-1177.Johnson, Bobbie. “Rightwing Website Challenges ‘Liberal Bias’ of Wikipedia.” The Guardian, 1 Mar. 2007. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/mar/01/wikipedia.news>. Kane, Gerald C., Ann Majchrzak, Jeremaih Johnson, and Lily Chenisern. A Longitudinal Model of Perspective Making and Perspective Taking within Fluid Online Collectives. Paper presented at the 2009 International Conference on Information Systems, Phoenix, AZ, 2009.Kittur, Aniket, Ed H. Chi, and Bongwon Suh. What’s in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure. Paper presented at the 2009 CHI Annual Conference, Boston, MA.———, and Robert E. Kraut. Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through Collaboration. Paper presented at the 2008 Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer Supported Cooperative Work Annual Conference, San Diego, CA.Konieczny, Piotr. “Governance, Organization, and Democracy on the Internet: The Iron Law and the Evolution of Wikipedia.” Sociological Forum 24 (2009): 162-191.———. “Wikipedia: Community or Social Movement?” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 1 (2009): 212-232.Langlois, Ganaele, and Greg Elmer. “Wikipedia Leeches? The Promotion of Traffic through a Collaborative Web Format.” New Media & Society 11 (2009): 773-794.Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution. New York, NY: Hyperion, 2009.McHenry, Robert. “The Real Bias in Wikipedia: A Response to David Shariatmadari.” OpenDemocracy.com 2006. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/wikipedia_bias_3621.jsp>. Middleton, Chris. “The World of Wikinomics.” Computer Weekly, 20 Jan. 2009: 22-26.Oreg, Shaul, and Oded Nov. “Exploring Motivations for Contributing to Open Source Initiatives: The Roles of Contribution, Context and Personal Values.” Computers in Human Behavior 24 (2008): 2055-2073.Osterloh, Margit and Sandra Rota. “Trust and Community in Open Source Software Production.” Analyse & Kritik 26 (2004): 279-301.Royal, Cindy, and Deepina Kapila. “What’s on Wikipedia, and What’s Not…?: Assessing Completeness of Information.” Social Science Computer Review 27 (2008): 138-148.Santana, Adele, and Donna J. Wood. “Transparency and Social Responsibility Issues for Wikipedia.” Ethics of Information Technology 11 (2009): 133-144.Schroer, Joachim, and Guido Hertel. “Voluntary Engagement in an Open Web-Based Encyclopedia: Wikipedians and Why They Do It.” Media Psychology 12 (2009): 96-120.Scott, John. Social Network Analysis. London: Sage, 1991.Vego-Redondo, Fernando. Complex Social Networks. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Viegas, Fernanda B., Martin Wattenberg, and Matthew M. McKeon. “The Hidden Order of Wikipedia.” Online Communities and Social Computing (2007): 445-454.Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003Wikipedia. “About.” n.d. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About>. ———. “Welcome to Wikipedia.” n.d. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>.———. “Wikiproject:Countering Systemic Bias.” n.d. 12 Feb. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias#Members>. Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008.

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In this article I discuss a story told by the South Australian Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Aunty Hilda Wilson (nee Varcoe), about the time when, at not quite sixteen, she was sent from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station to work in the Adelaide Hills, some 500 kilometres away, as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”. Her secondment was part of a widespread practice in early and mid-twentieth century Australia of placing young Aboriginal women “of marriageable age” from missions and government reserves into domestic service. Consciously deploying Indigenous storytelling practices as pedagogy, Hilda Wilson recounted this episode in a number of distinct ways during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across these iterations, each building on the other, she exhibited a personal resilience in her subjectivity, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work, which informed her agency and determination in a challenging situation in which she was both caring for a white socially-privileged family of five, while simultaneously grappling with the injustices of a state system of segregated indentured labour. Kirmayer and colleagues propose that “notions of resilience emerging from developmental psychology and psychiatry in recent years address the distinctive cultures, geographic and social settings, and histories of adversity of indigenous peoples”. Resilience is understood here as an ability to actively engage with traumatic change, involving the capacity to absorb stress and to transform in order to cope with it (Luthar et al.). Further to this, in an Indigenous context, Marion Kickett has found the capacity for resilience to be supported by three key factors: family connections, culture and belonging as well as notions of identity and history. In exploring the layers of this autobiographical story, I employ this extended psychological notion of resilience in both a domestic ambit as well as the broader social context for Indigenous people surviving a system of external domination. Additionally I consider the resilience Aunty Hilda demonstrates at a pivotal interlude between girlhood and womanhood within the trajectory of her overall long and productive life, and within an intergenerational history of resistance and accommodation. What is especially important about her storytelling is its refusal to be contained by the imaginary of the settler nation and its generic Aboriginal-female subject. She refuses victimhood while at the same time illuminating the mechanisms of injustice, hinting also at possibilities for alternative and more equitable relationships of family and work across cultural divides. Considered through this prism, resilience is, I suggest, also a quality firmly connected to ideas of Aboriginal cultural-sovereignty and standpoint and to, what Victoria Grieves has identified as, the Aboriginal knowledge value of sharing (25, 28, 45). Storytelling as Pedagogy The story I discuss was verbally recounted in a manner that Westphalen describes as “a continuation of Dreaming Stories”, functioning to educate and connect people and country (13-14). As MacGill et al. note, “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.” Hilda told me that as a child she was taught not to ask questions when listening to the stories of an Elder, and her own children were raised in this manner. Hilda's oldest daughter described this as a process involving patience, intrigue and surprise (Elva Wanganeen). Narratives unfold through nuance and repetition in a complexity of layers that can generate multiple levels of meaning over time. Circularity and recursivity underlie this pedagogy through which mnemonic devices are built so that stories become re-membered and inscribed on the body of the listener. When a perceived level of knowledge-transference has occurred, a narrator may elect to elaborate further, adding another detail that will often transform the story’s social, cultural, moral or political context. Such carefully chosen additional detail, however, might re-contextualise all that has gone before. As well as being embodied, stories are also emplaced, and thus most appropriately told in the Country where events occurred. (Here I use the Aboriginal English term “Country” which encompasses home, clan estate, and the powerful complex of spiritual, animate and inanimate forces that bind people and place.) Hilda Wilson’s following account of her first job as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”, Dr Frank Swann, provides an illustration of how she expertly uses traditional narrative forms of incrementally structured knowledge transmission within a cross-cultural setting to tell a story that expresses practices of resilience as resistance and transformation at its core. A “White Doctor” Story: The First Layer Aunty Hilda first told me this story when we were winding along the South Eastern Freeway through the Adelaide hills between Murray Bridge and Mount Barker, in 1997, on our way home to Adelaide from a trip to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri cultural education centre co-founded by her granddaughter. She was then 86 years old. Ahead of us, the profile of Mt Lofty rose out of the plains and into view. The highest peak in the Mount Lofty ranges, Yurrebilla, as it is known to Kaurna Aboriginal people, or Mt Lofty, has been an affluent enclave of white settlement for Adelaide’s moneyed elite since early colonial times. Being in place, or in view of place, provided the appropriate opportunity for her to tell me the story. It belongs to a group of stories that during our initial period of working together changed little over time until one day two years later she an added contextual detail which turned it inside out. Hilda described the doctor’s spacious hill-top residence, and her responsibilities of caring for Dr Swann’s invalid wife (“an hysteric who couldn't do anything for herself”), their twin teenage boys (who attended private college in the city) along with another son and younger daughter living at home (pers. com. Hilda Wilson). Recalling the exhilaration of looking down over the sparkling lights of Adelaide at night from this position of apparent “privilege” on the summit, she related this undeniably as a success story, justifiably taking great pride in her achievements as a teenager, capable of stepping into the place of the non-Indigenous doctor's wife in running the large and demanding household. Successfully undertaking a wide range of duties employed in the care of a family, including the disabled mother, she is an active participant crucial to the lives of all in the household, including to the work of the doctor and the twin boys in private education. Hilda recalled that Mrs Swann was unable to eat without her assistance. As the oldest daughter of a large family Hilda had previously assisted in caring for her younger siblings. Told in this way, her account collapses social distinctions, delineating a shared social and physical space, drawing its analytic frame from an Indigenous ethos of subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity and care. Moreover Hilda’s narrative of domestic service demonstrates an assertion of agency that resists colonial and patriarchal hegemony and inverts the master/mistress-servant relationship, one she firmly eschews in favour of the self-affirming role of the lady of the house. (It stands in contrast to the abuse found in other accounts for example Read, Tucker, Kartinyeri. Often the key difference was a continuity of family connections and ongoing family support.) Indeed the home transformed into a largely feminised and cross-culturalised space in which she had considerable agency and responsibility when the doctor was absent. Hilda told me this story several times in much the same way during our frequent encounters over the next two years. Each telling revealed further details that fleshed a perspective gained from what Patricia Hill Collins terms an “epistemic privilege” via her “outsider-within status” of working within a white household, lending an understanding of its social mechanisms (12-15). She also stressed the extent of her duty of care in upholding the family’s well-being, despite the work at times being too burdensome. The Second Version: Coming to Terms with Intersecting Oppressions Later, as our relationship developed and deepened, when I began to record her life-narrative as part of my doctoral work, she added an unexpected detail that altered its context completely: It was all right except I slept outside in a tin shed and it was very cold at night. Mount Lofty, by far the coldest part of Adelaide, frequently experiences winter maximum temperatures of two or three degrees and often light snowfalls. This skilful reframing draws on Indigenous storytelling pedagogy and is expressly used to invite reflexivity, opening questions that move the listener from the personal to the public realm in which domestic service and the hegemony of the home are pivotal in coming to terms with the overlapping historical oppressions of class, gender, race and nation. Suddenly we witness her subjectivity starkly shift from one self-defined and allied with an equal power relationship – or even of dependency reversal cast as “de-facto doctor's wife” – to one diminished by inequity and power imbalance in the outsider-defined role of “mistreated servant”. The latter was signalled by the dramatic addition of a single signifying detail as a decoding device to a deeper layer of meaning. In this parallel stratum of the story, Hilda purposefully brings into relief the politics in which “the private domain of women's housework intersected with the public domain of governmental social engineering policies” (Haskins 4). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, what for White Australia was cheap labour and a civilising mission, for Indigenous women constituted stolen children and slavery. Protection and then assimilation were government policies under which Indigenous women grew up. (96) Hilda was sent away from her family to work in 1927 by the universally-feared Sister Pearl McKenzie, a nurse who too-zealously (Katinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Calling, 23) oversaw the Chief Protector’s policies of “training” Aboriginal children from the South Australian missions in white homes once they reached fourteen (Haebich, 316—20). Indeed many prominent Adelaide hills’ families benefited from Aboriginal labour under this arrangement. Hilda explained her struggle with the immense cultural dislocation that removal into domestic service entailed, a removal her grandfather William Rankine had travelled from Raukkan to Government House to protest against less than a decade earlier (The Register December 21, 1923). This additional layer of story also illuminates Hilda’s capacity for resilience and persistence in finding a way forward through the challenge of her circ*mstances (Luthar et al.), drawing on her family networks and sense of personhood (Kickett). Hilda related that her father visited her at Mount Lofty twice, though briefly, on his way to shearing jobs in the south-east of the state. “He said it was no good me living like this,” she stated. Through his active intervention, reinforcement was requested and another teenager from Point Pearce, Hilda’s future husband’s cousin, Annie Sansbury, soon arrived to share the workload. But, Hilda explained, the onerous expectations coupled with the cultural segregation of retiring to the tin shed quickly became too much for Annie, who stayed only three months, leaving Hilda coping again alone, until her father applied additional pressure for a more suitable placement to be found for his daughter. In her next position, working for the family of a racehorse trainer, Hilda contentedly shared the bedroom with the small boy for whom she cared, and not long after returned to Point Pearce where she married Robert Wilson and began a family of her own. Gendered Resilience across Cultural Divides Hilda explicitly speaks into these spaces to educate me, because all but a few white women involved have remained silent about their complicity with state sanctioned practices which exploited Indigenous labour and removed children from their families through the policies of protection and assimilation. For Indigenous women, speaking out was often fraught with the danger of a deeper removal from family and Country, even of disappearance. Victoria Haskins writes extensively of two cases in New South Wales where young Aboriginal women whose protests concerning their brutal treatment at the hands of white employers, resulted in their wrongful and prolonged committal to mental health and other institutions (147-52, 228-39). In the indentured service of Indigenous women it is possible to see oppression operating through Eurocentric ideologies of race, class and gender, in which Indigenous women were assumed to take on, through displacement, the more oppressed role of white women in pre-second world war non-Aboriginal Australian society. The troubling silent shadow-figure of the “doctor’s wife” indeed provides a haunting symbol of - and also a forceful rebellion against – the docile upper middle-class white femininity of the inter-war era. Susan Bordo has argued that that “the hysteric” is archetypal of a discourse of ‘pathology as embodied protest’ in which the body may […] be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view in extreme or hyperliteral form. (20) Mrs Swann’s vulnerability contrasts markedly with the strength Hilda expresses in coping with a large family, emanating from a history of equitable gender relations characteristic of Ngarrindjeri society (Bell). The intersection of race and gender, as Marcia Langton contends “continues to require deconstruction to allow us to decolonise our consciousness” (54). From Hilda’s brief description one grasps a relationship resonant with that between the protagonists in Tracy Moffat's Night Cries, (a response to the overt maternalism in the film Jedda) in which the white mother finds herself utterly reliant on her “adopted” Aboriginal daughter at the end of her life (46-7). Resilience and Survival The different versions of story Hilda deploys, provide a pedagogical basis to understanding the broader socio-political framework of her overall life narrative in which an ability to draw on the cultural continuity of the past to transform the future forms an underlying dynamic. This demonstrated capacity to meet the challenging conditions thrown up by the settler-colonial state has its foundations in the connectivity and cultural strength sustained generationally in her family. Resilience moves from being individually to socially determined, as in Kickett’s model. During the onslaught of dispossession, following South Australia’s 1836 colonial invasion, Ngarrindjeri were left near-starving and decimated from introduced diseases. Pullume (c1808-1888), the rupuli (elected leader of the Ngarrindjeri Tendi, or parliament), Hilda’s third generation great-grandfather, decisively steered his people through the traumatic changes, eventually negotiating a middle-path after the Point McLeay Mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 (Jenkin, 59). Pullume’s granddaughter, the accomplished, independent-thinking Ellen Sumner (1842—1925), played an influential educative role during Hilda’s youth. Like other Ngarrindjeri women in her lineage, Ellen Sumner was skilled in putari practice (female doctor) and midwifery culture that extended to a duty of care concerning women and children (teaching her “what to do and what not to do”), which I suggest is something Hilda herself drew from when working with the Swann family. Hilda’s mother and aunties continued aspects of the putari tradition, attending births and giving instruction to women in the community (Bell, 171, Hughes Grandmother, 52-4). As mentioned earlier, when the South Australian government moved to introduce The Training of Children Act (SA) Hilda’s maternal grandfather William Rankine campaigned vigorously against this, taking a petition to the SA Governor in December 1923 (Haebich, 315-19). As with Aunty Hilda, William Rankine used storytelling as a method to draw public attention to the inequities of his times in an interview with The Register which drew on his life-narrative (Hughes, My Grandmother, 61). Hilda’s father Wilfred Varcoe, a Barngarrla-Wirrungu man, almost a thousand kilometres away from his Poonindie birthplace, resisted assimilation by actively pursuing traditional knowledge networks using his mobility as a highly sought after shearer to link up with related Elders in the shearing camps, (and as we saw to inspect the conditions his daughter was working under at Mt Lofty). The period Hilda spent as a servant to white families to be trained in white ways was in fact only a brief interlude in a long life in which family connections, culture and belonging (Kickett) served as the backbone of her resilience and resistance. On returning to the Point Pearce Mission, Hilda successfully raised a large family and activated a range of community initiatives that fostered well-being. In the 1960s she moved to Adelaide, initially as the sole provider of her family (her husband later followed), to give her younger children better educational opportunities. Working with Aunty Gladys Elphick OBE through the Council of Aboriginal Women, she played a foundational role in assisting other Aboriginal women establish their families in the city (Mattingly et al., 154, Fisher). In Adelaide, Aunty Hilda became an influential, much loved Elder, living in good health to the age of ninety-six years. The ability to survive changing circ*mstances, to extend care over and over to her children and Elders along with qualities of leadership, determination, agency and resilience have passed down through her family, several of whom have become successful in public life. These include her great-grandson and former AFL football player, Michael O’Loughlin, her great-nephew Adam Goodes and her-grand-daughter, the cultural weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Arguably, resilience contributes to physical as well as cultural longevity, through caring for the self and others. Conclusion This story demonstrates how sociocultural dimensions of resilience are contextualised in practices of everyday lives. We see this in the way that Aunty Hilda Wilson’s self-narrated story resolutely defies attempts to know, subjugate and categorise, operating instead in accord with distinctively Aboriginal expressions of gender and kinship relations that constitute an Aboriginal sovereignty. Her storytelling activates a revision of collective history in ways that valorise Indigenous identity (Kirmayer et al.). Her narrative of agency and personal achievement, one that has sustained her through life, interacts with the larger narrative of state-endorsed exploitation, diffusing its power and exposing it to wider moral scrutiny. Resilience in this context is inextricably entwined with practices of cultural survival and resistance developed in response to the introduction of government policies and the encroachment of settlers and their world. We see resilience too operating across Hilda Wilson’s family history, and throughout her long life. The agency and strategies displayed suggest alternative realities and imagine other, usually more equitable, possible worlds. References Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was and Will Be. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 90-110. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fisher, Elizabeth M. "Elphick, Gladys (1904–1988)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 29 Sep. 2013. ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/elphick-gladys-12460/text22411>. Grieves, Victoria. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing, Melbourne University: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009. Haebich, Anna. Broken Circles: The Fragmenting of Indigenous Families. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 2000. Haskins, Victoria. My One Bright Spot. London: Palgrave, 2005. Hughes, Karen. "My Grandmother on the Other Side of the Lake." PhD thesis, Department of Australian Studies and Department of History, Flinders University. Adelaide, 2009. ———. “Microhistories and Things That Matter.” Australian Feminist Studies 27.73 (2012): 269-278. ———. “I’d Grown Up as a Child amongst Natives.” Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge 28 (2013). 29 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/karen-hughes>. Jenkin, Graham. Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979. Kartinyeri, Doris. Kick the Tin. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000. Kartinyeri, Doreen. My Ngarrindjeri Calling, Adelaide: Wakefield, 2007. Kickett, Marion. “Examination of How a Culturally Appropriate Definition of Resilience Affects the Physical and Mental Health of Aboriginal People.” PhD thesis, Curtin University, 2012. Kirmayer, L.J., S. Dandeneau, E. Marshall, M.K. Phillips, K. Jenssen Williamson. “Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56.2 (2011): 84-91. Luthar, S., D. Cicchetti, and B. Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543-62. MacGill, Bindi, Julie Mathews, Ellen Trevorrow, Alice Abdulla, and Deb Rankine. “Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” M/C Journal 15.3 (2012). Mattingly, Christobel, and Ken Hampton. Survival in Our Own Land, Adelaide: Wakefield, 1988. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. St Lucia: UQP, 2000. Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy. Dir. Tracy Moffatt. Chili Films, 1990. Read, Peter. A Rape of the Soul So Profound. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977. Wanganeen, Elva. Personal Communication, 2000. Westphalen, Linda. An Anthropological and Literary Study of Two Aboriginal Women's Life Histories: The Impacts of Enforced Child Removal and Policies of Assimilation. New York: Mellen Press, 2011.

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Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in hom*osocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women's Studies International Forum 30.5 (2007): 427–38. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Walter, Brad. “From Shutdown to Restart: How NRL Walked Tightrope to Get Season Going Again.” NRL.com 25 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/05/25/from-shutdown-to-restart-how-nrl-walked-tightrope-to-get-season-going-again>. Wade, Lisa. “Rape on Campus: Athletes, Status, and the Sexual Assault Crisis.” The Conversation 7 Mar. 2017. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/rape-on-campus-athletes-status-and-the-sexual-assault-crisis-72255>. Webster, Andrew. “Sydney Roosters’ Mitchell Pearce Involved in a Drunken Incident with a Dog? 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Images 1-6: Photographs by Rachelle Viader Knowles (2012)This article discusses the cross-cultural, augmented artwork Parallel Worlds, Intersecting Moments (2012) by Rachelle Viader Knowles and Judy Anderson, that premiered at the First Nations University of Canada Gallery in Regina, on 2 March 2012, as part of a group exhibition entitled Critical Faculties. The work consists of two elements: wall pieces with black and white Quick Response (QR) codes created using traditional beading and framed within red Stroud cloth; and a series of videos, accessible via scanning the beaded QR codes. The videos feature Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people from Saskatchewan, Canada telling stories about their own personal experiences with new technologies. A QR code is a matrix barcode made up of black square modules on a white square in a grid pattern that is optically machine-readable. Performance artist and scholar Rebecca Caines was invited by the artists to participate in the work as a subject in one of the videos. She attended the opening and observed how audiences improvised and interacted with the work. Caines then went on to initiate this collaborative writing project. Like the artwork it analyzes, this writing documents a series of curated experiences and conversations. This article includes excerpts of artist statements, descriptions of artists’s process and audience observation, and new sections of collaborative critical writing, woven together to explore the different augmented elements of the artwork and the results of this augmentation. These conversations and responses explore the cross-cultural processes that led to the work’s creation, and describe the results of the technological and social disruptions and slippages that occurred in the development phase and in the gallery as observers and artists improvised with the augmentation technology, and with each other. The article includes detail on the augmented art practices of storytelling, augmented reality (AR), and traditional beading, that collided and mutated during this project, exploring the tension and opportunity inherent in the human impulse to augment. Storytelling through Augmented Art Practices: The Creation of the WorkJUDY ANDERSON: I am a Plains Cree artist from the Gordon’s First Nation, which is located in Saskatchewan, Canada. As a Professor of Indian Fine Arts at the First Nations University of Canada, I research and continue to learn about traditional art making using traditional materials creating primarily beaded pieces such as medicine bags and drum sticks. Of particular interest to me, however, is how such traditional practices manifest in contemporary Aboriginal art. In this regard I have been greatly influenced by my colleague and friend, artist Ruth Cuthand, and specifically her Trading series, which reframed my thinking about beadwork (Art Placement), and later by the work of artists like Nadia Myer, and KC Adams (Myer; KC Adams). Cuthand’s incredibly successful series taught me that beadwork does not only beautify and “augment” our world, but it has the power to bring to the forefront important issues regarding Aboriginal people. As a result, I began to work on my own ideas on how to create beadworks that spoke to both traditional and contemporary thoughts.RACHELLE VIADER KNOWLES: At the time we started developing this project, we were both working in leadership roles in our respective Departments; Judy as Coordinator of Indian Fine Arts at First Nations University, and myself as Head of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. We began discussing ways that we could create more interconnection between our faculty members and students. At the centre of both our practices was a dialogic method of back and forth negotiation and compromise. JA: Rachelle had the idea that we should bead QR codes and make videos for the upcoming First Nations and University of Regina joint faculty exhibition. Over the 2011 Christmas holiday we visited each other’s homes, beaded together, and found out about each other’s lives by telling stories of the things we’ve experienced. I felt it was very important that our QR codes were not beaded in the exact same manner; Rachelle built up hers through a series of straight lines, whereas mine was beaded with a circle around the square QR code, which reflected the importance of the circle in my Cree belief system. It was important for me to show that even though we, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, have similar experiences, we often have a different approach or way of thinking about similar things. I also suggested we frame the black and white beaded QR codes with bright red Stroud cloth, a heavy wool cloth originating in the UK that has been used in North America as trade cloth since the 1680s, and has become a significant part of First Nations fabric traditions.Since we were approaching this piece as a cross-cultural one, I chose the number seven for the amount of stories we would create because it is a sacred number in my own Plains Cree spiritual teachings. As such, we brought together seven pairs of people, including ourselves. The participants were drawn from family and friends from reserves and communities around Saskatchewan, including the city of Regina, as well as colleagues and students from the two university campuses. There were a number of different age ranges and socioeconomic backgrounds represented. We came together to tell stories about our experiences with technology, a common cross-cultural experience that seemed appropriate to the work.RVK: As the process of making the beadworks unfolded however, what became apparent to me was the sheer amount of hours it takes to create a piece of “augmentation” through beading, and the deeply social nature of the activity. We also worked together on the videos for the AR part of the artwork. Each participant in the videos was asked to write a short text about some aspect of their relationship to technology and communications. We took the short stories, arranged them into pairs, and used them to write short scripts. We then invited each pair to perform the scripts together on camera in my studio. The stories were really broad ranging. My own was a reflection of the profound discomfort of finding a blog where a man I was dating was publishing the story of our relationship as it unfolded. Other stories covered the loss of no longer being able to play the computer games from teenage years, first encounters with new technologies and social networks, secret admirers, and crank calls to emergency services. The storytelling and dialogue between us as we shared our practices became an important, but unseen layer of this “dialogical” work (Kester).REBECCA CAINES: I came along to Rachelle’s studio at the university to be a participant in a video for the piece. My co-performer was a young woman called Nova Lee. We laughed and chatted and talked and sat knee-to-knee together to film our stories about technology, both of us focusing on different types of Internet relationships. We were asked to read one line of our story at a time, interweaving together our poem of experience. Afterwards I asked her where her name was from. She told me it was from a song. She found the song on YouTube on Rachelle’s computer in the studio and played it for us. Here is a sample of the lyrics: I told my daddy I'd found a girlWho meant the world to meAnd tomorrow I'd ask the Indian chiefFor the hand of Nova LeeDad's trembling lips spoke softlyAs he told me of my life twangs then he said I could never takeThis maiden for my wifeSon, the white man and Indians were fighting when you were bornAnd a brave called Yellow Sun scalped my little boySo I stole you to get even for what he'd doneThough you're a full-blooded Indian, son I love you as much as my own little fellow that's deadAnd, son, Nova Lee is your sisterAnd that's why I've always saidSon, don't go near the IndiansPlease stay awaySon, don't go near the IndiansPlease do what I say— Rex Allen. “Don’t Go Near the Indians.” 1962. Judy explained to Rachelle and I that this was a common history of displacement in Canada, people taken away, falling in love with their relatives without knowing, perhaps sensing a connection, always longing for a home (Campbell). I thought, “What a weight for this young woman to bear, this name, this history.” Other participants also learnt about each other this way through the sharing of stories. Many had come to Canada from other places, each with different cultural and colonial resonances. Through these moments of working together, new understandings formed that deeply affected the participants. In this way, layers of storytelling form the heart of this work.JA: Storytelling holds an incredibly special place in Aboriginal people’s lives; through them we learned the laws, rules, and regulations that governed our behaviour as individuals, within our family, our communities, and our nations. These stories included histories (personal and communal), sacred teachings, the way the world used to be, creation stories, medicine stories, stories regarding the seasons and animals, and stories that defined our relationship with the environment, etc. The stories we asked for not only showed that we as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people have the same experiences, but also work in the way that a traditional story would. For example, Rachelle’s story taught a good lesson about how it is important to learn about the individual you are dating—had she not, her whole life could have been laid out to any who may have come across that man’s blog. My story spoke to the need to look up and observe what is around you instead of being engrossed in your own little world, because you don’t know who could be lifting your information. They all showed a common interest in sharing information, and laughing at mistakes and life lessons.Augmented Storytelling and Augmented RealityRC: This work relies on the augmented reality (AR) qualities of the QR code. Pavlik and Bridges suggest AR, even through relatively limited tools like a QR code, can have a significant impact on storytelling practices: “AR enriches an individual’s experience with the real world … Stories are put in a local context and act as a supplement to a citizen’s direct experience with the world” (Pavlik and Bridges 21). Their research shows that AR technologies like QR codes brings the story to life in a three dimensional and interactive form that allows the user a level of participation impossible in traditional, analogue media. They emphasize the different viewing possible in AR storytelling as: The new media storytelling model is nonlinear. The storyteller conceptualizes the audience member not as a consumer of the story engaged in a third-person narrative, but rather as a participant engaged in a first-person narrative. The storyteller invites the participant to explore the story in a variety of ways, perhaps beginning in the middle, moving across time, or space, or by topic. (Pavlik and Bridges 22) In their case studies, Pavlik and Bridges show AR has the “potential to become a viable storytelling format with a diverse range of options that engage citizens through sight, sound, or haptic experiences… to produce participatory, immersive, and community-based stories” (Pavlik and Bridges 39). The personal stories in this artwork were remediated a number of different ways. They were written down, then separated into one-line fragments, interwoven with our partners, and re-read again and again for the camera, before being edited and processed. Marked by the artists clearly as ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘non Aboriginal’ and placed alongside works featuring traditional beading, these stories were marked and re-inscribed by complex and fragmented histories of indigenous and non-indigenous relations in Canada. This history was emphasized as the QR codes were also physically located in the First Nations University of Canada, a unique indigenous space.To view this artwork in its entirety, therefore, two camera-enabled and internet-capable mobile devices were required to be used simultaneously. Due to the way they were accessed and played back through augmented reality technologies, stories in the gallery were experienced in nonlinear fashions, started part way through, left before completion, or not in sync with the partner they were designed to work with. The audience experimented with the video content, stopping and starting it to produce new combinations of words and images. This experience was also affected by chance as the video files online were on a cycle, after a set period of time, the scan would suddenly produce a new story. These augmented stories were recreated and reshaped by participants in dialogue with the space, and with each other. Augmented Stories and Improvised CommunitiesRC: In her 1997 study of the reception of new media art in galleries, Beryl Graham surveys the types of audience interaction common to new media art practices like AR art. She “reveals patterns of use of interactive artworks including the relation of use-time to gender, aspects of intimidation, and social interaction.” In particular, she observes “a high frequency of collective use of artworks, even when the artworks are designed to be used by one person” (Graham 2). What Graham describes as “collective” and “social,” I see as a type of improvisation engaging with difference, differences between audience members, and differences between human participants and the alien nature of sophisticated, interactive technologies. Improvisation “embodies real-time creative decision-making, risk-taking, and collaboration” (Heble). In the improvisatory act, participants participate in active listening in order to work with different voices, experiences, and practices, but share a common focus in the creative endeavour. Notions such as “the unexpected” or “the mistake” are constantly reconfigured into productive material. However, as leading improvisation studies scholar Ajay Heble suggests, “improvisation must be considered not simply as a musical or creative form, but as a complex social phenomenon that mediates transcultural inter-artistic exchanges that produce new conceptions of identity, community, history, and the body” (Heble). I watched at the opening as audience members in Parallel Worlds, Intersecting Moments paired up, successfully or unsuccessfully attempted to scan the code and download the video, and physically wrapped themselves around their partner (often a stranger) in order to hear the quiet audio in the loud gallery. The audience began to help each other through the process, to improvise together. The QR code was not always a familiar or comfortable object. The audience often had to install a QR code reader application onto their own device first, and then proceed to try to get the reader to work. Underfunded university Wi-Fi connections dropped, Apple ID logins failed, devices stalled. There were sudden loud cries when somebody successfully scanned their half of the work, and then rushes and scrambles as small groups of people attempted to sync their videos to start at the same time. The louder the gallery got, the closer the pairs had to stand to each other to hear the video through the device’s tiny speakers. Many people looked over someone else’s shoulder without their knowledge. Sometimes people were too close for comfort and behavior was negotiated and adapted. Sometimes, the pairs gave up trying; sometimes they borrowed each other’s devices, sometimes their phone or tablet was incompatible. Difference created new improvisations, or introduced sudden stops or diversions in the activities taking place. The theme of the work was strengthened every time an improvised negotiation took place, every time the technology faltered or succeeded, every time a digital or physical interaction was attempted. Through the combination of augmented bead practices used in an innovative way, and augmented technology with new audiences, new types of improvisatory responses could take place.Initially I found it difficult to not simplify and stereotype the processes taking place, to read it as a metaphor of the differing access to resources and training in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities, a clear example of the ways technology-use marks wealth and status. As I moved through the space, caught up in dialogic, improvisatory encounters, cross-cultural experiences broke down, but did not completely erase, these initial markers of difference. Instead, layers of interaction and information began to be placed over the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal identities in the gallery. My own assumptions were placed under pressure as I interacted with the artists and the other participants in the space. My identity as a relative newcomer to Saskatchewan was slowly augmented by the stories and experiences I shared and heard, and the audience members shifted back and forth between being experts in the aspects of the stories and technologies that were familiar, and asking for help to translate and activate the stories and processes that were alien.Augmented Art PracticesJA: There is an old saying, “if it doesn’t move, bead it.” I think that this desire to augment with the decorative is handed down through traditional thoughts and beliefs regarding clothing. Once nomadic we did not accumulate many goods, as a result, the goods we did keep were beautified though artistic practices including quilling and eventually beadwork (painting too). And our clothing was thought of as spiritual because it did the important act of protecting us from the elements, therefore it was thought of as sacred. To beautify the clothing was to honour your spirit while at the same time it honoured the animal that had given its life to protect you (Berlo and Phillips). I think that this belief naturally grew to include any item, after all, there is nothing like an object or piece of clothing that is beaded well—no one can resist it. There is, however, a belief that humans should not try to mimic perfection, which is reserved for the Creator and in many cases a beader will deliberately put a bead out of place.RC: When new media produces unexpected results, or as Rachelle says, when pixels “go out of place”, it can be seen as a sign that humans are (deliberately or accidently) failing to use the digital technology in the way it was intended. In Parallel Worlds, Intersecting Moments the theme of cross cultural encounters and technological communication was only enhanced by these moments of displacement and slippage and the improvisatory responses that took place. The artists could not predict the degree of slippage that would occur, but from their catalogue texts and the conversations above, it is clear that collective negotiation was a desired outcome. By creating a QR code based artwork that utilized augmented art practices to create new types of storytelling, the artists allowed augmented identities to develop, slip, falter, and be reconfigured. Through the dialogic art practices of traditional beading and participatory video work, Anderson and Knowles began to build new modes of communication and knowledge sharing. I believe there could be productive relationships to be further explored between what Judy calls the First Nations “desire to bead” whilst acknowledging human fallibility; and the ways Rachelle aims to technologically-augment conversation and storytelling through contemporary AR and video practices despite, or perhaps because of the possibility of risk and disruptions when bodies and code interact. What kind of trust and reciprocity becomes possible across cultural divides when this can be acknowledged as a common human quality? How could beads and/or pixels being “out of place” expose fault lines and opportunities in these kinds of cross-cultural knowledge transfer? As Judy suggested in our conversations, such work requires active engagement from the audience in the process that does not always occur. “In those instances, does the piece fail or people fail the piece? I'm not sure.” In crossing back and forth between these different types of augmentation impulses, and by creating improvisatory, dialogic encounters in the gallery, these artists began the tentative, complex, and vital process of cultural exchange, and invited participants and audience to take this step with them and to work “across traditional and contemporary modes of production” to “use the language and process of art to speak, listen, teach and learn” (Knowles and Anderson).ReferencesAdams, K.C. “Cyborg Hybrid \'cy·borg 'hi·brid\ n.” KC Adams, n.d. 16 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.kcadams.net/art/arttotal.html›. Allen, Rex. “Don't Go Near the Indians.” Rex Allen Sings and Tells Tales of the Golden West. Mercury, 1962. LP and CD.Anderson, Judy, and Rachelle Viader Knowles. Parallel Worlds, Intersecting Moments. First Nations University of Canada Gallery; Slate Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan, 2012. Art Placement. “Ruth Cuthand”. Artists. Art Placement, n.d. 16 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.artplacement.com/gallery/artists.php›.Berlo, Janet Catherine, and Ruth B. Phillips. Native North American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Campbell, Maria. Stories of the Road Allowance People. Penticton, B.C.: Theytus Books, 1995. Critical Faculties. Regina: University of Regina and First Nations University of Canada, 2012. Graham, Beryl C.E. “A Study of Audience Relationships with Interactive Computer-Based Visual Artworks in Gallery Settings, through Observation, Art Practice, and Curation”. Dissertation. University of Sunderland, 1997. Heble, Ajay. “About ICASP.” Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice. University of Guelph; Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada, n.d. 16 Nov. 2011 ‹http://www.improvcommunity.ca/›.Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Knowles, Rachelle Viader. Rachelle Viader Knowles, n.d. 16 Nov. 2013 ‹http://uregina.ca/rvk›.Myre, Nadia. Nadia Myre. 16 Nov. 2013 ‹http://nadiamyre.com/NadiaMyre/home.html›. Pavlik, John G., and Frank Bridges. “The Emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) as a Storytelling Medium in Journalism.” Journalism & Communication Monographs 15.4 (2013): 4-59.

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Abstract:

I have only ever owned one pig. It didn’t have a name, due as it was for the table. Just pu‘aka. But I liked feeding it; nothing from the household was wasted. I planned not to become attached. We were having a feast and a pig was the one essential requirement. The piglet came to us as a small creature with a curly tail. It would not even live an adult life, as the fully-grown local pig is a fatty beast with little meat. Pigs are mostly killed when partly grown, when the meat/fat ratio is at its optimum. The pig was one of the few animals to accompany Polynesians as they made the slow journey across the islands and oceans from Asia: pigs and chickens and dogs. The DNA of island pigs reveals details about the route taken that were previously hidden (Larsen et al.). Of these three animals, pigs assumed the most ceremonial importance. In Tonga, pigs often live an exalted life. They roam freely, finding food where they can. They wallow. Wherever there is a pool of mud, often alongside a road, there is a pig wallowing. Huge beasts emerge from their pools with dark mud lining their bellies as they waddle off, teats swinging, to another pleasure. Pig snouts are extraordinarily strong; with the strength of a pig behind them, they can dig holes, uproot crops, and generally wreak havoc. How many times have I chased them from my garden, despairing at the loss of precious vegetables I could get no other way? But they must forage. They are fed scraps, and coconut for protein, but often must fend for themselves. Despite the fact that many meet an early death, their lives seem so much more interesting than those lived by the anonymous residents of intensive piggeries in Australia, my homeland. When the time came for the pig to be sacrificed to the demands of the feast, two young Tongan men did the honours. They also cooked the pig on an open fire after skewering it on a pole. Their reward was the roasted sweetmeats. The ‘umu was filled with taro and cassava, yam and sweet potato, along with lū pulu and lū ika: tinned beef and fish cooked in taro leaves and coconut cream. In the first sitting, all those of high status—church ministers, college teachers, important villagers and pālangi like me—had the first pick of the food. Students from the college and lowly locals had the second. The few young men who remained knew it was their task to finish off all of the food. They set about this activity with intense dedication, paying particular attention to the carcass of the pig. By the end of the night, what was left of our little pig was a pile of bones, the skeleton taken apart at every joint. Not a scrap of anything edible remained. In the early 1980s, I went to live on a small island in the Kingdom of Tonga, where my partner was the Principal of an agricultural college, in the main training young men for working small hereditary mixed farms. Memories of that time and a recent visit inform this reflection on the contemporary Tongan diet and problems associated with it. The role of food in a culture is never a neutral issue. Neither is body size, and Tongans have traditionally favoured the large body as an indication of status (Pollock 58). Similarly the capacity to eat has been seen as positive. Many Tongans are larger than is healthy, with 84% of men and 93% of women “considered overweight or obese” (Kirk et al. 36). The rate of diabetes, 80% of it undiagnosed, has doubled since the 1970s to 15% of the adult population (Colagiuri et al. 1378). In the Tongan diaspora there are also high rates of so-called “metabolic syndrome,” leading to this tendency to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In Auckland, for instance, Pacific Islanders are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from this condition (Gentles et al.). Its chief cause is not, however, genetic, but comes from “differences in obesity,” leading to a much higher incidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes (Gentles et al.). Deaths from diabetes in Tonga are common. When a minister’s wife in the neighbouring village to mine died, everyone of status on the island attended the putu. Though her gangrenous foot could have been amputated, the family decided against this, and she soon died from the complications of her diabetes. On arrival at the putu, as well as offering gifts such as mats and tapa, participants lined up to pay very personal respects to the dead woman. This took the form of a kiss on her face. I had never touched a dead person before, let alone someone who had died of gangrene, but life in another culture requires many firsts. I bent down and kissed the dry, cold face of a woman who had suffered much before dying. Young men of the family pushed sand over the grave with their own hands as the rest of us stood around, waiting for the funeral food: pigs, yes, but also sweets made from flour and refined sugar. Diet and eating practices are informed by culture, but so are understandings of illness and its management. In a study conducted in New Zealand, sharp differences were seen between the Tongan diaspora and European patients with diabetes. Tongans were more likely “to perceive their diabetes as acute and cyclical in nature, uncontrollable, and caused by factors such as God’s will, pollution in the environment, and poor medical care in the past”, and this was associated “with poorer adherence to diet and medication taking” (Barnes et al. 1). This suggests that as well as being more likely to suffer from illnesses associated with diet and body size, Tongans may also be less likely to manage them, causing these diseases to be even more debilitating. When James Cook visited the Tongan group and naively named them the Friendly Islands, he was given the customary hospitality shown to one of obviously high status. He and his officers were fed regularly by their hosts, even though this must have put enormous pressure on the local food systems, in which later supply was often guaranteed by the imposition of tapu in order to preserve crops and animals. Further pressure was added by exchanges of hogs for nails (Beaglehole). Of course, while they were feeding him royally and entertaining his crew with wrestling matches and dances, the local chiefs of Ha‘apai were arguing about exactly when they were going to kill him. If it were by night, it would be hard to take the two ships. By day, it might be too obvious. They never could agree, and so he sailed off to meet his fate elsewhere (Martin 279-80). As a visitor of status, he was regularly fed pork, unlike most of the locals. Even now, in contemporary Tonga, pigs are killed to mark a special event, and are not eaten as everyday food by most people. That is one of the few things about the Tongan diet that has not changed since the Cook visits. Pigs are usually eaten on formal feasting occasions, such as after church on the Sabbath (which is rigorously kept by law), at weddings, funerals, state occasions or church conferences. During such conferences, village congregations compete with each other to provide the most lavish spreads, with feasting occurring three times a day for a week or more. Though each pola is spread with a range of local root crops, fish and seafood, and possibly beef or even horse, the pola is not complete unless there is at least one pig on it. Pigs are not commercially farmed in Tonga, so these pigs have been hand- and self-raised in and around villages, and are in short supply after these events. And, although feasts are a visible sign of tradition, they are the exception. Tongans are not suffering from metabolic syndrome because they consume too much pork; they are suffering because in everyday life traditional foods have been supplanted by imports. While a range of traditional foods is still eaten, they are not always the first choice. Some imported foods have become delicacies. Mutton flap is a case in point. Known as sipi (sheep), it is mostly fat and bone, and even when barbequed it retains most of its fat. It is even found on outer islands without refrigeration, because it can be transported frozen and eaten when it arrives, thawed. I remember once the local shopkeeper said she had something I might like. A leg of lamb was produced from under the counter, mistakenly packed in the flap box. The cut was so unfamiliar that nobody else had much use for it. The question of why it is possible to get sipi in Tonga and very difficult to get any other kind of fresh meat other than one’s own pigs or chickens raises the question of how Tonga’s big neighbours think of Pacific islands. Such islands are the recipients of Australian and New Zealand aid; they are also the recipients of their waste. It’s not uncommon to find out of date medications, banned agricultural chemicals, and food that is really unsuitable for human consumption. Often the only fresh and affordable meat is turkey tails, chicken backs, and mutton flap. From July 2006 to July 2007, New Zealand exported $73 million worth of sheep off-cuts to the Pacific (Edwardes & Frizelle). Australia and the US account for the supply of turkey tails. Not only are these products some of the few fresh meat sources available, they are also relatively inexpensive (Rosen et al.). These foods are so detrimental to the health of locals that importing them has been banned in Fiji and independent Samoa (Edwardes & Frizelle). The big nations around the Pacific have found a market for the meat by-products their own citizens will not eat. Local food sources have also been supplanted as a result of the high value placed on other foods, like rice, flour and sugar, which from the nineteenth century became associated with “civilisation and progress” (Pollock 233). To counter this, education programs have been undertaken in Tonga and elsewhere in the Pacific in order to promote traditional local foods. These have also sought to address the impact of high food imports on the trade balance (Pollock 232). Food choices are not just determined by preference, but also by cost and availability. Similarly, the Tonga Healthy Weight Loss Program ran during the late 1990s, but it was found that a lack of “availability of healthy low-cost food was a problem” to its success (Englberger et al. 147). In a recent study of Tongan food preferences, it was found that “in general, Tongans prefer healthier traditional, indigenously produced, foods”, but that they are not always available (Evans et al. 170). In the absence of a consistent supply of local protein sources, the often inferior but available imported sources become the default ingredient. Fish in particular are in short supply. Though many Tongans can still be seen harvesting the reef for seafood at low tide, there is no extensive fishing industry capable of providing for the population at large. Intensive farming of pigs has been considered—there was a model piggery on the college where I lived, complete with facilities for methane collection—but it has not been undertaken. Given the strongly ceremonial function of the pig, it would take a large shift in thinking for it to be considered an everyday food. The first cooked pig I encountered arrived at my house in a woven coconut leaf basket, surrounded by baked taro and yam. It was a small pig, given by a family too poor to hold the feast usually provided after church when it was their turn. Instead, they gave the food portion owed directly to the preacher. There’s a faded photo of me squatting on a cracked linoleum floor, examining the contents of the basket, and wondering what on earth I’m going to do with them. I soon learnt the first lesson of island life: food must be shared. With no refrigeration, no family of strapping youths, and no plans to eat the pig myself, it had to be given away to neighbours. It was that simple. Even watermelon went off within the day. In terms of eating, that small pig would have been better kept until a later day, when it reached optimum size, but each family’s obligation came around regularly, and had to be fulfilled. Feasting, and providing for feasting, was a duty, even a fatongia mamafa: a “heavy duty” among many duties, in which the pig was an object deeply “entangled” in all social relations (Thomas). A small pig was big enough to carry the weight of such obligations, even if it could not feed a crowd. Growing numbers of tourists to Tonga, often ignored benignly by their hosts, are keen to snap photos of grazing pigs. It is unusual enough for westerners to see pigs freely wandering, but what is more striking about some pigs on Tongatapu and ‘Eua is that they venture onto the reefs and mudflats at low tide, going after the rich marine pickings, just as their human counterparts do. The silhouette of a pig in the water as the tropical sun sinks behind, caught in a digital frame, it is a striking memory of a holiday in a place that remains largely uninterested in its tourist potential. While an influx of guests is seen by development consultants as the path to the nation’s economic future, Tongans bemusedly refuse to take this possibility seriously (Menzies). Despite a negative trade balance, partly caused by the importation of foreign food, Tonga survives on a combination of subsistence farming and remittances from Tongans living overseas; the tourist potential is largely unrealised. Dirk Spennemann’s work took a strange turn when, as an archaeologist working in Tonga, it became necessary for him to investigate whether these reef-grazing pigs were disturbing midden contents on Tongatapu. In order to establish this, he collected bags of both wet and dry “pig excreta” (107). Spenemann’s methodology involved soaking the contents of these bags for 48 hours, stirring them frequently; “they dissolved, producing considerable smell” (107). Spennemann concluded that pigs do appear to have been eating fish and shellfish, along with grass and “the occasional bit of paper” (107). They also feed on “seaweed and seagrass” (108). I wonder if these food groups have any noticeable impact on the taste of their flesh? Creatures fed particular diets in order to create a certain distinct taste are part of the culinary traditions of the world. The deli around the corner from where I live sells such gourmet items as part of its lunch fare: Saltbush lamb baguettes are one of their favourites. In the Orkneys, the rare and ancient North Ronaldsay Sheep are kept from inland foraging for most of the year by a high stone fence in order to conserve the grass for lambing time. This forces them to eat seaweed on the beach, producing a distinct marine taste, one that is highly valued in certain Parisian restaurants. As an economy largely cut out of the world economic loop, Tonga is unlikely to find select menus on which its reef pigs might appear. While living on ‘Eua, I regularly took a three hour ferry trip to Tongatapu in order to buy food I could not get on my home island. One of these items was wholemeal flour, from which I baked bread in a mud oven we had built outside. Bread was available on ‘Eua, but it was white, light and transported loose in the back of truck. I chose to make my own. The ferry trip usually involved a very rough crossing, though on calmer days, roof passengers would cook sipi on the diesel chimney, added flavour guaranteed. It usually only took about thirty minutes on the way out from Nafanua Harbour before the big waves struck. I could endure them for a while, but soon the waves, combined with a heavy smell of diesel, would have me heading for the rail. On one journey, I tried to hold off seasickness by focussing on an island off shore from Tongatapu. I went onto the front deck of the ferry and faced the full blast of the wind. With waves and wind, it was difficult to stand. I diligently stared at the island, which only occasionally disappeared beneath the swell, but I soon knew that this trip would be like the others; I’d be leaning over the rail as the ocean came up to meet me, not really caring if I went over. I could not bear to share the experience, so in many ways being alone on the foredeck was ideal for me, if I had to be on the boat at all. At least I thought I was alone, but I soon heard a grunt, and looked across to see an enormous sow, trotters tied front and back, lying across the opposite side of the boat. And like me, she too was succumbing to her nausea. Despite the almost complete self-absorption seasickness brings, we looked at each other. I may have imagined an acknowledgement, but I think not. While the status of pigs in Tongan life remains important, in many respects the imposition of European institutions and the availability of imported foods have had an enormous impact on the rest of the Tongan diet, with devastating effects on the health of Tongans. Instead of the customary two slow-cooked meals, one before noon and one in the evening (Pollock 56), consisting mostly of roots crops, plantains and breadfruit, with a relish of meat or fish, most Tongans eat three meals a day in order to fit in with school and work schedules. In current Tongan life, there is no time for an ‘umu every day; instead, quick and often cheaper imported foods are consumed, though local foods can also be cooked relatively quickly. While some still start the day by grabbing a piece of left over cassava, many more would sit down to the ubiquitous Pacific breakfast food: crackers, topped with a slab of butter. Food is a neo-colonial issue. If larger nations stopped dumping unwanted and nutritionally poor food products, health outcomes might improve. Similarly, the Tongan government could tip the food choice balance by actively supporting a local and traditional food supply in order to make it as cheap and accessible as the imported foods that are doing such harm to the health of Tongans References Barnes, Lucy, Rona Moss-Morris, and Mele Kaufusi. “Illness Beliefs and Adherence in Diabetes Mellitus: A Comparison between Tongan and European Patients.” The New Zealand Medical Journal 117.1188 (2004): 1-9. Beaglehole, J.C. Ed. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780. Parts I & II. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967. ­­­____. Ed. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772-1775. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969. Colagiuri, Stephen, Ruth Colgaiuri, Siva Na‘ati, Soana Muimuiheata, Zafirul Hussein, and Taniela Palu. “The Prevalence of Diabetes in the Kingdom of Tonga.” Diabetes Care 28.2 (2002): 1378-83. Edwardes, Brennan, and Frank Frizelle. “Globalisation and its Impact on the South Pacific.” The New Zealand Medical Journal 122.1291 (2009). 4 Aug. 2010 Englberger, L., V. Halavatau, Y. Yasuda, & R, Yamazaki. “The Tonga Healthy Weight Loss Program.” Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition 8.2 (1999): 142-48. Gentles, Dudley, et al. “Metabolic Syndrome Prevalence in a Multicultural Population in Auckland, New Zealand.” Journal of the New Zealand Medical Association 120.1248 (2007). 4 Aug. 2010 Kirk, Sara F.L., Andrew J. co*ckbain, and James Beasley. “Obesity in Tonga: A cross-sectional comparative study of perceptions of body size and beliefs about obesity in lay people and nurses.” Obesity Research & Clinical Practice 2.1 (2008): 35-41. Larsen, Gregor, et al. “Phylogeny and Ancient DNA of Sus Provides New Insights into Neolithic Expansion in Island Southeast Asia and Oceania.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104.12 (2007): 4834-39. Martin, John. Tonga Islands: William Mariner’s Account, 1817. Neiafu, Tonga: Vava‘u, 1981. Menzies, Isa. “Cultural Tourism and International Development in Tonga: Notes from the Field”. Unpublished paper. Oceanic Passages Conference. Hobart, June 2010. Pollock, Nancy J. These Roots Remain: Food Habits in Islands of the Central and Eastern Pacific since Western Contact. Honolulu: Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1992. Rosen, Rochelle K., Judith DePue, and Stephen T. McGarvey. “Overweight and Diabetes in American Samoa: The Cultural Translation of Research into Health Care Practice.” Medicine and Health/ Rhode Island 91.12 (2008): 372-78. Spennemann, Dirk H.R. “On the Diet of Pigs Foraging on the Mud Flats of Tongatapu: An Investigation in Taphonomy.” Archaeology in New Zealand 37.2 (1994): 104-10. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Objects and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1991.

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According to The Betoota Advocate (Parker), a CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) paper has recently established that “it takes roughly seven minutes on average for a vegan to tell you that they’re vegan” (qtd. in Harrington et al. 135). For such a statement to have currency as a joke means that it is grounded in a shared experience of being vegan on the one hand, and of encountering vegans on the other. Why should vegans feel such a need to justify themselves? I recognise the observation as being true of me, and this article is one way to explore this perspective: writing to find out what I currently only intuit. As Richardson notes (516), writing is “a way of ‘knowing’—a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (qtd. in Wall 151).Autoethnography, the qualitative research methodology used for this article, is etymologically derived from Greek to indicate a process for exploring the self (autos) and the cultural (“ethno” from ethnos—nation, tribe, people, class) using a shared, understood, approach (“graphy” from graphia, writing). It relies upon critical engagement with and synthesising of the personal. In Wall’s words, this methodological analysis of human experience “says that what I know matters” (148). The autoethnographic investigation (Riggins; Sparkes) reported here interrogates the experience of “being judged” as a vegan: firstly, by myself; secondly, by other vegans; and ultimately by the wider society. As Ellis notes, autoethnography is “research, writing, story and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political. Autoethnographic forms feature concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection” (xix).Introspection is important because researchers’ stories of their observations are interwoven with self-reflexive critique and analysis: “illustrative materials are meant to give a sense of what the observed world is really like, while the researcher’s interpretations are meant to represent a more detached conceptualization of that reality” (Strauss and Corbin 22). Leaving aside Gans’s view that this form of enquiry represents the “climax of the preoccupation with self […] an autobiography written by sociologists” (542), an autoethnography generally has the added advantage of protecting against Glendon and Stanton’s concern that interpretive studies “are often of too short a duration to be able to provide sufficiently large samples of behaviour” (209). In my case, I have twelve years of experience of identifying as a vegan to draw upon.My experience is that being vegan is a contested activity with a significant range of variation that partly reflects the different initial motivations for adopting this increasingly mainstream identity. Greenebaum notes that “ethical vegans differentiate between those who ‘eat’ vegan (health vegans) and those who ‘live’ vegan (ethical vegans)”, going on to suggest that these differences create “hierarchies and boundaries between vegans” (131). As Greenebaum acknowledges, there is sometimes a need to balance competing priorities: “an environmental vegan […] may purchase leather products over polyvinyl chloride (PVC), thinking that leather is a better choice for the environment” (130). Harrington et al. similarly critique vegan motivations as encompassing “a selfless pursuit for those who cared for other beings (animals)” to “a concern about impacts that affect all humans (environment), and an interest mostly in the self (individual health …)” (144). Wright identifies a fourth group of vegans: those searching for a means of dietary inclusivity (2). I have known Orthodox Jewish households that have adopted veganism because it is compatible with keeping Kosher, while many strict Hindus are vegan and some observant Muslims may also follow suit, to avoid meat that is not Halal certified.The Challenge of the EverydayAlthough my initial vegan promptings were firmly at the selfish end of an altruism spectrum, my experience is that motivation is not static. Being a vegan for any reason increasingly primes awareness of more altruistic motivations “at the intersection of a diversity of concerns [… promoting] a spread and expansion of meaning to view food choices holistically” (Harrington et al. 144). Even so, everyday life offers a range of temptations and challenges that require constant juggling and, sometimes, a string of justifications: to oneself, and to others. I identify as a bit of a bad vegan, and not simply because I embrace the possibility that “honey is a gray area” (Greenebaum, quoting her participant Jason, 139). I’m also flexible around wine, for example, and don’t ask too many questions about whether the wine I drink is refined using milk, or egg-shells or even (yuk!) fish bladders. The point is, there are an infinite number of acid tests as to what constitutes “a real vegan”, encouraging inter-vegan judgmentality. Some slight definitional slippage aligns with Singer and Mason’s argument, however, that vegans should avoid worrying about “trivial infractions of the ethical guidelines […] Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is. Giving people the impression that it is virtually impossible to be vegan doesn’t help animals at all” (Singer and Mason 258–9).If I were to accept a definition of non-vegan, possibly because I have a leather handbag among other infractions, that would feel inauthentic. The term “vegan” helpfully labels my approach to food and drink. Others also find it useful as a shorthand for dietary preferences (except for the small but significant minority who muddle veganism with being gluten free). From the point of view of dietary prohibitions I’m a particularly strict vegan, apart from honey. I know people who make exceptions for line-caught fish, or the eggs from garden-roaming happy chooks, but I don’t. I increasingly understand the perspectives of those who have a more radical conception of veganism than I do, however: whose vision and understanding is that “behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The ‘absent referent’ is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product [… keeping] something from being seen as having been someone” (Adams 14). The concept of the global suffering of animals inherent in the figures: “31.1 billion each year, 85.2 million each day, 3.5 million each hour, 59,170 each minute” (Adams dedication) is appalling; as well as being an under-representation of the current situation since the globe has had almost two further decades of population growth and rising “living standards”.Whatever the motivations, it’s easy to imagine that the different branches of veganism have more in common than divides them. Being a vegan of any kind helps someone identify with other variations upon the theme. For example, even though my views on animal rights did not motivate my choice to become vegan, once I stopped seeing other sentient creatures as a handy food source I began to construct them differently. I gradually realised that, as a species, we were committing the most extraordinary atrocities on a global scale in treating animals as disposable commodities without rights or feelings. The large-scale production of what we like to term “meat and poultry” is almost unadulterated animal suffering, whereas the by-catch (“waste products”) of commercial fishing represents an extraordinary disregard of the rights to life of other creatures and, as Cole and Morgan note, “The number of aquatic animals slaughtered is not recorded, their individual deaths being subsumed by aggregate weight statistics” (135). Even if we did accept that humans have the right to consume some animals some of the time, should the netting of a given weight of edible fish really entail the death of many, many time more weight of living creatures that will be “wasted”: the so-called by-catch? Such wanton destruction has increasingly visible impacts upon complex food chains, and the ecosystems that sustain us all.The Vegan Threat to the Status QuoExamining the evidence for the broader community being biased against vegetarians and vegans, MacInnis and Hodson identify that these groups are “clear targets of relatively more negative attitudes” (727) towards them than other minority groups. Indeed, “only drug addicts were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians and vegans” (726). While “vegans were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians” (732), there was a hierarchy in negative evaluations according to the underlying motivation for someone adopting veganism or vegetarianism. People motivated by personal health received the least negative evaluations from the general population followed by those who were motivated by the environment. The greatest opprobrium was reserved for vegans who were motivated by animal rights (732). MacInnis and Hodson reason that this antipathy is because “vegetarians and vegans represent strong threats to the status quo, given that prevailing cultural norms favour meat-eating” (722). Also implied here is that fact that eating meat is itself a cultural norm associated with masculinity (Rothgerber).Adams’s work links the unthinking, normative exploitation of animals to the unthinking, normative exploitation of women, a situation so aligned that it is often expressed through the use of a common metaphor: “‘meat’ becomes a term to express women’s oppression, used equally by patriarchy and feminists, who say that women are ‘pieces of meat’” (2002, 59). Rothberger further interrogates the relationship between masculinity and meat by exploring gender in relation to strategies for “meat eating justification”, reflecting a 1992 United States study that showed, of all people reporting that they were vegetarian, 68% were women and 32% men (Smart, 1995). Rothberger’s argument is that:Following a vegetarian diet or deliberately reducing meat intake violates the spirit of Western hegemonic masculinity, with its socially prescribed norms of stoicism, practicality, seeking dominance, and being powerful, strong, tough, robust and invulnerable […] Such individuals have basically cast aside a relatively hidden male privilege—the freedom and ability to eat without criticism and scrutiny, something that studies have shown women lack. (371)Noting that “to raise concerns about the injustices of factory farming and to feel compelled by them would seem emotional, weak and sensitive—feminine characteristics” (366), Rothberger sets the scene for me to note two items of popular culture which achieved cut-through in my personal life. The evidence for this is, in terms of all the pro-vegan materials I encounter, these were two of a small number that I shared on social media. In line with Rothberger’s observations, both are oppositional to hegemonic masculinity:one represents a feminised, mother and child exchange that captures the moment when a child realises the “absent referent” of the dead animal in the octopus on his plate—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU03da2arE;while the other is a sentimentalised and sympathetic recording of cattle luxuriating in their first taste of pastureland after a long period of confinement—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huT5__BqY_U.Seeing cows behaving like pets does call attention to the artificial distinction between “companion animals” and other animals. As Cole and Stewart note, “the naming of other animals is useful for human beings, while it is dangerous, and frequently lethal, for other animals. This is because the words we use to name other animals are saturated with common sense knowledge claims about those animals that legitimate their habitual use for humans” (13). Thus a cat, in Western culture, has a very different life trajectory to a cow. Adams notes the contrary case where the companion animal is used as a referent for a threatened human:Child sexual abusers often use threats and/or violence against companion animals to achieve compliance from their victims. Batterers harm or kill a companion animal as a warning to their partner that she could be next; as a way of further separating her from meaningful relationships; to demonstrate his power and her powerlessness. (Adams 57)For children who are still at a stage where animals are creatures of fascination and potential friends, who may be growing up with Charlotte’s Web (White) or Peter Rabbit (Potter), the mental gymnastics of suspending identification with these fellow creatures are harder because empathy and imagination are more active and the ingrained habit of eating without thinking has not had so long to develop. Indeed, children often understand domestic animals as “members of the family”, as illustrated by an interview with Kani, a 10-year old participant in one of my research projects. “In the absence of her extended family overseas, Kani adds her pets to [the list of] those with whom she shares her family life: ‘And my mum and my uncle and then our cat Dobby. I named it [for Harry Potter’s house elf] ...and the goldfish. The goldfish are Twinkle, Glitter, Glow and Bobby’” (Green and Stevenson). Such perceptions may well filter through to children having a different understanding of animals-as-food, even though Cole and Stewart note that “children enter into an adult culture habituated to [the] banal conceptualization of other animals according to their (dis)utilities” (21).Evidence-Based VeganismThose M/C Journal readers who know me personally will understand that one reason why I embrace the “bad vegan” label, is that I’m no more obviously a pin-up for healthy veganism than I am for ethical or environmental veganism. In particular, my BMI (Body Mass Index) is significantly outside the “healthy” range. Even so, I attribute a dramatic change in my capacity for stamina-based activity to my embrace of veganism. A high-speed recap of the evidence would include: in 2009 I embarked on a week-long 500km Great Vic bike ride; in 2012 I successfully completed a Machu Picchu trek at high altitude; by 2013 I was ready for my first half marathon (reprised in 2014, and 2017); in 2014 I cycled from Surfers’ Paradise to Noosa—somewhat less successfully than in my 2009 venture, but even so; in 2016 I completed the Oxfam 50km in 24 hours (plus a half hour, if I’m honest); and in 2017 I completed the 227km Portuguese Camino; in 2018 I jogged an average of over 3km per day, every day, up until 20 September... Apart from indicating that I live an extremely fortunate life, these activities seem to me to demonstrate that becoming vegan in 2007 has conferred a huge health benefit. In particular, I cannot identify similar metamorphoses in the lives of my 50-to-60-something year-old empty-nester friends. My most notable physical feat pre-veganism was the irregular completion of Perth’s annual 12km City-to-Surf fun run.Although I’m a vegan for health reasons, I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide that this was now my future: I had to be coaxed and cajoled into looking at my food preferences very differently. This process entailed my enrolling in a night school-type evening course, the Coronary Health Improvement Program: 16 x 3 hour sessions over eight weeks. Its sibling course is now available online as the Complete Health Improvement Program. The first lesson of the eight weeks convincingly demonstrated that what is good for coronary health is also good for health in general, which I found persuasive and reassuring given the propensity to cancer evident in my family tree. In the generation above me, my parents each had three siblings so I have a sample of eight immediate family to draw upon. Six of these either have cancer at the moment, or have died from cancer, with the cancers concerned including breast (1), prostate (2), lung (1), pancreas (1) and brain (1). A seventh close relative passed away before her health service could deliver a diagnosis for her extraordinarily elevated eosinophil levels (100x normal rates of that particular kind of white blood cell: potentially a blood cancer, I think). The eighth relative in that generation is my “bad vegan” uncle who has been mainly plant-based in his dietary choices since 2004. At 73, he is still working three days per week as a dentist and planning a 240 km trek in Italy as his main 2019 holiday. That’s the kind of future I’m hoping for too, when I grow up.And yet, one can read volumes of health literature without stumbling upon Professor T. Colin Campbell’s early research findings via his work on rodents and rodent cells that: “nutrition [was] far more important in controlling cancer promotion than the dose of the initiating carcinogen” and that “nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development” (66, italics in original). Plant was already an eminent scientist at the point where she developed breast cancer, but she noted her amazement at learning “precisely how much has been discovered already [that] has not filtered through to the public” (18). The reason for the lack of visible research in this area is not so much its absence, but more likely its political sensitivity in an era of Big Food. As Harrington et al.’s respondent Samantha noted, “I think the meat lobby’s much bigger than the vegetable lobby” (147). These arguments are addressed in greater depth in Green et al.My initiating research question—Why do I feel the need to justify being vegan?—can clearly be answered in a wide variety of ways. Veganism disrupts the status quo: it questions both the appropriateness of humanity’s systematic torturing of other species for food, and the risks that those animal-based foods pose for the long-term health of human populations. It offends many vested interests from Big Food to accepted notions of animal welfare to the conventional teachings of the health industry. Identifying as a vegan represents an outcome of one or more of a wide range of motivations, some of which are more clearly self-serving (read “bad”); while others are more easily identified as altruistic (read “good”). After a decade or more of personal experimentation in this space, I’m proud to identify as a “bad vegan”. It’s been a great choice personally and, I hope, for some other creatures whose planet I share.ReferencesAdams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.Campbell, T. Colin, and Thomas M. Cambell. The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2005.Cole, Matthew, and Karen Morgan. “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspaper.” British Journal of Sociology 62 (2011): 134–53.———, and Kate Stewart. Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004.Gans, Herbert J. “Participant Observation in the Era of ‘Ethnography’.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28.5 (1999): 540–48.Glendon, A. 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Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. 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Introduction I think the Privacy Act is a huge edifice to protect the minority of things that could go wrong. I’ve got a good example for you, I’m just trying to think … yeah the worst one I’ve ever seen was the Balga Youth Program where we took these students on a reward excursion all the way to Fremantle and suddenly this very alienated kid started to jump under a bus, a moving bus so the kid had to be restrained. The cops from Fremantle arrived because all the very good people in Fremantle were alarmed at these grown-ups manhandling a kid and what had happened is that DCD [Department of Community Development] had dropped him into the program but hadn’t told us that this kid had suicide tendencies. No, it’s just chronically bad. And there were caseworkers involved and … there is some information that we have to have that doesn’t get handed down. Rather than a blanket rule that everything’s confidential coming from them to us, and that was a real live situation, and you imagine how we’re trying to handle it, we had taxis going from Balga to Fremantle to get staff involved and we only had to know what to watch out for and we probably could have … well what you would have done is not gone on the excursion I suppose (School Principal, quoted in Balnaves and Luca 49). These comments are from a school principal in Perth, Western Australia in a school that is concerned with “at-risk” students, and in a context where the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 has imposed limitations on their work. Under this Act it is illegal to pass health, personal or sensitive information concerning an individual on to other people. In the story cited above the Department of Community Development personnel were apparently protecting the student’s “negative right”, that is, “freedom from” interference by others. On the other hand, the principal’s assertion that such information should be shared is potentially a “positive right” because it could cause something to be done in that person’s or society’s interests. Balnaves and Luca noted that positive and negative rights have complex philosophical underpinnings, and they inform much of how we operate in everyday life and of the dilemmas that arise (49). For example, a ban on euthanasia or the “assisted suicide” of a terminally ill person can be a “positive right” because it is considered to be in the best interests of society in general. However, physicians who tacitly approve a patient’s right to end their lives with a lethal dose by legally prescribed dose of medication could be perceived as protecting the patient’s “negative right” as a “freedom from” interference by others. While acknowledging the merits of collaboration between people who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk”, this paper examines some of the barriers to collaboration. Based on both primary and secondary sources, and particularly on oral testimonies, the paper highlights the tension between privacy as a negative right and collaborative helping as a positive right. It also points to other difficulties and dilemmas within and between the institutions engaged in this joint undertaking. The authors acknowledge Michel Foucault’s contention that discourse is power. The discourse on privacy and the sharing of information in modern societies suggests that privacy is a negative right that gives freedom from bureaucratic interference and protects the individual. However, arguably, collaboration between agencies that are working to support individuals “at-risk” requires a measured relaxation of the requirements of this negative right. Children and young people “at-risk” are a case in point. Towards Collaboration From a series of interviews conducted in 2004, the school authorities at Balga Senior High School and Midvale Primary School, people working for the Western Australian departments of Community Development, Justice, and Education and Training in Western Australia, and academics at the Edith Cowan and Curtin universities, who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk” as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project called Smart Communities, have identified students “at-risk” as individuals who have behavioural problems and little motivation, who are alienated and possibly violent or angry, who under-perform in the classroom and have begun to truant. They noted also that students “at-risk” often suffer from poor health, lack of food and medication, are victims of unwanted pregnancies, and are engaged in antisocial and illegal behaviour such as stealing cars and substance abuse. These students are also often subject to domestic violence (parents on drugs or alcohol), family separation, and homelessness. Some are depressed or suicidal. Sometimes cultural factors contribute to students being regarded as “at-risk”. For example, a social worker in the Smart Communities project stated: Cultural factors sometimes come into that as well … like with some Muslim families … they can flog their daughter or their son, usually the daughter … so cultural factors can create a risk. Research elsewhere has revealed that those children between the ages of 11-17 who have been subjected to bullying at school or physical or sexual abuse at home and who have threatened and/or harmed another person or suicidal are “high-risk” youths (Farmer 4). In an attempt to bring about a positive change in these alienated or “at-risk” adolescents, Balga Senior High School has developed several programs such as the Youth Parents Program, Swan Nyunger Sports Education program, Intensive English Centre, and lower secondary mainstream program. The Midvale Primary School has provided services such as counsellors, Aboriginal child protection workers, and Aboriginal police liaison officers for these “at-risk” students. On the other hand, the Department of Community Development (DCD) has provided services to parents and caregivers for children up to 18 years. Academics from Edith Cowan and Curtin universities are engaged in gathering the life stories of these “at-risk” students. One aspect of this research entails the students writing their life stories in a secured web portal that the universities have developed. The researchers believe that by engaging the students in these self-exploration activities, they (the students) would develop a more hopeful outlook on life. Though all agencies and educational institutions involved in this collaborative project are working for the well-being of the children “at-risk”, the Privacy Act forbids the authorities from sharing information about them. A school psychologist expressed concern over the Privacy Act: When the Juvenile Justice Department want to reintroduce a student into a school, we can’t find out anything about this student so we can’t do any preplanning. They want to give the student a fresh start, so there’s always that tension … eventually everyone overcomes [this] because you realise that the student has to come to the school and has to be engaged. Of course, the manner and consequences of a student’s engagement in school cannot be predicted. In the scenario described above students may have been given a fair chance to reform themselves, which is their positive right but if they turn out to be at “high risk” it would appear that the Juvenile Department protected the negative right of the students by supporting “freedom from” interference by others. Likewise, a school health nurse in the project considered confidentiality or the Privacy Act an important factor in the security of the student “at-risk”: I was trying to think about this kid who’s one of the children who has been sexually abused, who’s a client of DCD, and I guess if police got involved there and wanted to know details and DCD didn’t want to give that information out then I’d guess I’d say to the police “Well no, you’ll have to talk to the parents about getting further information.” I guess that way, recognising these students are minor and that they are very vulnerable, their information … where it’s going, where is it leading? Who wants to know? Where will it be stored? What will be the outcomes in the future for this kid? As a 14 year old, if they’re reckless and get into things, you know, do they get a black record against them by the time they’re 19? What will that information be used for if it’s disclosed? So I guess I become an advocate for the student in that way? Thus the nurse considers a sexually abused child should not be identified. It is a positive right in the interest of the person. Once again, though, if the student turns out to be at “high risk” or suicidal, then it would appear that the nurse was protecting the youth’s negative right—“freedom from” interference by others. Since collaboration is a positive right and aims at the students’ welfare, the workable solution to prevent the students from suicide would be to develop inter-agency trust and to share vital information about “high-risk” students. Dilemmas of Collaboration Some recent cases of the deaths of young non-Caucasian girls in Western countries, either because of the implications of the Privacy Act or due to a lack of efficient and effective communication and coordination amongst agencies, have raised debates on effective child protection. For example, the British Laming report (2003) found that Victoria Climbié, a young African girl, was sent by her parents to her aunt in Britain in order to obtain a good education and was murdered by her aunt and aunt’s boyfriend. However, the risk that she could be harmed was widely known. The girl’s problems were known to 6 local authorities, 3 housing authorities, 4 social services, 2 child protection teams, and the police, the local church, and the hospital, but not to the education authorities. According to the Laming Report, her death could have been prevented if there had been inter-agency sharing of information and appropriate evaluation (Balnaves and Luca 49). The agencies had supported the negative rights of the young girl’s “freedom from” interference by others, but at the cost of her life. Perhaps Victoria’s racial background may have contributed to the concealment of information and added to her disadvantaged position. Similarly, in Western Australia, the Gordon Inquiry into the death of Susan Taylor, a 15 year old girl Aboriginal girl at the Swan Nyungah Community, found that in her short life this girl had encountered sexual violation, violence, and the ravages of alcohol and substance abuse. The Gordon Inquiry reported: Although up to thirteen different agencies were involved in providing services to Susan Taylor and her family, the D[epartment] of C[ommunity] D[evelopment] stated they were unaware of “all the services being provided by each agency” and there was a lack of clarity as to a “lead coordinating agency” (Gordon et al. quoted in Scott 45). In this case too, multiple factors—domestic, racial, and the Privacy Act—may have led to Susan Taylor’s tragic end. In the United Kingdom, Harry Ferguson noted that when a child is reported to be “at-risk” from domestic incidents, they can suffer further harm because of their family’s concealment (204). Ferguson’s study showed that in 11 per cent of the 319 case sample, children were known to be re-harmed within a year of initial referral. Sometimes, the parents apply a veil of secrecy around themselves and their children by resisting or avoiding services. In such cases the collaborative efforts of the agencies and education may be thwarted. Lack of cultural education among teachers, youth workers, and agencies could also put the “at-risk” cultural minorities into a high risk category. For example, an “at-risk” Muslim student may not be willing to share personal experiences with the school or agencies because of religious sensitivities. This happened in the UK when Khadji Rouf was abused by her father, a Bangladeshi. Rouf’s mother, a white woman, and her female cousin from Bangladesh, both supported Rouf when she finally disclosed that she had been sexually abused for over eight years. After group therapy, Rouf stated that she was able to accept her identity and to call herself proudly “mixed race”, whereas she rejected the Asian part of herself because it represented her father. Other Asian girls and young women in this study reported that they could not disclose their abuse to white teachers or social workers because of the feeling that they would be “letting down their race or their Muslim culture” (Rouf 113). The marginalisation of many Muslim Australians both in the job market and in society is long standing. For example, in 1996 and again in 2001 the Muslim unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total (Australian Bureau of Statistics). But since the 9/11 tragedy and Bali bombings visible Muslims, such as women wearing hijabs (headscarves), have sometimes been verbally and physically abused and called ‘terrorists’ by some members of the wider community (Dreher 13). The Howard government’s new anti-terrorism legislation and the surveillance hotline ‘Be alert not alarmed’ has further marginalised some Muslims. Some politicians have also linked Muslim asylum seekers with terrorists (Kabir 303), which inevitably has led Muslim “at-risk” refugee students to withdraw from school support such as counselling. Under these circ*mstances, Muslim “at-risk” students and their parents may prefer to maintain a low profile rather than engage with agencies. In this case, arguably, federal government politics have exacerbated the barriers to collaboration. It appears that unfamiliarity with Muslim culture is not confined to mainstream Australians. For example, an Aboriginal liaison police officer engaged in the Smart Communities project in Western Australia had this to say about Muslim youths “at-risk”: Different laws and stuff from different countries and they’re coming in and sort of thinking that they can bring their own laws and religions and stuff … and when I say religions there’s laws within their religions as well that they don’t seem to understand that with Australia and our laws. Such generalised misperceptions of Muslim youths “at-risk” would further alienate them, thus causing a major hindrance to collaboration. The “at-risk” factors associated with Aboriginal youths have historical connections. Research findings have revealed that indigenous youths aged between 10-16 years constitute a vast majority in all Australian States’ juvenile detention centres. This over-representation is widely recognised as associated with the nature of European colonisation, and is inter-related with poverty, marginalisation and racial discrimination (Watson et al. 404). Like the Muslims, their unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total in 2001 (ABS). However, in 1998 it was estimated that suicide rates among Indigenous peoples were at least 40 per cent higher than national average (National Advisory Council for Youth Suicide Prevention, quoted in Elliot-Farrelly 2). Although the wider community’s unemployment rate is much lower than the Aboriginals and the Muslims, the “at-risk” factors of mainstream Australian youths are often associated with dysfunctional families, high conflict, low-cohesive families, high levels of harsh parental discipline, high levels of victimisation by peers, and high behavioural inhibition (Watson et al. 404). The Macquarie Fields riots in 2005 revealed the existence of “White” underclass and “at-risk” people in Sydney. Macquarie Fields’ unemployment rate was more than twice the national average. Children growing up in this suburb are at greater risk of being involved in crime (The Age). Thus small pockets of mainstream underclass youngsters also require collaborative attention. In Western Australia people working on the Smart Communities project identified that lack of resources can be a hindrance to collaboration for all sectors. As one social worker commented: “government agencies are hierarchical systems and lack resources”. They went on to say that in their department they can not give “at-risk” youngsters financial assistance in times of crisis: We had a petty cash box which has got about 40 bucks in it and sometimes in an emergency we might give a customer a couple of dollars but that’s all we can do, we can’t give them any larger amount. We have bus/metro rail passes, that’s the only thing that we’ve actually got. A youth worker in Smart Communities commented that a lot of uncertainty is involved with young people “at-risk”. They said that there are only a few paid workers in their field who are supported and assisted by “a pool of volunteers”. Because the latter give their time voluntarily they are under no obligation to be constant in their attendance, so the number of available helpers can easily fluctuate. Another youth worker identified a particularly important barrier to collaboration: because of workers’ relatively low remuneration and high levels of work stress, the turnover rates are high. The consequence of this is as follows: The other barrier from my point is that you’re talking to somebody about a student “at-risk”, and within 14 months or 18 months a new person comes in [to that position] then you’ve got to start again. This way you miss a lot of information [which could be beneficial for the youth]. Conclusion The Privacy Act creates a dilemma in that it can be either beneficial or counter-productive for a student’s security. To be blunt, a youth who has suicided might have had their privacy protected, but not their life. Lack of funding can also be a constraint on collaboration by undermining stability and autonomy in the workforce, and blocking inter-agency initiatives. Lack of awareness about cultural differences can also affect unity of action. The deepening inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the Australian society, and the Howard government’s harshness on national security issues, can also pose barriers to collaboration on youth issues. Despite these exigencies and dilemmas, it would seem that collaboration is “the only game” when it comes to helping students “at-risk”. To enhance this collaboration, there needs to be a sensible modification of legal restrictions to information sharing, an increase in government funding and support for inter-agency cooperation and informal information sharing, and an increased awareness about the cultural needs of minority groups and knowledge of the mainstream underclass. Acknowledgments The research is part of a major Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, Smart Communities. The authors very gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the interviewees, and thank *Donald E. Scott for conducting the interviews. References Australian Bureau of Statistics. 1996 and 2001. Balnaves, Mark, and Joe Luca. “The Impact of Digital Persona on the Future of Learning: A Case Study on Digital Repositories and the Sharing of Information about Children At-Risk in Western Australia”, paper presented at Ascilite, Brisbane (2005): 49-56. 10 April 2006. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/ 06_Balnaves.pdf>. Dreher, Tanya. ‘Targeted’: Experiences of Racism in NSW after September 11, 2001. Sydney: University of Technology, 2005. Elliot-Farrelly, Terri. “Australian Aboriginal Suicide: The Need for an Aboriginal Suicidology”? Australian e-Journal for the Advancement of Mental Health, 3.3 (2004): 1-8. 15 April 2006 http://www.auseinet.com/journal/vol3iss3/elliottfarrelly.pdf>. Farmer, James. A. High-Risk Teenagers: Real Cases and Interception Strategies with Resistant Adolescents. Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas, 1990. Ferguson, Harry. Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. Rouf, Khadji. “Myself in Echoes. My Voice in Song.” Ed. A. Bannister, et al. Listening to Children. London: Longman, 1990. Scott E. Donald. “Exploring Communication Patterns within and across a School and Associated Agencies to Increase the Effectiveness of Service to At-Risk Individuals.” MS Thesis, Curtin University of Technology, August 2005. The Age. “Investing in People Means Investing in the Future.” The Age 5 March, 2005. 15 April 2006 http://www.theage.com.au>. Watson, Malcolm, et al. “Pathways to Aggression in Children and Adolescents.” Harvard Educational Review, 74.4 (Winter 2004): 404-428. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid, and Mark Balnaves. "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>. APA Style Kabir, N., and M. Balnaves. (May 2006) "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>.

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In the 2019 documentary Chasing Happiness, recording artist/musician Joe Jonas tells audiences that the band was “living the dream”. Similarly, in the 2012 documentary Artifact, lead singer Jared Leto remarks that at the height of Thirty Seconds to Mars’s success, they “were living the dream”. However, for both the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, their experiences of the music industry (much like other commercially successful recording artists) soon transformed into nightmares. Similar to other commercially successful recording artists, the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, came up against the constraints of the industry which inevitably led to a forfeiting of authenticity, a loss of creative control, increased exploitation, and unequal remuneration. This work will consider how working in the music industry is not always a dream come true and can instead be viewed as a proverbial nightmare. Living the DreamIn his book Dreams, Carl Gustav Jung discusses how that which is experienced in sleep, speaks of a person’s wishes: that which might be desired in reality but may not actually happen. In his earlier work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that the dream is representative of fulfilling a repressed wish. However, the creative industries suggest that a dream need not be a repressed wish; it can become a reality. Jon Bon Jovi believes that his success in the music industry has surpassed his wildest dreams (Atkinson). Jennifer Lopez considers the fact that she held big dreams, had a focussed passion, and strong aspirations the reason why she pursued a creative career that took her out of the Bronx (Thomas). In a Twitter post from 23 April 2018, Bruno Mars declared that he “use [sic] to dream of this sh*t,” in referring to a picture of him performing for a sold out arena, while in 2019 Shawn Mendes informed his 24.4 million Twitter followers that his “life is a dream”. These are but a few examples of successful music industry artists who are seeing their ‘wishes’ come true and living the American Dream.Endemic to the American culture (and a characteristic of the identity of the country) is the “American Dream”. It centres on “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability and achievement” (Adams, 404). Although initially used to describe having a nice house, money, stability and a reasonable standard of living, the American Dream has since evolved to what the scholar Florida believes is the new ‘aspiration of people’: doing work that is enjoyable and relies on human creativity. At its core, the original American Dream required striving to meet individual goals, and was promoted as possible for anyone regardless of their cultural, socio-economic and political background (Samuel), because it encourages the celebrating of the self and personal uniqueness (Gamson). Florida’s conceptualisation of the New American dream, however, tends to emphasise obtaining success, fame and fortune in what Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin (310) consider “hot”, “creative” industries where “the jobs are cool”.Whether old or new, the American Dream has perpetuated and reinforced celebrity culture, with many of the young generation reporting that fame and fortune were their priorities, as they sought to emulate the success of their famous role models (Florida). The rag to riches stories of iconic recording artists can inevitably glorify and make appealing the struggle that permits achieving one’s dream, with celebrities offering young, aspiring creative people a means of identification for helping them to aspire to meet their dreams (Florida; Samuel). For example, a young Demi Lovato spoke of how she idolised and looked up to singer Beyonce Knowles, describing Knowles as a role model because of the way she carries herself (Tishgart). Similarly, American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson cited Aretha Franklin as her musical inspiration and the reason that she sings from a place deep within (Nilles). It is unsurprising then, that popular media has tended to portray artists working in the creative industries and being paid to follow their passions as “a much-vaunted career dream” (Duffy and Wissinger, 4656). Movies such as A Star Is Born (2018), The Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Dreamgirls (2006), Begin Again (2013) and La La Land (2016) exalt the perception that creativity, talent, sacrifice and determination will mean dreams come true (Nicolaou). In concert with the American dream is the drive among creative people pursuing creative success to achieve their dreams because of the perceived autonomy they will gain, the chance of self-actualisation and social rewards, and the opportunity to fulfil intrinsic motivations (Amabile; Auger and Woodman; Cohen). For these workers, the love of creation and the happiness that accompanies new discoveries (Csikszentmihalyi) can offset the tight budgets and timelines, precarious labour (Blair, Grey, and Randle; Hesmondhalgh and Baker), uncertain demand (Caves; Shultz), sacrifice of personal relationships (Eikhof and Haunschild), the demand for high quality products (Gil & Spiller), and the tense relationships with administrators (Bilton) which are known to plague these industries. In some cases, young, up and coming creative people overlook these pitfalls, instead romanticising creative careers as ideal and worthwhile. They willingly take on roles and cede control to big corporations to “realize their passions [and] uncover their personal talent” (Bill, 50). Of course, as Ursell argues in discussing television employees, such idealisation can mean creatives, especially those who are young and unfamiliar with the constraints of the industry, end up immersed in and victims of the “vampiric” industry that exploits workers (816). They are socialised towards believing, in this case, that the record label is a necessary component to obtain fame and fortune and whether willing or unwilling, creative workers become complicit in their own exploitation (Cohen). Loss of Control and No CompensationThe music industry itself has been considered by some to typify the cultural industries (Chambers). Popular music has potency in that it is perceived as speaking a universal language (Burnett), engaging the emotions and thoughts of listeners, and assisting in their identity construction (Burnett; Gardikiotis and Baltzis). Given the place of music within society, it is not surprising that in 2018, the global music industry was worth US$19.1billion (IFPI). The music industry is necessarily underpinned by a commercial agenda. At present, six major recording companies exist and between them, they own between 70-80 per cent of the recordings produced globally (Konsor). They also act as gatekeepers, setting trends by defining what and who is worth following and listening to (Csikszentmihalyi; Jones, Anand, and Alvarez). In essence, to be successful in the music industry is to be affiliated with a record label. This is because the highly competitive nature and cluttered environment makes it harder to gain traction in the market without worthwhile representation (Moiso and Rockman). In the 2012 documentary about Thirty Seconds to Mars, Artifact, front man Jared Leto even questions whether it is possible to have “success without a label”. The recording company, he determines, “deal with the crappy jobs”. In a financially uncertain industry that makes money from subjective or experience-based goods (Caves), having a label affords an artist access to “economic capital for production and promotion” that enables “wider recognition” of creative work (Scott, 239). With the support of a record label, creative entrepreneurs are given the chance to be promoted and distributed in the creative marketplace (Scott; Shultz). To have a record label, then, is to be perceived as legitimate and credible (Shultz).However, the commercial music industry is just that, commercial. Accordingly, the desire to make money can see the intrinsic desires of musicians forfeited in favour of standardised products and a lack of remuneration for artists (Negus). To see this standardisation in practice, one need not look further than those contestants appearing on shows such as American Idol or The Voice. Nowhere is the standardisation of the music industry more evident than in Holmes’s 2004 article on Pop Idol. Pop Idol first aired in Britain from 2001-2003 and paved the way for a slew of similar shows around the world such as Australia’s Popstars Live in 2004 and the global Idol phenomena. According to Holmes, audiences are divested of the illusion of talent and stardom when they witness the obvious manufacturing of musical talent. The contestants receive training, are dressed according to a prescribed image, and the show emphasises those melodramatic moments that are commercially enticing to audiences. Her sentiments suggest these shows emphasise the artifice of the music industry by undermining artistic authenticity in favour of generating celebrities. The standardisation is typified in the post Idol careers of Kelly Clarkson and Adam Lambert. Kelly Clarkson parted with the recording company RCA when her manager and producer Clive Davis told her that her album My December (2007) was “not commercial enough” and that Clarkson, who had written most of the songs, was a “sh*tty writer… who should just shut up and sing” (Nied). Adam Lambert left RCA because they wanted him to make a full length 80s album comprised of covers. Lambert commented that, “while there are lots of great songs from that decade, my heart is simply not in doing a covers album” (Lee). In these instances, winning the show and signing contracts led to both Clarkson and Lambert forfeiting a degree of creative control over their work in favour of formulaic songs that ultimately left both artists unsatisfied. The standardisation and lack of remuneration is notable when signing recording artists to 360° contracts. These 360° contracts have become commonplace in the music industry (Gulchardaz, Bach, and Penin) and see both the material and immaterial labour (such as personal identities) of recording artists become controlled by record labels (Stahl and Meier). These labels determine the aesthetics of the musicians as well as where and how frequently they tour. Furthermore, the labels become owners of any intellectual property generated by an artist during the tenure of the contract (Sanders; Stahl and Meier). For example, in their documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of (2015), the Backstreet Boys lament their affiliation with manager Lou Pearlman. Not only did Pearlman manufacture the group in a way that prevented creative exploration by the members (Sanders), but he withheld profits to the point that the Backstreet Boys had to sue Pearlman in order to gain access to money they deserved. In 2002 the members of the Backstreet Boys had stated that “it wasn’t our destinies that we had to worry about in the past, it was our souls” (Sanders, 541). They were not writing their own music, which came across in the documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of when singer Howie Dorough demanded that if they were to collaborate as a group again in 2013, that everything was to be produced, managed and created by the five group members. Such a demand speaks to creative individuals being tied to their work both personally and emotionally (Bain). The angst encountered by music artists also signals the identity dissonance and conflict felt when they are betraying their true or authentic creative selves (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey). Performing and abiding by the rules and regulations of others led to frustration because the members felt they were “being passed off as something we aren’t” (Sanders 539). The Backstreet Boys were not the only musicians who were intensely controlled and not adequately compensated by Pearlman. In the documentary The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story 2019, Lance Bass of N*Sync and recording artist Aaron Carter admitted that the experience of working with Pearlman became a nightmare when they too, were receiving cheques that were so small that Bass describes them as making his heart sink. For these groups, the dream of making music was undone by contracts that stifled creativity and paid a pittance.In a similar vein, Thirty Seconds to Mars sought to cut ties with their record label when they felt that they were not being adequately compensated for their work. In retaliation EMI issued Mars with a US$30 million lawsuit for breach of contract. The tense renegotiations that followed took a toll on the creative drive of the group. At one point in the documentary Artifact (2012), Leto claims “I can’t sing it right now… You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to sing this song the way it needs to be sung right now. I’m not ready”. The contract subordination (Phillips; Stahl and Meier) that had led to the need to renegotiate financial terms came at not only a financial cost to the band, but also a physical and emotional one. The negativity impacted the development of the songs for the new album. To make music requires evoking necessary and appropriate emotions in the recording studio (Wood, Duffy, and Smith), so Leto being unable to deliver the song proved problematic. Essentially, the stress of the lawsuit and negotiations damaged the motivation of the band (Amabile; Elsbach and Hargadon; Hallowell) and interfered with their creative approach, which could have produced standardised and poor quality work (Farr and Ford). The dream of making music was almost lost because of the EMI lawsuit. Young creatives often lack bargaining power when entering into contracts with corporations, which can prove disadvantaging when it comes to retaining control over their lives (Phillips; Stahl and Meier). Singer Demi Lovato’s big break came in the 2008 Disney film Camp Rock. As her then manager Phil McIntyre states in the documentary Simply Complicated (2017), Camp Rock was “perceived as the vehicle to becoming a superstar … overnight she became a household name”. However, as “authentic and believable” as Lovato’s edginess appeared, the speed with which her success came took a toll on Lovato. The pressure she experienced having to tour, write songs that were approved by others, star in Disney channel shows and movies, and look a certain way, became too much and to compensate, Lovato engaged in regular drug use to feel free. Accordingly, she developed a hybrid identity to ensure that the squeaky clean image required by the moral clauses of her contract, was not tarnished by her out-of-control lifestyle. The nightmare came from becoming famous at a young age and not being able to handle the expectations that accompanied it, coupled with a stringent contract that exploited her creative talent. Lovato’s is not a unique story. Research has found that musicians are more inclined than those in other workforces to use psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs (Vaag, Bjørngaard, and Bjerkeset) and that fame and money can provide musicians more opportunities to take risks, including drug-use that leads to mortality (Bellis, Hughes, Sharples, Hennell, and Hardcastle). For Lovato, living the dream at a young age ultimately became overwhelming with drugs her only means of escape. AuthenticityThe challenges then for music artists is that the dream of pursuing music can come at the cost of a musician’s authentic self. According to Hughes, “to be authentic is to be in some sense real and true to something ... It is not simply an imitation, but it is sincere, real, true, and original expression of its creator, and is believable or credible representations or example of what it appears to be” (190). For Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, being in the spotlight and abiding by the demands of Disney was “non-stop” and prevented his personal and musical growth (Chasing Happiness). As Kevin Jonas put it, Nick “wanted the Jonas Brothers to be no more”. The extensive promotion that accompanies success and fame, which is designed to drive celebrity culture and financial motivations (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King), can lead to cynical performances and dissatisfaction (Hughes) if the identity work of the creative creates a disjoin between their perceived self and aspirational self (Beech, Gilmore, Cochrane, and Greig). Promoting the band (and having to film a television show and movies he was not invested in all because of contractual obligations) impacted on Nick’s authentic self to the point that the Jonas Brothers made him feel deeply upset and anxious. For Nick, being stifled creatively led to feeling inauthentic, thereby resulting in the demise of the band as his only recourse.In her documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two (2017), Lady Gaga discusses the extent she had to go to maintain a sense of authenticity in response to producer control. As she puts it, “when producers wanted me to be sexy, I always put some absurd spin on it, that made me feel like I was still in control”. Her words reaffirm the perception amongst scholars (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King; Meyers) that in playing the information game, industry leaders will construct an artist’s persona in ways that are most beneficial for, in this case, the record label. That will mean, for example, establishing a coherent life story for musicians that endears them to audiences and engaging recording artists in co-branding opportunities to raise their profile and to legitimise them in the marketplace. Such behaviour can potentially influence the preferences and purchases of audiences and fans, can create favourability, originality and clarity around artists (Loroz and Braig), and can establish competitive advantage that leads to producers being able to charge higher prices for the artists’ work (Hernando and Campo). But what impact does that have on the musician? Lady Gaga could not continue living someone else’s dream. She found herself needing to make changes in order to avoid quitting music altogether. As Gaga told a class of university students at the Emotion Revolution Summit hosted by Yale University:I don’t like being used to make people money. It feels sad when I am overworked and that I have just become a money-making machine and that my passion and creativity take a backseat. That makes me unhappy.According to Eikof and Haunschild, economic necessity can threaten creative motivation. Gaga’s reaction to the commercial demands of the music industry signal an identity conflict because her desire to create, clashed with the need to be commercial, with the outcome imposing “inconsistent demands upon” her (Ashforth and Mael, 29). Therefore, to reduce what could be considered feelings of dissonance and inconsistency (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey) Gaga started saying “no” to prevent further loss of her identity and sense of authentic self. Taking back control could be seen as a means of reorienting her dream and overcoming what had become dissatisfaction with the commercial processes of the music industry. ConclusionsFor many creatives working in the creative industries – and specifically the music industry – is constructed as a dream come true; the working conditions and expectations experienced by recording artists are far from liberating and instead can become nightmares to which they want to escape. The case studies above, although likely ‘constructed’ retellings of the unfortunate circ*mstances encountered working in the music industry, nevertheless offer an inside account that contradicts the prevailing ideology that pursuing creative passions leads to a dream career (Florida; Samuel). If anything, the case studies explored above involving 30 Seconds to Mars, the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Adam Lambert and the Backstreet Boys, acknowledge what many scholars writing in the creative industries have already identified; that exploitation, subordination, identity conflict and loss of control are the unspoken or lesser known consequences of pursuing the creative dream. That said, the conundrum for creatives is that for success in the industry big “creative” businesses, such as recording labels, are still considered necessary in order to break into the market and to have prolonged success. This is simply because their resources far exceed those at the disposal of independent and up-and-coming creative entrepreneurs. Therefore, it can be argued that this friction of need between creative industry business versus artists will be on-going leading to more of these ‘dream to nightmare’ stories. The struggle will continue manifesting in the relationship between business and artist for long as the recording artists fight for greater equality, independence of creativity and respect for their work, image and identities. 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