Journal articles: 'Life Saving Service of the City of New York' – Grafiati (2024)

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This article reports the results of research that examined a randomized group of 118 Jewish seniors who were clients of one of three Jewish social service agencies in New York City. They were interviewed by four Clinical Pastoral Education residents at the Jewish Institute for Pastoral Care. During the interview, participants were asked to respond to the questions contained in the Brief Depression Scale, Version 3 of the UCLA Loneliness Scale, and the Index of Core Spiritual Experience—INSPIRIT. A statistically significant positive correlation was found between the depression and loneliness scores, r(116) = .56, p< .001. Spirituality was not correlated with either of these scales. Both depression and loneliness were significantly higher among women, among people who had physical impairments and those who had been victims of Nazi persecution. Depression and loneliness were inversely related to participants' ability to venture out of their house and to their relationship with their families. Having a sense of meaning or purpose in life was also inversely related to depression and loneliness. Spirituality tended to be higher among women, those participants with more years of religious education, and those with physicals impairments, but only the gender effect was statistically significant.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract A nationwide survey of community gardeners found differences in rankings of the importance of community gardens related to quality-of-life perceptions based on Maslow' hierarchy of human needs model. Race, gender, and city sizes affected perceptions. When comparisons were made among the four racial/ethnic divisions, responses to 18 of the 24 questions were found to be statistically different. Community gardens were especially important to African-American and Hispanic gardeners. Male and female gardeners rated quality-of-life benefits from gardens similarly in importance. However, women placed higher value on the importance of saving money and the beauty within the garden. Gardeners in small, medium, and large metropolitan cities had similar quality-of-life perceptions with only 4 of the 24 statement responses showing significant differences. Significant differences were found in 10 of the 24 statement responses between gardeners of the two large cities of Los Angeles and New York. In most cases, mean ratings were higher for gardeners in New York than those in Los Angeles.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In the 1980s, visible homelessness became one of the most pressing problems in New York City. While most New Yorkers expressed sympathy for the homeless, many of them also resisted efforts to site shelters and service facilities in their neighborhoods. But far from being simply a case of NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) sentiment, protests over the placement of these facilities arose in the context of decades-long neighborhood movements against urban disinvestment and the beginning of gentrification in some New York City neighborhoods. I argue that understanding this history is crucial to parsing the complex politics of anti-homeless facility protests in the 1980s and to understanding the rise of “quality of life” policies that would govern many neoliberal urban spaces by the 1990s.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The ‘Humans of New York’ social media feed, featuring photographs of people in New York City – and in recent years also Iran, Syria, and other locations – has amassed nearly 18 million Facebook followers, spawned multiple books, and inspired various copy-cat projects. Over the 6 years since its creation, the feed has evolved from an assortment of photos of individuals in New York to an intentional, morally conscious portrait of the perspectives and lived experiences of the inhabitants of New York and other places, and has resulted in real-life consequences for the subjects, ranging from donations to projects to invitations from the president of the United States. This article analyzes the ‘Humans of New York’ posts in the context of public service ideals of modern journalism as laid out by scholars, professional journalism societies, and leading news organizations. This analysis considers the perspective of the posts through the captions that accompany each post and finds that, since 2011, the feed has changed its narrative focus from the photographer to the subjects, who share their stories in their own words. In this way, the ‘Humans of New York’ feed satisfies several aspects of the public service ideal of journalism, lending support to the idea that new media sites created by non-professionals, or citizen journalists, may be able to satisfy some of the social responsibilities of the press, and offer lessons for both professionals and amateurs.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The Triborough Bridge connects the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx in New York City. The bridge has suspended spans with a total length of 2,700 ft (823 m). The existing concrete deck is being replaced with an orthotropic steel deck to reduce the overall dead load. Before deck replacement, a prototype steel orthotropic deck was installed on the main span for a length of 120 ft (36.6 m). About 300 strain gauges were installed at critical locations to investigate the fatigue strength under static and dynamic loads of the AASHTO fatigue truck and under normal traffic. The strain gauge testing was done in three phases, and structural refinements were made to the deck system between phases. Traffic monitoring was conducted for the most critical locations over a 30-day period during Phase III. The results from three phases of the strain gauge testing, including influence lines and traffic monitoring data, were used to calculate fatigue stress ranges and the fatigue life for each detail. In addition to strain gauge testing, a finite element analysis of the orthotropic deck was performed with loading criteria set by AASHTO load and resistance factor design. The results from the finite element analysis were compared with the results obtained from the strain gauge testing. It was concluded that the heavy trucks on the bridge cause fatigue stresses higher than what had been anticipated by AASHTO. The investigation assisted in modifying the design to obtain a longer service life for the deck system under heavy-truck traffic.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Concepts of thrift and dwelling are central to how societies live together. Thrift refers to a complex and morally-loaded set of economic practices that people engage with out of necessity, choice, or both. Whilst home-making or dwelling refers to social integration and self-representation. The ways in which social realms of thrift and dwelling relate to each other are historically and culturally specific, and media representations are an important intersection for reflecting and putting forward specific ‘imaginaries’ of thrift and dwelling. In this special issue, depictions of thrift in popular television are treated inclusively and span makeover reality TV, comedy-drama and documentaries, and target different national and international audiences. Contributions by researchers from the US, France, Germany and Australia examine how ‘appropriate’ ways of dwelling, involving thrift are negotiated in situations marked by material scarcity, precarity and aspirational lifestyles. These include: negotiating the harsh realities of housing in expensive cities such as New York in Insecure or Broad City (Perkins; Kanai & Dobson), make-over through decluttering and controlling debt in Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (Ouellette); Life or Debt; Raus aus den Schulden (Meyer), and are linked to specific historical and social circ*mstances in different national contexts. Suburban areas of post-war France are represented in 1967-1981 TV documentaries (Overney); gentrified British rural areas in Midsomer Murders (Zahlmann) and post-recessional New York City after the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in Broad City. Drawing on recent thrift scholarship and analyses of televised thrift in this special issue, we demonstrate how thrift and dwelling are articulated largely as a middle-class concern and a disciplining discourse and apparatus. Positive incidents of thrift are also revealed for example, in the comedy form and female voice in French post-war women’s documentaries. In other discussions there is much scepticism over the possibilities for protagonists to self-fashion themselves within the system of television series. This raises the question of whether alternative forms of imagining subjectivities and social relations in neo-liberal economies of dwelling can occur in entertainment television, or whether thrift imagined as what we call ‘televised endurance’ merely serves to reproduce the status quo as an irreversible condition.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

With the development of social economy, the urbanization of the world has presented a new development trend. The green, ecological, and economic city has gradually attracted people's attention. How to plan new cities and towns to coordinate economic development with nature has been the focus of domestic and foreign scholars. Based on this premise, this article elaborates the domestic and foreign research status of ecological city and puts forward a new type of green ecological civilization from the perspective of evolution of civilization. From the perspective of green ecological economy, the evolution of China's urban planning is studied in terms of the urban and rural areas, nature, pollution, industry, culture, and other aspects. To accumulate experience, green ecological planning in New York is also analyzed at multiple levels, such as urban expansion, energy, and urban water use. According to the development of our country in the past 30 years, the development strategy of urbanization suitable to China's national conditions is introduced on the basis of ecological economy. From the perspective of green ecological planning and economy, practice has proved that new urban planning is able to promote the establishment of a resource-saving society, to enhance the coordinated development of the population, resources, environment, and economy, and to comprehensively improve people's quality of life.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This paper expands on an earlier analysis finding that massive loss of housing to contagious urban decay in New York City, after a delay, has materially contributed to creation of a literal famine of housing and community. As in traditional food famines, a great housing deficit, some estimates suggest a quarter million unit shortfall affecting perhaps a million people, has structured itself according to the city's social hierarchy, striking most seriously the most vulnerable of the population. These increasingly become precariously housed and then, with time, homeless as the decline of low-income housing supply collides with increasing numbers of the poor. Previous simple mathematical analysis suggested the demographics of those precariously housed strongly determines the dynamics of homelessness. A generalized treatment is given here, linking the number precariously housed in New York City to contagious urban decay and time lag effects resulting from housing units made available by an episode of out-migration by the middle class, along with the impact of expected deterioration of public health causing elevated death rates among the precariously housed and the homeless. The resulting mathematical model raises the possibility of complex, counterintuitive and self-reinforcing cyclic time dynamics, with deceptive apparently latent periods, and serious instabilities, perhaps capable of rapidly producing unexpected avalanches of homeless people. Suggestions are made for intervention and control, based on understanding the complex ‘life cycle’ of the process. These, it is found, must include prompt restoration of critical housing-related municipal services, particularly fire extinguishment.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Perhaps the greatest operational problem faced by the New York City Emergency Medical Service (EMS) today is the sheer volume of calls entering the system, and the fact that many of those requests for medical aid are not life-threatening emergencies requiring ambulance transport. This creates two situations that New York City is all too familiar with: (l) ambulances are not available for true emergencies; and (2) response times for ambulances to arrive at the scene of an emergency are extended.A four-month pilot “on-scene triage” program was initiated by EMS as a possible solution to these problems. The program ran from May to August of 1980. A marked EMS car was designated as the “Triage Car” and was in operation during those hours when ambulance requests were at their peak (usually two to ten PM).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Aims/Background Heart failure affects approximately 1 million people in the UK, adversely affecting quality of life, functional capacity and cognitive health. Iron deficiency complicates heart failure in approximately 50% of patients. Giving intravenous ferric carboxymaltose has been shown to improve quality of life in patients with heart failure (New York Heart Association class and Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire). Methods A quality improvement project was designed to assess the feasibility, safety and cost implications of establishing an intravenous iron service in the authors' centre. Results Between July and December 2019 61 patients who were screened met the inclusion criteria and were administered intravenous ferric carboxymaltose. There were statistically significant improvements in ferritin levels (83.3 ug/litre to 433 ug/litre; P<0.0001), transferrin saturation (18% to 30% P<0.0001) and haemoglobin levels (126 g/litre to 135 g/litre; P<0.01). No demonstrable changes in New York Heart Association class or quality of life scores were noted. The overall financial impact for the trust was income generation of £14 665, a net income of £240 per patient. Conclusions Intravenous iron replacement with ferric carboxymaltose is safe and cost effective, and should be considered in eligible iron-deficient patients with symptomatic heart failure. Integration with another day case intravenous service represented the most logistically simple and economically viable method of service delivery.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In her pivotal work on Kuwaiti politics, Mary Ann Tétreault provides an “insider's guide” to the private and public spaces in which struggles over communal power are pursued by the government, the Parliament, and the people of Kuwait. Tétreault is careful to call her text “Stories of Democracy,” as she realizes the reflexive nature of what democracy means at different periods in history (before oil, after oil, under Iraqi occupation, in post-Liberation Kuwait); for different people in Kuwait (women, the merchants, government officials, tribal leaders, service politicians, opposition leaders); and in different contexts (the mosque, the diwaniyya or men's social club, the civic association, Parliament, the government). With this in mind, she argues that “democracy” is a “concept that ‘moves' depending on one's assumptions” (p. 3). Her basic message is that Kuwaiti politics resembles the politics of the Greek city-state, and she relies on various forms of Aristotelian comparison to explore this concept. Moreover, Tétreault illustrates that much of Kuwaiti politics resembles a high-stakes soap opera. For example, she calls the bad debt crisis “one of the longest running soap operas in Kuwaiti politics” (p. 164). In Chapter 4, she labels Kuwaiti politics “a family romance, whose grip on political actors constrains their choices” (p. 67). Toward the end of her text in chapter 8, Tétreault combines these metaphors when she observes that in the city-state that is Kuwait, politics are “the product of a domestic public life that seems all too often like life in a large and contentious family” (p. 206).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The World Trade Center (WTC) attacks on 9/11/2001 have consistently been associated with elevated rates of physical and mental health morbidities, while evidence about mortality has been limited. We examined mortality between 9/12/2001 and 12/31/2017 among 15,431 WTC-exposed Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) firefighters and emergency medical service providers (EMS), specifically assessing associations between intensity of WTC-exposure and mortality risk. Standardized mortality ratios (SMR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) compared FDNY cohort mortality with the US general population using life table analysis. Deaths were identified via linkage to the National Death Index. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to identify associations between intensity of WTC-exposure and mortality, accounting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, smoking history, and other relevant confounders. We identified 546 deaths and a lower than expected all-cause mortality rate (SMR = 0.22; 95% CI, 0.20–0.24). No cause-specific SMRs were meaningfully elevated. Mortality hazard ratios showed no association or linear trend with level of WTC-exposure. Our results provide evidence of the healthy worker effect, despite exposure to the World Trade Center. More follow-up time may be needed to assess the full impact of WTC-exposure on mortality in this occupational population.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

AbstractThe Third Street Music School Settlement was founded on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a dedicated music school offering conservatory-style music instruction along with social services in an effort to improve the lives of the immigrant poor and ease their assimilation as citizens of the United States. Music instruction aligned with social action and service was a powerful combination that attracted financial support and strong enrollment. When societal change and economic fluctuations in New York City affected enrollment and the fiscal health of the school, Third Street responded with renewed efforts to foster music instruction within a social context to serve the changing social needs of students and families. These efforts required negotiating a balance between concepts of music as aesthetic object and as social practice. Daily use of classical music as the expression of a diverse musical community has created contexts in which classical music is heard, not as a European cultural product or a historical artifact, but as a dynamic and living part of everyday life, a force for self-realization, and a basis for personal relationships.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Background The US National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) emphasizes the use of technology to facilitate coordination of comprehensive care for people with HIV. We examined cost-effectiveness from the health system perspective of 6 health information technology (HIT) interventions implemented during 2008 to 2012 in a Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program (RWHAP) Special Projects of National Significance (SPNS) Program demonstration project. Methods/findings HIT interventions were implemented at 6 sites: Bronx, New York; Durham, North Carolina; Long Beach, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York, New York (2 sites); and Paterson, New Jersey. These interventions included: (1) use of HIV surveillance data to identify out-of-care individuals; (2) extension of access to electronic health records (EHRs) to support service providers; (3) use of electronic laboratory ordering and prescribing; and (4) development of a patient portal. We employed standard microcosting techniques to estimate costs (in 2018 US dollars) associated with intervention implementation. Data from a sample of electronic patient records from each demonstration site were analyzed to compare prescription of antiretroviral therapy (ART), CD4 cell counts, and suppression of viral load, before and after implementation of interventions. Markov models were used to estimate additional healthcare costs and quality-adjusted life-years saved as a result of each intervention. Overall, demonstration site interventions cost $3,913,313 (range = $287,682 to $998,201) among 3,110 individuals (range = 258 to 1,181) over 3 years. Changes in the proportion of patients prescribed ART ranged from a decrease from 87.0% to 72.7% at Site 4 to an increase from 74.6% to 94.2% at Site 6; changes in the proportion of patients with 0 to 200 CD4 cells/mm3 ranged from a decrease from 20.2% to 11.0% in Site 6 to an increase from 16.7% to 30.2% in Site 2; and changes in the proportion of patients with undetectable viral load ranged from a decrease from 84.6% to 46.0% in Site 1 to an increase from 67.0% to 69.9% in Site 5. Four of the 6 interventions—including use of HIV surveillance data to identify out-of-care individuals, use of electronic laboratory ordering and prescribing, and development of a patient portal—were not only cost-effective but also cost saving ($6.87 to $14.91 saved per dollar invested). In contrast, the 2 interventions that extended access to EHRs to support service providers were not effective and, therefore, not cost-effective. Most interventions remained either cost-saving or not cost-effective under all sensitivity analysis scenarios. The intervention that used HIV surveillance data to identify out-of-care individuals was no longer cost-saving when the effect of HIV on an individual’s health status was reduced and when the natural progression of HIV was increased. The results of this study are limited in that we did not have contemporaneous controls for each intervention; thus, we are only able to assess sites against themselves at baseline and not against standard of care during the same time period. Conclusions These results provide additional support for the use of HIT as a tool to enhance rapid and effective treatment of HIV to achieve sustained viral suppression. HIT has the potential to increase utilization of services, improve health outcomes, and reduce subsequent transmission of HIV.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

ABSTRACTNaturally Occurring Retirement Community Supportive Service Programs (NORC Programs) constitute a national model in the United States of America that aims to benefit older adults ageing in place in their own homes and communities. One central aspect of NORC Programs is the provision of community activities to facilitate older adults’ connections with others. Guided by ecological systems theory, we explored from older adults’ perspectives what influences their participation in the community activities offered by NORC Programs, as well as the meaning of the social contact that such participation affords. We used data from an in-depth interview study with 41 older residents across seven NORC Program sites in the greater New York City area. Themes regarding influences on participation included individual circ*mstances (personal desire for social activity and health status), programmatic factors (relationships with staff and appeal of the activities) and community contexts (appeal of the other attendees). Perceptions of other attendees also emerged as an influence on the social effects of participation, which ranged from experiencing social contact alone to creating independent friendships. Overall, findings indicate that programme features combine with individual and community contexts to influence diverse experiences of community activities. In addition to implications for organisational practice, we interpret the results in terms of directions for future research regarding how community-based organisations can influence social integration in later life.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

BackgroundUsing the 140 speed cameras in New York City (NYC) as a case study, we explore how to optimise the number of cameras such that the most lives can be saved at the lowest cost.MethodsA Markov model was built to explore the economic and health impacts of speed camera installations in NYC as well as the optimal number and placement. Both direct and indirect medical savings associated with speed cameras are weighed against their cost. Health outcomes are measured in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs).ResultsOver the lifetime of an average NYC resident, the existing 140 speed cameras increase QALYs by 0.00044 units (95% credible interval (CrI) 0.00027 to 0.00073) and reduce costs by US$70 (95% CrI US$21 to US$131) compared with no speed cameras. The return on investment would be maximised where the number of cameras more than doubled to 300. This would further increase QALY gains per resident by 0.00083 units (95% CrI 0.00072 to 0.00096) while reducing medical costs by US$147 (95% CrI US$70 to US$221) compared with existing speed cameras. Overall, this increase in cameras would save 7000 QALYs and US$1.2 billion over the lifetime of the current cohort of New Yorkers.ConclusionSpeed cameras rank among the most cost-effective social policies, saving both money and lives.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Paul A. Volcker has spent most of his life in public service, at the Treasury under President Kennedy (1962–1965) and then as Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs under President Nixon (1969–1974), as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1975–1979), and finally as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System under both President Carter and President Reagan (1979–1987). Born in 1927, his world view was formed by childhood experience of the Great Depression and World War II, times of great national trial that led ultimately to recommitment and reconstruction. He went into public service in order to be a part of the rebuilding effort, but it was his fate instead to be involved mainly in managing pressures that would ultimately lead to the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system internationally and the Glass–Steagall banking system domestically. Consequently, there is some sadness today when he looks back on his career, but there is also a sense of accomplishment. In spite of everything, there was no depression and there was no world war. The possibility and hope for progress in years to come remains alive.The interview took place in Volcker's office at Rockefeller Center in New York City. His fourth-floor windows look out over the sunken plaza to the gold-leafed statue of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, and then on farther to the elegant GE building, which is familiar to anyone who has visited New York. Over the front entrance it is just possible to see the inscription adapted from Isaiah 33:6, “Wisdom and Knowledge shall be the stability of thy times.” It strikes me as an appropriate inscription for the building, reminding one that this most beautiful complex was built in the years of the Great Depression. Today, with the forthcoming interview in mind, it reminds me also of the stakes involved in the conduct of monetary policy.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Although they experience high rates of chronic illness, low-income minority communities have traditionally underutilized palliative care services compared to whites and those with higher incomes. One reason for this trend is lack of screening by community providers. We utilized a community-based participatory research approach to develop and implement an innovative multidomain palliative care screening tool in aging service agencies. Participants were aging service providers and clients in the East and Central Harlem neighborhoods of New York City, which are characterized by high poverty, largely African American and Latino populations, disproportionally high rates of chronic conditions, and limited health-care access. Screening tool development included reviewing existing measures and obtaining feedback from an expert panel, aging service providers, and older adults. We developed a 22-item tool covering 3 domains of palliative care need (physical symptoms, emotional concerns, and goals of care), which can be administered in 10 to 15 minutes. Sixteen providers at 2 aging service agencies were trained to use the tool over a 3-month pilot period. The tool showed evidence of feasibility of implementation, with 44 older adult clients screened. Providers reported high acceptability, 36% of clients screened positive, and the majority accepted referrals to outpatient palliative care clinics. The screening tool has the potential to increase palliative care utilization among underserved community-dwelling older adults and may improve their quality of life, potentially in communities worldwide. Future work should examine the psychometric proprieties of the tool, examine predictors of positive screens, explore its impact on clinical outcomes, and expand its reach.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract Background: The Acute Life Interventions Goals & Needs Program (ALIGN) at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City aims to work closely with high risk geriatric patients for short term intensive management of acute medical and social issues. Quantitative measures for determining success of the program is comparing emergency room visits and hospitalizations prior to and after enrollment with ALIGN. The Community Paramedicine service allows a paramedic, the ALIGN provider, and an emergency room physician to assess and triage patients in their home via video conference thereby avoiding ED visits for non-urgent services. Method: We reviewed the utilization of the Community Paramedicine service (from July 2017-February 2020) and its impact on ALIGN’s efforts to reduce unnecessary ED visits and hospitalizations. Results: 36 patients were evaluated with the Community Paramedicine service (from July 2017-February 2020). 19 or 52.8% avoided an ED visit and 17 or 47.2% were transported to the ED. 12 or 70.6% were admitted to the hospital of those that were transported to the ED initially. Top reasons for transport to ED included generalized weakness, acute mental status change (AMS), and shortness of breath (SOB). Conclusions: A Community Paramedicine program utilized by a high risk geriatrics team like ALIGN is effective in reducing ED visits and hospitalizations for the elderly population who incur greater expenses to the health care system and traditionally have poorer health outcomes.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

For personal or political reasons undocumented and controversial to this day, Greenwich Village lesbian photographer Angela Calomiris joined forces with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the Second World War to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). As Calomiris rose through CPUSA ranks in New York City, espionage efforts resulted in the Attorney General's office declaring the avant-garde Film and Photo League to be a subversive communist organisation in 1947, and the conviction of communist leaders during the Smith Act trial two years later. Interestingly, despite J. Edgar Hoover's indeterminate sexuality and well-documented harassment of gays and lesbians in public life, what mattered to him was not whether Calomiris adhered to heteronormativity, but that her ultimate sense of duty lay with the US government. This article demonstrates how this distinction helped Calomiris find personal satisfaction in defiance of patriarchal conservative expectations and heteronormative cold war gender roles. This article, which utilises FBI files, press coverage, some of Calomiris's papers and her memoir, concludes with a brief discussion of Calomiris's later life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she continued to craft her identity as a left-liberal feminist, with no mention of the service to the FBI or her role in fomenting the second Red Scare.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

AbstractIntroductionOn October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy touched down in New York City (NYC; New York USA) causing massive destruction, paralyzing the city, and destroying lives. Research has shown that considerable damage and loss of life can be averted in at-risk areas from advanced preparation in communication procedures, evacuation planning, and resource allocation. However, research is limited in describing how natural disasters of this magnitude affect emergency departments (EDs).Hypothesis/ProblemThe aim of this study was to identify and describe trends in patient volume and demographics, and types of conditions treated, as a result of Hurricane Sandy at Staten Island University Hospital North (SIUH-N; Staten Island, New York USA) site ED.MethodsA retrospective chart review of patients presenting to SIUH-N in the days surrounding the storm, October 26, 2012 through November 2, 2012, was completed. Data were compared to the same week of the year prior, October 28, 2011 through November 4, 2011. Daily census, patient age, gender, admission rates, mode of arrival, and diagnoses in the days surrounding the storm were observed.ResultsA significant decline in patient volume was found in all age ranges on the day of landfall (Day 0) with a census of 114; -55% compared to 2011. The daily volume exhibited a precipitous drop on the days preceding the storm followed by a return to usual volumes shortly after.A notably larger percentage of patients were seen for medication refills in 2012; 5.8% versus 0.4% (P<.05). Lacerations and cold exposure also were increased substantially in 2012 at 7.6% versus 2.8% (P<.05) and 3.8% versus 0.0% (P<.05) of patient visits, respectively.A large decline in admissions was observed in the days prior to the storm, with a nadir on Day +1 at five percent (-22%). Review of admitted patients revealed atypical admissions for home care service such as need for supplemental oxygen or ventilator.In addition, a drop in Emergency Medical Services (EMS) utilization was seen on Days 0 and +1. The SIUH-N typically sees 18% of patients arriving via EMS. On Day +1, only two percent of patients arrived by ambulance.ConclusionThe daily ED census saw a significant decline in the days preceding the storm. In addition, the type of conditions treated varied from baseline, and a considerable drop in hospital admissions was seen. Data such as these presented here can help make predictions for future scenarios.GreensteinJ, ChackoJ, ArdolicB, BerwaldN. Impact of Hurricane Sandy on the Staten Island University Hospital emergency department. Prehosp Disaster Med. 2016;31(3):335–339.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Music, medicine, escape: Austria, Italy, America. As a very young man, Sigmund Weissmann, before he was 18, had seen the prosperous stability and direction of his youth disintegrate, had, through fortunate foresight and mature determination escaped potential disaster, and had found himself, essentially alone, in New York City. That was April 1939. Within 5 years, his early studies completed and military service over, his future had been established with crystallography, and even more particularly, that aspect of it which was related to the “pathology” of metals. He was to establish one of the first laboratories devoted to research of lattice defects and to lay the groundwork for what is now known as Materials Science. Contemporaneous with the operation of this laboratory and as an outgrowth of his own basic connection with the famous “Brooklyn Poly,” Weissmann included, among his manifold teaching, research, and consulting activities, the acceptance of a position as an editor of the Powder Diffraction File, the PDF. The PDF was then just large enough, just important enough and had just that suggestion of an important reach into the future to necessitate an equally important attention from a group of persons schooled and skilled in the most recent techniques of X-ray powder diffraction. Weissmann (metals), Ben Post (organics), of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and J. V. Smith (minerals) (University of Chicago) were the first thus crystographically trained persons to oversee the PDF.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In this article, the author reports on a study exploring the impact of an urban setting on the lived experience of dementia for older couples where one member of each couple was diagnosed with the illness over age 64, the other was the primary care partner, and both were residing together in the greater New York metropolitan area at the time of the research. Certain features of city living, such as accessible medical care, public transportation, and social services, are known to provide substantial instrumental and affective support during challenging times However, how dementia care partnerships transform other aspects of urban environments to their own individual and unpredictable advantage is less documented. By describing how older dementia-affected couples make use of informal features of place to meet complex needs, such as affirming couplehood and sustaining autonomy, the study uncovers links between place and quality of life with dementia. There are implications for dementia care and research. These include deepening understanding of the role of place in dementia, establishing knowledge of place as a component of cultural competence, and implementing policies that support place-based care. Moreover, findings propose pathways to greater inclusivity in knowledge building by promoting creative approaches to data collecting supported by naturalistic inquiry. By adopting a strength perspective and a person-inenvironment approach to service provision, social work practice, and research stand to make a difference in the lives of persons affected by dementia and those who care for them.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

HIV-related symptoms have a deleterious effect on quality of life. One determinant of HIV symptom burden among individuals of color may be discrimination. The aim of this study was to explore whether multiple lifetime discrimination events are associated with a greater number of HIV-related symptoms among heterosexual HIV-positive men of color and to examine the influence of anxiety and social support on this relationship. Data for this study were drawn from a cross-sectional survey of 307 heterosexual HIV-positive men recruited from health and social service agencies in New York City (NYC). This study indicated that the number of discrimination events experienced in one’s lifetime was positively associated with the number of HIV-related symptoms experienced in the past month. Moreover, the direct effect of discrimination on HIV symptoms remained significant after anxiety was included as a mediator in the model, and there was a significant indirect effect of discrimination on HIV symptoms through anxiety. Evidence supported a potential moderated mediation effect involving social support: As social support increased, the indirect effect of discrimination on HIV symptoms through anxiety decreased. The results of this study suggest an association between discrimination and HIV-related symptom burden. Furthermore, the relationship between number of major discrimination experiences and HIV symptom burden was partially mediated by anxiety. Future research should consider how lifetime discrimination might be associated with negative health outcomes among HIV-positive individuals of color.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract As part of its strategic plan for Building a Weather-Ready Nation, the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) has increased their efforts to provide decision support services connecting forecasts and warnings to decision-making for core partners responsible for public safety. In 2011, the NWS formalized their approach to provide impact-based decision support services (IDSS) to help core partners better understand and utilize NWS forecasts and warnings in the face of upcoming extreme events. IDSS encourages weather forecasters to better consider societal impacts from weather events. This shift in emphasis toward impacts ensures NWS information and services are more relevant to decision-makers, which will allow those decision-makers to use NWS information and services to take proactive mitigating actions to protect life and property. This study posits that formal IDSS provides core partners with better information and supports decisions that reduce socioeconomic impacts during extreme winter storms. We compare two storms in the New York City area with similar characteristics but differing in their implementation of IDSS: the December 2010 storm occurred before the implementation of formal IDSS, whereas the January 2016 storm occurred after the implementation of formal IDSS. The comparison of the storm events indicates that IDSS and mitigating actions reduce flight cancellations, improve recovery time in the ground transportation sector, and reduce the duration and number of customers affected by power outages. We recommend that future studies of the value of IDSS consider using case studies for a range of weather events as well as other methodological approaches to assessing benefits.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Background In 2016, a short message service text messaging intervention to titrate insulin in patients with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes was implemented at two health care facilities in New York City. Objective This study aimed to conduct a qualitative evaluation assessing barriers to and the facilitators of the implementation of the Mobile Insulin Titration Intervention (MITI) program into usual care. Methods We conducted in-depth interviews with 36 patients enrolled in the MITI program and the staff involved in MITI (n=19) in the two health care systems. Interviews were transcribed and iteratively coded by two study investigators, both inductively and deductively using a codebook guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. Results Multiple facilitator themes emerged: (1) MITI had strong relative advantages to in-person titration, including its convenience and time-saving design, (2) the free cost of MITI was important to the patients, (3) MITI was easy to use and the patients were confident in their ability to use it, (4) MITI was compatible with the patients’ home routines and clinic workflow, (5) the patients and staff perceived MITI to have value beyond insulin titration by reminding and motivating the patients to engage in healthy behaviors and providing a source of patient support, and (6) implementation in clinics was made easy by having a strong implementation climate, communication networks to spread information about MITI, and a strong program champion. The barriers identified included the following: (1) language limitations, (2) initial nurse concerns about the scope of practice changes required to deliver MITI, (3) initial provider knowledge gaps about the program, and (4) provider perceptions that MITI might not be appropriate for some patients (eg, older or not tech-savvy). There was also a theme that emerged during the patient and staff interviews of an unmet need for long-term additional diabetes management support among this population, specifically diet, nutrition, and exercise support. Conclusions The patients and staff were overwhelmingly supportive of MITI and believed that it had many benefits and that it was compatible with the clinic workflow and patients’ lives. Initial implementation efforts should address staff training and nurse concerns. Future research should explore options for integrating additional diabetes support for patients.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In this issue of Journal of Disaster Research, we introduce nine papers on societal responses to recent catastrophic disasters with special focus on long-term recovery processes in Japan and the United States. As disaster impacts increase, we also find that recovery times take longer and the processes for recovery become more complicated. On January 17th of 1995, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake hit the Hanshin and Awaji regions of Japan, resulting in the largest disaster in Japan in 50 years. In this disaster which we call the Kobe earthquake hereafter, over 6,000 people were killed and the damage and losses totaled more than 100 billion US dollars. The long-term recovery from the Kobe earthquake disaster took more than ten years to complete. One of the most important responsibilities of disaster researchers has been to scientifically monitor and record the long-term recovery process following this unprecedented disaster and discern the lessons that can be applied to future disasters. The first seven papers in this issue present some of the key lessons our research team learned from the studying the long-term recovery following the Kobe earthquake disaster. We have two additional papers that deal with two recent disasters in the United States – the terrorist attacks on World Trade Center in New York on September 11 of 2001 and the devastation of New Orleans by the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and subsequent levee failures. These disasters have raised a number of new research questions about long-term recovery that US researchers are studying because of the unprecedented size and nature of these disasters’ impacts. Mr. Mammen’s paper reviews the long-term recovery processes observed at and around the World Trade Center site over the last six years. Ms. Johnson’s paper provides a detailed account of the protracted reconstruction planning efforts in the city of New Orleans to illustrate a set of sufficient and necessary conditions for successful recovery. All nine papers in this issue share a theoretical framework for long-term recovery processes which we developed based first upon the lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake and later expanded through observations made following other recent disasters in the world. The following sections provide a brief description of each paper as an introduction to this special issue. 1. The Need for Multiple Recovery Goals After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the long-term recovery process began with the formulation of disaster recovery plans by the City of Kobe – the most severely impacted municipality – and an overarching plan by Hyogo Prefecture which coordinated 20 impacted municipalities; this planning effort took six months. Before the Kobe earthquake, as indicated in Mr. Maki’s paper in this issue, Japanese theories about, and approaches to, recovery focused mainly on physical recovery, particularly: the redevelopment plans for destroyed areas; the location and standards for housing and building reconstruction; and, the repair and rehabilitation of utility systems. But the lingering problems of some of the recent catastrophes in Japan and elsewhere indicate that there are multiple dimensions of recovery that must be considered. We propose that two other key dimensions are economic recovery and life recovery. The goal of economic recovery is the revitalization of the local disaster impacted economy, including both major industries and small businesses. The goal of life recovery is the restoration of the livelihoods of disaster victims. The recovery plans formulated following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, including the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s plans, all stressed these two dimensions in addition to physical recovery. The basic structure of both the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s recovery plans are summarized in Fig. 1. Each plan has three elements that work simultaneously. The first and most basic element of recovery is the restoration of damaged infrastructure. This helps both physical recovery and economic recovery. Once homes and work places are recovered, Life recovery of the impacted people can be achieved as the final goal of recovery. Figure 2 provides a “recovery report card” of the progress made by 2006 – 11 years into Kobe’s recovery. Infrastructure was restored in two years, which was probably the fastest infrastructure restoration ever, after such a major disaster; it astonished the world. Within five years, more than 140,000 housing units were constructed using a variety of financial means and ownership patterns, and exceeding the number of demolished housing units. Governments at all levels – municipal, prefectural, and national – provided affordable public rental apartments. Private developers, both local and national, also built condominiums and apartments. Disaster victims themselves also invested a lot to reconstruct their homes. Eleven major redevelopment projects were undertaken and all were completed in 10 years. In sum, the physical recovery following the 1995 Kobe earthquake was extensive and has been viewed as a major success. In contrast, economic recovery and life recovery are still underway more than 13 years later. Before the Kobe earthquake, Japan’s policy approaches to recovery assumed that economic recovery and life recovery would be achieved by infusing ample amounts of public funding for physical recovery into the disaster area. Even though the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s recovery plans set economic recovery and life recovery as key goals, there was not clear policy guidance to accomplish them. Without a clear articulation of the desired end-state, economic recovery programs for both large and small businesses were ill-timed and ill-matched to the needs of these businesses trying to recover amidst a prolonged slump in the overall Japanese economy that began in 1997. “Life recovery” programs implemented as part of Kobe’s recovery were essentially social welfare programs for low-income and/or senior citizens. 2. Requirements for Successful Physical Recovery Why was the physical recovery following the 1995 Kobe earthquake so successful in terms of infrastructure restoration, the replacement of damaged housing units, and completion of urban redevelopment projects? There are at least three key success factors that can be applied to other disaster recovery efforts: 1) citizen participation in recovery planning efforts, 2) strong local leadership, and 3) the establishment of numerical targets for recovery. Citizen participation As pointed out in the three papers on recovery planning processes by Mr. Maki, Mr. Mammen, and Ms. Johnson, citizen participation is one of the indispensable factors for successful recovery plans. Thousands of citizens participated in planning workshops organized by America Speaks as part of both the World Trade Center and City of New Orleans recovery planning efforts. Although no such workshops were held as part of the City of Kobe’s recovery planning process, citizen participation had been part of the City of Kobe’s general plan update that had occurred shortly before the earthquake. The City of Kobe’s recovery plan is, in large part, an adaptation of the 1995-2005 general plan. On January 13 of 1995, the City of Kobe formally approved its new, 1995-2005 general plan which had been developed over the course of three years with full of citizen participation. City officials, responsible for drafting the City of Kobe’s recovery plan, have later admitted that they were able to prepare the city’s recovery plan in six months because they had the preceding three years of planning for the new general plan with citizen participation. Based on this lesson, Odiya City compiled its recovery plan based on the recommendations obtained from a series of five stakeholder workshops after the 2004 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake. <strong>Fig. 1. </strong> Basic structure of recovery plans from the 1995 Kobe earthquake. <strong>Fig. 2. </strong> “Disaster recovery report card” of the progress made by 2006. Strong leadership In the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, local leadership had a defining role in the recovery process. Kobe’s former Mayor, Mr. Yukitoshi Sasayama, was hired to work in Kobe City government as an urban planner, rebuilding Kobe following World War II. He knew the city intimately. When he saw damage in one area on his way to the City Hall right after the earthquake, he knew what levels of damage to expect in other parts of the city. It was he who called for the two-month moratorium on rebuilding in Kobe city on the day of the earthquake. The moratorium provided time for the city to formulate a vision and policies to guide the various levels of government, private investors, and residents in rebuilding. It was a quite unpopular policy when Mayor Sasayama announced it. Citizens expected the city to be focusing on shelters and mass care, not a ban on reconstruction. Based on his experience in rebuilding Kobe following WWII, he was determined not to allow haphazard reconstruction in the city. It took several years before Kobe citizens appreciated the moratorium. Numerical targets Former Governor Mr. Tosh*tami Kaihara provided some key numerical targets for recovery which were announced in the prefecture and municipal recovery plans. They were: 1) Hyogo Prefecture would rebuild all the damaged housing units in three years, 2) all the temporary housing would be removed within five years, and 3) physical recovery would be completed in ten years. All of these numerical targets were achieved. Having numerical targets was critical to directing and motivating all the stakeholders including the national government’s investment, and it proved to be the foundation for Japan’s fundamental approach to recovery following the 1995 earthquake. 3. Economic Recovery as the Prime Goal of Disaster Recovery In Japan, it is the responsibility of the national government to supply the financial support to restore damaged infrastructure and public facilities in the impacted area as soon as possible. The long-term recovery following the Kobe earthquake is the first time, in Japan’s modern history, that a major rebuilding effort occurred during a time when there was not also strong national economic growth. In contrast, between 1945 and 1990, Japan enjoyed a high level of national economic growth which helped facilitate the recoveries following WWII and other large fires. In the first year after the Kobe earthquake, Japan’s national government invested more than US$ 80 billion in recovery. These funds went mainly towards the repair and reconstruction of infrastructure and public facilities. Now, looking back, we can also see that these investments also nearly crushed the local economy. Too much money flowed into the local economy over too short a period of time and it also did not have the “trickle-down” effect that might have been intended. To accomplish numerical targets for physical recovery, the national government awarded contracts to large companies from Osaka and Tokyo. But, these large out-of-town contractors also tended to have their own labor and supply chains already intact, and did not use local resources and labor, as might have been expected. Essentially, ten years of housing supply was completed in less than three years, which led to a significant local economic slump. Large amounts of public investment for recovery are not necessarily a panacea for local businesses, and local economic recovery, as shown in the following two examples from the Kobe earthquake. A significant national investment was made to rebuild the Port of Kobe to a higher seismic standard, but both its foreign export and import trade never recovered to pre-disaster levels. While the Kobe Port was out of business, both the Yokohama Port and the Osaka Port increased their business, even though many economists initially predicted that the Kaohsiung Port in Chinese Taipei or the Pusan Port in Korea would capture this business. Business stayed at all of these ports even after the reopening of the Kobe Port. Similarly, the Hanshin Railway was severely damaged and it took half a year to resume its operation, but it never regained its pre-disaster readership. In this case, two other local railway services, the JR and Hankyu lines, maintained their increased readership even after the Hanshin railway resumed operation. As illustrated by these examples, pre-disaster customers who relied on previous economic output could not necessarily afford to wait for local industries to recover and may have had to take their business elsewhere. Our research suggests that the significant recovery investment made by Japan’s national government may have been a disincentive for new economic development in the impacted area. Government may have been the only significant financial risk-taker in the impacted area during the national economic slow-down. But, its focus was on restoring what had been lost rather than promoting new or emerging economic development. Thus, there may have been a missed opportunity to provide incentives or put pressure on major businesses and industries to develop new businesses and attract new customers in return for the public investment. The significant recovery investment by Japan’s national government may have also created an over-reliance of individuals on public spending and government support. As indicated in Ms. Karatani’s paper, individual savings of Kobe’s residents has continued to rise since the earthquake and the number of individuals on social welfare has also decreased below pre-disaster levels. Based on our research on economic recovery from the Kobe earthquake, at least two lessons emerge: 1) Successful economic recovery requires coordination among all three recovery goals – Economic, Physical and Life Recovery, and 2) “Recovery indices” are needed to better chart recovery progress in real-time and help ensure that the recovery investments are being used effectively. Economic recovery as the prime goal of recovery Physical recovery, especially the restoration of infrastructure and public facilities, may be the most direct and socially accepted provision of outside financial assistance into an impacted area. However, lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake suggest that the sheer amount of such assistance may not be effective as it should be. Thus, as shown in Fig. 3, economic recovery should be the top priority goal for recovery among the three goals and serve as a guiding force for physical recovery and life recovery. Physical recovery can be a powerful facilitator of post-disaster economic development by upgrading social infrastructure and public facilities in compliance with economic recovery plans. In this way, it is possible to turn a disaster into an opportunity for future sustainable development. Life recovery may also be achieved with a healthy economic recovery that increases tax revenue in the impacted area. In order to achieve this coordination among all three recovery goals, municipalities in the impacted areas should have access to flexible forms of post-disaster financing. The community development block grant program that has been used after several large disasters in the United States, provide impacted municipalities with a more flexible form of funding and the ability to better determine what to do and when. The participation of key stakeholders is also an indispensable element of success that enables block grant programs to transform local needs into concrete businesses. In sum, an effective economic recovery combines good coordination of national support to restore infrastructure and public facilities and local initiatives that promote community recovery. Developing Recovery Indices Long-term recovery takes time. As Mr. Tatsuki’s paper explains, periodical social survey data indicates that it took ten years before the initial impacts of the Kobe earthquake were no longer affecting the well-being of disaster victims and the recovery was completed. In order to manage this long-term recovery process effectively, it is important to have some indices to visualize the recovery processes. In this issue, three papers by Mr. Takashima, Ms. Karatani, and Mr. Kimura define three different kinds of recovery indices that can be used to continually monitor the progress of the recovery. Mr. Takashima focuses on electric power consumption in the impacted area as an index for impact and recovery. Chronological change in electric power consumption can be obtained from the monthly reports of power company branches. Daily estimates can also be made by tracking changes in city lights using a satellite called DMSP. Changes in city lights can be a very useful recovery measure especially at the early stages since it can be updated daily for anywhere in the world. Ms. Karatani focuses on the chronological patterns of monthly macro-statistics that prefecture and city governments collect as part of their routine monitoring of services and operations. For researchers, it is extremely costly and virtually impossible to launch post-disaster projects that collect recovery data continuously for ten years. It is more practical for researchers to utilize data that is already being collected by local governments or other agencies and use this data to create disaster impact and recovery indices. Ms. Karatani found three basic patterns of disaster impact and recovery in the local government data that she studied: 1) Some activities increased soon after the disaster event and then slumped, such as housing construction; 2) Some activities reduced sharply for a period of time after the disaster and then rebounded to previous levels, such as grocery consumption; and 3) Some activities reduced sharply for a while and never returned to previous levels, such as the Kobe Port and Hanshin Railway. Mr. Kimura focuses on the psychology of disaster victims. He developed a “recovery and reconstruction calendar” that clarifies the process that disaster victims undergo in rebuilding their shattered lives. His work is based on the results of random surveys. Despite differences in disaster size and locality, survey data from the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2004 Niigata-ken Chuetsu earthquake indicate that the recovery and reconstruction calendar is highly reliable and stable in clarifying the recovery and reconstruction process. <strong>Fig. 3.</strong> Integrated plan of disaster recovery. 4. Life Recovery as the Ultimate Goal of Disaster Recovery Life recovery starts with the identification of the disaster victims. In Japan, local governments in the impacted area issue a “damage certificate” to disaster victims by household, recording the extent of each victim’s housing damage. After the Kobe earthquake, a total of 500,000 certificates were issued. These certificates, in turn, were used by both public and private organizations to determine victim’s eligibility for individual assistance programs. However, about 30% of those victims who received certificates after the Kobe earthquake were dissatisfied with the results of assessment. This caused long and severe disputes for more than three years. Based on the lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake, Mr. Horie’s paper presents (1) a standardized procedure for building damage assessment and (2) an inspector training system. This system has been adopted as the official building damage assessment system for issuing damage certificates to victims of the 2004 Niigata-ken Chuetsu earthquake, the 2007 Noto-Peninsula earthquake, and the 2007 Niigata-ken Chuetsu Oki earthquake. Personal and family recovery, which we term life recovery, was one of the explicit goals of the recovery plan from the Kobe earthquake, but it was unclear in both recovery theory and practice as to how this would be measured and accomplished. Now, after studying the recovery in Kobe and other regions, Ms. Tamura’s paper proposes that there are seven elements that define the meaning of life recovery for disaster victims. She recently tested this model in a workshop with Kobe disaster victims. The seven elements and victims’ rankings are shown in Fig. 4. Regaining housing and restoring social networks were, by far, the top recovery indicators for victims. Restoration of neighborhood character ranked third. Demographic shifts and redevelopment plans implemented following the Kobe earthquake forced significant neighborhood changes upon many victims. Next in line were: having a sense of being better prepared and reducing their vulnerability to future disasters; regaining their physical and mental health; and restoration of their income, job, and the economy. The provision of government assistance also provided victims with a sense of life recovery. Mr. Tatsuki’s paper summarizes the results of four random-sample surveys of residents within the most severely impacted areas of Hyogo Prefecture. These surveys were conducted biannually since 1999,. Based on the results of survey data from 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005, it is our conclusion that life recovery took ten years for victims in the area impacted significantly by the Kobe earthquake. Fig. 5 shows that by comparing the two structural equation models of disaster recovery (from 2003 and 2005), damage caused by the Kobe earthquake was no longer a determinant of life recovery in the 2005 model. It was still one of the major determinants in the 2003 model as it was in 1999 and 2001. This is the first time in the history of disaster research that the entire recovery process has been scientifically described. It can be utilized as a resource and provide benchmarks for monitoring the recovery from future disasters. <strong>Fig. 4.</strong> Ethnographical meaning of “life recovery” obtained from the 5th year review of the Kobe earthquake by the City of Kobe. <strong>Fig. 5.</strong> Life recovery models of 2003 and 2005. 6. The Need for an Integrated Recovery Plan The recovery lessons from Kobe and other regions suggest that we need more integrated recovery plans that use physical recovery as a tool for economic recovery, which in turn helps disaster victims. Furthermore, we believe that economic recovery should be the top priority for recovery, and physical recovery should be regarded as a tool for stimulating economic recovery and upgrading social infrastructure (as shown in Fig. 6). With this approach, disaster recovery can help build the foundation for a long-lasting and sustainable community. Figure 6 proposes a more detailed model for a more holistic recovery process. The ultimate goal of any recovery process should be achieving life recovery for all disaster victims. We believe that to get there, both direct and indirect approaches must be taken. Direct approaches include: the provision of funds and goods for victims, for physical and mental health care, and for housing reconstruction. Indirect approaches for life recovery are those which facilitate economic recovery, which also has both direct and indirect approaches. Direct approaches to economic recovery include: subsidies, loans, and tax exemptions. Indirect approaches to economic recovery include, most significantly, the direct projects to restore infrastructure and public buildings. More subtle approaches include: setting new regulations or deregulations, providing technical support, and creating new businesses. A holistic recovery process needs to strategically combine all of these approaches, and there must be collaborative implementation by all the key stakeholders, including local governments, non-profit and non-governmental organizations (NPOs and NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), and the private sector. Therefore, community and stakeholder participation in the planning process is essential to achieve buy-in for the vision and desired outcomes of the recovery plan. Securing the required financial resources is also critical to successful implementation. In thinking of stakeholders, it is important to differentiate between supporting entities and operating agencies. Supporting entities are those organizations that supply the necessary funding for recovery. Both Japan’s national government and the federal government in the U.S. are the prime supporting entities in the recovery from the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2001 World Trade Center recovery. In Taiwan, the Buddhist organization and the national government of Taiwan were major supporting entities in the recovery from the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake. Operating agencies are those organizations that implement various recovery measures. In Japan, local governments in the impacted area are operating agencies, while the national government is a supporting entity. In the United States, community development block grants provide an opportunity for many operating agencies to implement various recovery measures. As Mr. Mammen’ paper describes, many NPOs, NGOs, and/or CBOs in addition to local governments have had major roles in implementing various kinds programs funded by block grants as part of the World Trade Center recovery. No one, single organization can provide effective help for all kinds of disaster victims individually or collectively. The needs of disaster victims may be conflicting with each other because of their diversity. Their divergent needs can be successfully met by the diversity of operating agencies that have responsibility for implementing recovery measures. In a similar context, block grants made to individual households, such as microfinance, has been a vital recovery mechanism for victims in Thailand who suffered from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami disaster. Both disaster victims and government officers at all levels strongly supported the microfinance so that disaster victims themselves would become operating agencies for recovery. Empowering individuals in sustainable life recovery is indeed the ultimate goal of recovery. <strong>Fig. 6.</strong> A holistic recovery policy model.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

James Tait Goodrich was born on April 16, 1946 in Portland, Oregon, United States, the son of Richard Goodrich and Gail (Josselyn) Goodrich. Dr. Goodrich served as a Marine officer during the Vietnam War, during which time he decided his next step would be to pursue a medical career. Not only was he an elite surgeon, but over the years he was also a generous mentor and teacher who shared his craft with many young surgeons who wanted to follow in his footsteps. During the Tet Offensive, he spotted a Vietnamese surgeon in a medical tent opening up a soldier’s head. “Cool,” he thought. “I want to do that” (1). Upon return to the USA, Jim married Judy Loudin on December 27, 1970, the love of his life who gave him the confidence and support to pursue his dreams. Dr. Goodrich completed his undergraduate work at the University of California, Irvine and his graduate studies at the School of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University (1972), receiving his Masters and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 1978 and 1980, respectively. He received his Medical Degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. After an internship at Columbia- Presbyterian Medical Center (1980-1981), he completed his residency training at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and the New York Neurological Institute (1981-1986). He also holds the rank of Professor Contralto of Neurological Surgery at the University of Palermo in Palermo, Italy. He was Director of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the Children’s Hospital of Montefiore Health System and he served as a Professor of Clinical Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine since 1998 (2). Dr. James T. Goodrich dedicated his life to saving children with complex neurological conditions. He had a particular interest in the treatment of craniofacial abnormalities. He was a pioneer in this field and developed a multi-stage approach for separating craniopagus twins who have their brain and skull conjoined. In 2016, he famously led a team of 40 doctors in a 27-hour procedure to separate the McDonald twins. Throughout his distinguished career, he became known as the world’s leading expert on this lifesaving procedure. He has been consulted on hundreds of cases, and he routinely traveled the world sharing his vast knowledge and expertise with colleagues (3,4). In Brazil, Dr. Goodrich played a very important role in leading the processes to successfully separate craniopagus sets in Ribeirao Preto (2017-2018), and in Brasilia (2019). A classical multistage surgery was performed to separate the Ribeirao Preto conjoined twins, and Dr. Goodrich participated on all the neurosurgical procedures as a great mentor. In the final operation, on October 28, 2019, some members of Montefiore Hospital medical staff (Dr. Oren Tepper, plastic surgeon, Dr. Carlene Broderick, pediatric anesthesiologist and Kamilah A. Dowling, nurse) also worked alongside Jim and the Brazilian team. An extraordinary and humble man, his words after the first surgical step, during an interview for a TV channel, were that in “this particular surgery we were able to do more than we expected because the anatomy was very good and the team had exceptional skills that made the difference”. Dr. Goodrich was a chief supporter of the Latin American Pediatric Neurosurgery Course (LACPN), having participated in all editions since 2004. In these events, he did not hesitate to share his knowledge during the hands-on sessions and, likewise, his wonderful conferences. Prof. Goodrich was officially honored by the Brazilian Society for Pediatric Neurosurgery during the “XII Brazilian Congress of Pediatric Neurosurgery”, in Florianopolis, Brazil. Dr. Goodrich was a gentle and truly caring man. He did not crave the limelight and was beloved by his colleagues and staff. He has authored numerous book chapters and articles on Pediatric Neurosurgery and is known worldwide as a prominent lecturer in this field. Outside his work, he was also known for his passion for historical artifacts, travelling, wine, and surfing. Dr. Goodrich was an incredible human being. In March 30th, 2020, he passed away after complications due to Covid-19 (5). In that day the world has become a little less bright without Jim. Our sympathy and prayers go to his wife Judy, his three sisters, and all those who were close to him

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Abstract Abstract 3689 Background: Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) is an unpredictable drug reaction to heparin characterized by thrombocytopenia and increased risk of life threatening venous and/or arterial thrombosis. Although HIT is uncommon, it is a serious side effect in patients receiving heparin. Data are lacking if there are additional risk factors that may be associated with the development of HIT. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to identify the risk factors that may be associated with the development of HIT in medical inpatients receiving heparin. Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study with 25,653 patients who were admitted to the medicine service and received heparin products (unfractionated heparin [UFH] or enoxaparin) in an urban teaching hospital in New York City from August 2005 to January 2010. Computerized discharge summaries, medical charts, radiology and laboratory reports were used in this retrospective study. Demographics such as age, gender and race were recorded. Details of medical history and hospital course of each patient was reviewed to obtain the known risk factors for HIT as well as possible confounding factors that may be related to the development of HIT. The diagnosis of HIT was confirmed if the platelet count dropped >50% from baseline and there was a positive laboratory HIT assay. Results: Fifty-five cases of in-hospital HIT (raw incidence, 0.21%, 95% CI [0.16, 0.28]) were observed (Table 1). After multivariate analysis, patients whose race was either Asian or Hispanic demonstrated an increased risk of developing HIT (relative risk [RR]= 2.61; 95% CI [1.10, 6.17]; p= 0.03 and RR= 2.21; 95% CI [1.22, 4.02]; p= 0.01 respectively). Additionally, patients who received full anticoagulation dose with UFH (RR= 3.66; 95% CI [1.98, 6.75]; p= <0.0001) or were exposed to heparin products for more than 5 days also had an increased risk of HIT (RR= 5.51; 95% CI [2.48, 12.2]; p= <0.0001 if heparin given 5 to 10 days, RR= 7.66; 95% CI [3.31, 17.8]; p= <0.0001 if heparin given more than 10 days). Moreover, patients who were on hemodialysis, carried a diagnosis of autoimmune disease, gout or heart failure remained as a independent risk factor for HIT (RR= 9.68; 95% CI [4.90, 19.1]; p= <0.0001, RR= 3.47; 95% CI [1.93, 6.26]; p= <0.0001, RR= 2.89; 95% CI [1.09, 7.68]; p= 0.03, and RR= 2.10; 95% CI [1.09, 4.08]; p= 0.03 respectively) (Table 2). Conclusion: Among patients admitted to inpatient medicine service receiving heparin products, patients who were Asian or Hispanic, who were treated with full anticoagulation dose with UFH or who received heparin product >5 days were at increased risk of HIT. Furthermore, patients who were on hemodialysis, had autoimmune disease, gout and heart failure were also at increased risk of in-hospital HIT. The results suggest that when using heparin products in these patient cohorts, increased surveillance of HIT is necessary. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Purpose Recent research finds that youth who identify as transgender or gender-expansive are disproportionately incarcerated in juvenile justice systems and are treated differently from their non-trans peers (Himmelstein and Brückner, 2011; Hunt and Moodie-Mills, 2012; Irvine, 2010; Mitchum and Moodie-Mills, 2014). Juvenile justice systems have paid little attention to this group of young people in terms of their unique service needs and risk factors. Using qualitative methods, the researchers analyze in-depth interviews and focus group findings from formerly incarcerated trans youth in juvenile justice settings to better understand their experiences. This paper aims to examine the challenges for young people, and, as well as considered recommendations for juvenile justice professionals to study toward making changes in policies, practices and programs that are needed to support young people who are transgender or gender expansive. Design/methodology/approach Using qualitative, case examples and descriptive analysis, this paper describes the experiences of trans youth in juvenile justice settings and studies toward developing models of promoting trans-affirming approaches to enhance juvenile justice institutions for trans and gender-expansive youth placed in them. The paper describes the evolution of an approach used by the authors, in New York state juvenile justice settings to increase a trans-affirming perspective as a central role in the organization’s strategy and design, and the methods it is using to institutionalize this critical change. Findings culled from the focus groups and in-depth interviews with 15 former residents of juvenile justice settings and several (3) key staff members from the juvenile justice system, focusing on policies, practices and training models are useful tools for assessing progress and recommending actions to increase the affirming nature of such systems. At its conclusion, this chapter will provide clear outcomes and implications for the development of policies, practices and programs with trans and gender expansive youth in juvenile justice systems. Findings Finding are conceptualized in six thematic categories, namely, privacy, access to health and mental health care, the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, name and pronoun use, clothing, appearance and mannerism, and housing issues. Research limitations/implications This study is limited as it focuses on formerly incarcerated youth in the New York City area. Practical implications The following implications for practice stemming from this study are as follows: juvenile justice professionals (including judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, probation officers and detention staff) must treat – and ensure others treat – all trans and gender-expansive youth with fairness, dignity and respect, including prohibiting any attempts to ridicule or change a youth’s gender identity or expression. Having written nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy is also essential. These policies can address issues such as prohibiting harassment of youth or staff who are trans or gender expansive, requiring the use of respectful and inclusive language and determining how gender rules (e.g. usage of “male or “female” bathrooms, gender-based room assignments) will be addressed for transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. Programs should also provide clients and staff with training and helpful written materials. Juvenile justice professionals must promote the well-being of transgender youth by allowing them to express their gender identity through choice of clothing, name, hair-style and other means of expression and by ensuring that they have access to appropriate medical care if necessary. Juvenile justice professionals must receive training and resources regarding the unique societal, familial and developmental challenges confronting trans youth and the relevance of these issues to court proceedings. Training must be designed to address the specific professional responsibilities of the audience (i.e. judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, probation officers and detention staff). Juvenile justice professionals must develop individualized, developmentally appropriate responses to the behavior of each trans youth, tailored to address the specific circ*mstances of his or her or their life. Social implications Providing trans-affirming services to youth in juvenile justice settings is a matter of equity and should be the goal strived for by all systems that care for these young people. Helping trans and gender-expansive youth reenter and reintegrate into society should be a primary goal. There are many organizations and systems that stand ready to assist juvenile justice systems and facilities in supporting trans and gender expansive youth in their custody and helping them to rehabilitate, heal and reenter a society that welcomes their participation and where they can thrive and not just survive. Originality/value The paper is original in that it examines the lived experiences of trans and gender-expansive youth in juvenile justice systems. An area, which has not been fully explored in the professional literature.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The achievement of family well - being is an aspiration of all families including families of migrant workers, to achieve the well - being of one of the ways that the families of migrant workers with the departure of the wife work as domestic servants in various countries. The purpose of this study was to analyze social capital, economic coping, sress symptom’s husband and family subjektive well - being of women migrant workers. This research use cross sectional studies. The location was chosen purposively in Tanggeung Village, Pagermaneuh Village, Margaluyu Village, Karangtengah Village, Tanggeung District and Pasirdalam Village Kadupandak District, Cianjur, West Java, Indonesia. Seventy five families were selected purposively among the families of women migrant workers. The finding indicates that social capital is in the moderate category, the coping economy is in the moderate category, the sress symptom’s husband is in the low category and the family well-being is in the low category. Finding in this study family subjective well-being is influenced by income per capita, sress symptom’s husband and economic coping. Keywords: economic coping, family subjective well-being, social capital, stress symptom Abstrak Kesejahteraan keluarga merupakan sesuatu yang ingin dicapai seluruh keluarga, termasuk keluarga Tenaga Kerja Wanita (TKW), untuk mencapai kesejahteraan tersebut salah satu cara yang dilakukan oleh keluarga TKW adalah mengirim istri sebagai pembantu rumah tangga di berbagai negara. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk menganalisis modal sosial, coping ekonomi, gejala stres suami, dan kesejahteraan subjektif keluarga TKW. Penelitian ini menggunakan cross sectional studies. Lokasi dipilih dengan metode purposive di Provinsi Jawa Barat, Kabupaten Cianjur, Kecamatan Tanggeung, Desa Pagermaneuh, Desa Marguluyu, Desa Karangtengah, Desa Tanggeung, Kecamatan Kadupandak, Desa Pasirdalam. Jumlah sampel sebanyak 75 keluarga TKW dengan metode purposive sampling. Penelitian ini menemukan modal sosial berada pada kategori sedang, coping ekonomi berada pada kategori sedang, gelaja stres suami berada pada kategori rendah, dan kesejahteraan subjektif berada pada kategori rendah. Penelitian ini juga menemukan kesejahteraan keluarga berpengaruh terhadap pendapatan perkapita, gelaja stres suami, dan coping ekonomi. Kata kunci : coping ekonomi, gejala stres, kesejahteraan subjektif, modal sosial. References [BPS] Badan Pusat Statistik. 2016. Data provinsi termiskin 2016. Berita Resmi Statistik [internet]. 4 Januari 2016. [diunduh 2016 September 7]; Tersedia pada: http://www.bps.go.id. [BPS] Badan Pusat Statistik Jawa Barat. 2016. Garis Kemiskinan Menurut Kabupaten/Kota di Jawa Barat (Rp/kapita/bulan), 2005-2014. Berita Resmi Statistik [internet]. 4 Januari 2016, [diunduh 2016 September 7]; Tersedia pada: http://jabar.bps.go.id. Alfiasari. 2008. Analisis modal sosial dalam pemberdayaan ekonomi keluarga miskin di Kelurahan Kedung Jaya, Kecamatan Tanah Sareal, Kota Bogor. Vol. 1 no. 1 edisi Januari. Bogor (ID): Institut Pertanian Bogor. Borner, Shively J, Wunder G, Wyman S. 2012. How do rural households respond to economic shocks? Insights from hierarchical analysis using global data. International Association of Agricultural Economists. Casey L. 2013. Stress and wellbeing in Australia survey 2013. Australian Psychological Society Carbonell A F. 2005. Income and well-being: an empirical analysis of the comparison income effect. Journal of Public Economics: 89 (2005) 997 – 1019. Coleman J S. 1988. “Social capital in the creation of human capital.” American Journal of Sociology 94 (Supplement): S95-S120. Celia M, Lenore M. 2004. Somali Women and Well-Being: Social Networks and Social Capital among Immigrant Women in Australia. Human Organization. Vol. 63 :88 Djohan R. 2008. Leader & Social Capital : Lead to Togetherness. Jakarta: Fund Asia Education Debebe Z, Mebratie A, Sparrow R, Abebaw D, Dekker M, Alemu G, Bedi A. 2013. Coping with shocks in rural Ethiopia. Working Paper. African Studies Centre. Dercon S. 2000. Income risk, coping strategies and safety nets. Background paper World Development Report 2000/01: Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford University, Department of Economics Diener E, Tay L. 2013. Rising Income and the Subjective Well-Being of Nations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Vol. 104, No. 2, 267–276 DOI: 10.1037/a0030487 Dwyer A, Cummings A. 2001. Stress, Self-Efficacy, Social Support, and Coping Strategies in University Students. Canadian Journal of Counselling. Vol. 35:3 Ersado L, Alderman H, Alwang J. 2014. Changes in Consumption and Saving Behavior before and after Economic Shocks: Evidence from Zimbabwe. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/380136 Fujiwara F, Kawachi I. 2008. Social Capital and Health A Study of Adult Twins in the U.S. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Vol. 35: 2 Garcia M, McDowell T. 2010. Mapping Social Capital: A Critical Contextual Approach For Working with Low-Status Families. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. Vol. 36 No. 1: 96. 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2009.00188.x Grootaert C. 1999. Social capital, household walfare and poverty in Indonesia. Working Paper, No.6. Washington DC, USA: The World Bank. Social Development Department. Hasanah U, Nadiroh, Neolaka A. 2017. The Influence of Couple Interaction, Roles Differences, and Social-Economic Status on Mother’s Stress Coping. American Scientific Publisher. Vol. 23 10868 – 10870. Helliwell J F, Huang H, Wang S. 2013. Social Capital and Well-Being in Times of Crisis. Journal Happiness Study: DOI 10.1007/s10902-013-9441-z Headey B, Wooden Mark. 2004. The Effects of Wealth and Income on Subjective Well-Being and Ill-Being. Melbourne Institute of Applied and Social Research: IZA DP No. 1032. Hyyppa M. T, Maki J. (2003). Social participation and health in a community rich in stock of social capital. Health Education Research, 18(6), 770–779. Hossain S. 2006. Poverty, household strategies, and coping with urban life: examining livelihood framework in Dhaka City, Bangladesh. Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 1. Jain A K, Giga S I, Cooper C L. 2013. Stress, Health and Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Employee and Organizational Commitment. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health: doi:10.3390/ijerph10104907 Jaya, Sumertajaya I M, 2008, Pemodelan persamaan struktural dengan partial least square. Semnas Matematika dan Pendidikan Matematika. Vol. 1 118 - 132 Jha R, Nahrajan H K, Pradhan K. 2012. Household Coping Strategies and Welfare: Does Governance Matter? NCAER Working Papers on Decentralisation and Rural Governance in India. Krantz. 2001. The Sustainable Livelihood Approach to Poverty Reduction. Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency Kawachi I. 2006 Commentary: social capital and health: making the connections one step at a time. Int J Epidemiol. Vol. 35:989 –93. Lazarus, R S, Folkman, S, 1984. Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer. Mohnen S, Beate V B, Flap H, Subramanian S, Groenewegen P. 2015. The Influence of Social Capital on Individual Health: Is it the Neighbourhood or the Network?. Soc Indic Res. Vol. 121:195–214 DOI 10.1007/s11205-014-0632-8 Markovic, M, Manderson, L. (2002). Crossing national boundaries: Social identity formation among recent immigrant women in Australia from former Yugoslavia. Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 2, 303-316. Puspitawati H. 2012. Gender dan Keluarga. Bogor (ID): IPB Press. ____________. 2013. Ekologi Keluarga: Konsep dan Lingkungan. Bogor (ID): IPB Press. ____________. 2013. Pengantar Studi Keluarga. Bogor (ID): IPB Press. Puspitawati H, Herawati T. 2013. Metode Penelitian Keluarga. Bogor (ID): IPB Press. Rebecca P, Crnic K A, Cox M J, Mills W R. 2013. The Family Model Stress and Maternal Psychological Symptoms: Mediated Pathways From Economic Hardship to Parenting. Journal of Family Psychology: DOI: 10.1037/a0031112 Rosidah U, Hartoyo, Istiqlaliyah. 2012. Kajian strategi koping dan perilaku investasi anak pada keluarga buruh pemetik melati gambir. Jurnal Ilmu Keluarga dan Konsumen, Vol. 5, No. 1. Stevenson B, Wolfers J. 2013. Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation? American Economic Review. 103(3): 598–604 http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.3.598 Welsh J A, Berry H L. 2009. Social capital and mental health and well-being. National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, The Australian National University Wills E, Orozco L, Forero C, Pardo O, Andonova V. 2011. The relationship between perceptions of insecurity, social capital and subjective well-being: Empirical evidences from areas of rural conflict in Colombia. The Journal of Socio-Economics. Vol. 40 88–96 Yip W, Subramanian S. V, Mitchell A D, Lee D, Wang J, Kawachi I. 2007. Does social capital enhance health and well-being? Evidence from rural China. Journal Social Science & Medicine: 35 – 49

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction: In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, various emergency medical services (EMS) and health agencies in New York City (NYC), and other hard-hit cities, issued new guidelines terminating resuscitation efforts in cases of out of hospital cardiac arrests (CA). This guidance was issued to protect the health and safety of EMS providers, to conserve hospital resources, and to ensure optimal use of equipment to save the greatest number of lives. However, the psychological impact of this public health messaging on existing CA survivors has not yet been studied. Methods: Between 5/15 - 5/18 of 2020, a month after the NYC COVID-19 pandemic peak, CA survivors from an ongoing, prospective study, were invited to participate in a telephone-based assessment of the pandemic’s impact on psychological and behavioral dimensions. COVID-19 anxiety was assessed using the 7-item Perceived Coronavirus Threat Questionnaire (PCTQ; e.g., “I am stressed around other people because I worry I’ll catch the coronavirus;” range 1-42). Survivors’ self-reported fear and uncertainty in receiving immediate life-saving care in the event of a CA due to recent public health messaging was assessed on a 5-point Likert-scale (Not at all—extremely). Results: Of 100 approached, 75 CA survivors participated (53% male; age 61±15 years; 44% non-Hispanic White, 20% Black, and 31% Latinx). The majority, 63 of 75 (84%), had no COVID-19 symptoms or had not been tested. The median COVID-19 anxiety score was 28 (interquartile range [IQR]: 21-37). Participants who were “very to extremely” afraid that emergency care would not come if they had another CA made up 45% (34 of 75; 95% C.I: 34-57) and scored 1 SD higher (mean±SD 34±6 vs 23±9, p<0.001) on COVID-19 anxiety scores than those with little fear about the availability of emergency care. The association was significant after adjusting for age, race, sex, and COVID-19 testing status (Odds Ratio = 1.17; 95% CI: [1.079, 1.274]; p<0.001). Conclusion: A better understanding of the potential psychological impact of disaster-related public health messaging is needed to prevent campaigns from causing additional distress and contributing to poor mental health and quality of life.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In this paper we explore the rise of anti-gambling apps in the context of the massive expansion of gambling in new spheres of life (online and offline) and an acceleration in strategies of anticipatory and individualised management of harm caused by gambling. These apps, and the techniques and forms of labour they demand, are examples of and a mechanism through which a mode of governance premised on ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ is articulated and put into practice. To support this argument, we explore two government initiatives in the Australian context. Quit Pokies, a mobile app project between the Moreland City Council, North East Primary Care Partnership and the Victorian Local Governance Association, is an example of an emerging service paradigm of ‘self-care’ that uses online and mobile platforms with geo-location to deliver real time health and support interventions. A similar mobile app, Gambling Terminator, was launched by the NSW government in late 2012. Both apps work on the premise that interrupting a gaming session through a trigger, described by Quit Pokies’ creator as a “tap on the shoulder” provides gamblers the opportunity to take a reflexive stance and cut short their gambling practice in the course of play. We critically examine these apps as self-disciplining techniques of contemporary neo-liberalism directed towards anticipating and reducing the personal harm and social risk associated with gambling. We analyse the material and discursive elements, and new forms of user labour, through which this consumable media is framed and assembled. We argue that understanding the role of these apps, and mobile media more generally, in generating new techniques and technologies of the self, is important for identifying emerging modes of governance and their implications at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of cultural normalisation in online and offline environments. The Australian context is particularly germane for the way gambling permeates everyday spaces of sociality and leisure, and the potential of gambling interventions to interrupt and re-configure these spaces and institute a new kind of subject-state relation. Gambling in Australia Though a global phenomenon, the growth and expansion of gambling manifests distinctly in Australia because of its long cultural and historical attachment to games of chance. Australians are among the biggest betters and losers in the world (Ziolkowski), mainly on Electronic Gaming Machines (EGM) or pokies. As of 2013, according to The World Count of Gaming Machine (Ziolkowski), there were 198,150 EGMs in the country, of which 197,274 were slot machines, with the rest being electronic table games of roulette, blackjack and poker. There are 118 persons per machine in Australia. New South Wales is the jurisdiction with most EGMs (95,799), followed by Queensland (46,680) and Victoria (28,758) (Ziolkowski). Gambling is significant in Australian cultural history and average Australian households spend at least some money on different forms of gambling, from pokies to scratch cards, every year (Worthington et al.). In 1985, long-time gambling researcher Geoffrey Caldwell stated thatAustralians seem to take a pride in the belief that we are a nation of gamblers. Thus we do not appear to be ashamed of our gambling instincts, habits and practices. Gambling is regarded by most Australians as a normal, everyday practice in contrast to the view that gambling is a sinful activity which weakens the moral fibre of the individual and the community. (Caldwell 18) The omnipresence of gambling opportunities in most Australian states has been further facilitated by the availability of online and mobile gambling and gambling-like spaces. Social casino apps, for instance, are widely popular in Australia. The slots social casino app Slotomania was the most downloaded product in the iTunes store in 2012 (Metherell). In response to the high rate of different forms of gambling in Australia, a range of disparate interest groups have identified the expansion of gambling as a concerning trend. Health researchers have pointed out that online gamblers have a higher risk of experiencing problems with gambling (at 30%) compared to 15% in offline bettors (Hastings). The incidence of gambling problems is also disproportionately high in specific vulnerable demographics, including university students (Cervini), young adults prone to substance abuse problems (Hayatbakhsh et al.), migrants (Tanasornnarong et al.; Scull & Woolco*ck; Ohtsuka & Ohtsuka), pensioners (Hing & Breen), female players (Lee), Aboriginal communities (Young et al.; McMillen & Donnelly) and individuals experiencing homelessness (Holsworth et al.). While there is general recognition of the personal and public health impacts of gambling in Australia, there is a contradiction in the approach to gambling at a governance level. On one hand, its expansion is promoted and even encouraged by the federal and state governments, as gambling is an enormous source of revenue, as evidenced, for example, by the construction of the new Crown casino in Barangaroo in Sydney (Markham & Young). Campaigns trying to limit the use of poker machines, which are associated with concerns over problem gambling and addiction, are deemed by the gambling lobby as un-Australian. Paradoxically, efforts to restrict gambling or control gambling winnings have also been described as un-Australian, such as in the Australian Taxation Office’s campaign against MONA’s founder, David Walsh, whose immense art collection was acquired with the funds from a gambling scheme (Global Mail). On the other hand, people experiencing problems with gambling are often categorised as addicts and the ultimate blame (and responsibility) is attributed to the individual. In Australia, attitudes towards people who are arguably addicted to gambling are different than those towards individuals afflicted by alcohol or drug abuse (Jean). While “Australians tend to be sympathetic towards people with alcohol and other drug addictions who seek help,” unless it is seen as one of the more socially acceptable forms of occasional, controlled gambling (such as sports betting, gambling on the Melbourne Cup or celebrating ANZAC Day with Two-Up), gambling is framed as an individual “problem” and “moral failing” (Jean). The expansion of gambling is the backdrop to another development in health care and public health discourse, which have for some time now been devoted to the ideal of what Lupton has called the “digitally engaged patient” (Lupton). Technologies are central to the delivery of this model of health service provision that puts the patient at the centre of, and responsible for, their own health and medical care. Lupton has pointed out how this discourse, while appearing new, is in fact the latest version of the 1970s emphasis on the ‘patient as consumer’, an idea given an extra injection by the massive development and availability of digital and interactive web-based and mobile platforms, many of these directed towards the provision of health and health-related information and services. What this means for patients is that, rather than relying solely on professional medical expertise and care, the patient is encouraged to take on some of this medical/health work to conduct practices of ‘self-care’ (Lupton). The Discourse of ‘Self-Management’ and ‘Self-Care’ The model of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’ by ‘empowering’ digital technology has now become a dominant discourse within health and medicine, and is increasingly deployed across a range of related sectors such as welfare services. In recent research conducted on homelessness and mobile media, for example, government department staff involved in the reform of welfare services referred to ‘self-management’ as the new service paradigm that underpins their digital reform strategy. Echoing ideas and language similar to the “digitally engaged patient”, customers of Centrelink, Medicare and other ‘human services’ are being encouraged (through planned strategic initiatives aimed at shifting targeted customer groups online) to transact with government services digitally and manage their own personal profiles and health information. One departmental staff member described this in terms of an “opportunity cost”, the savings in time otherwise spent standing in long queues in service centres (Humphry). Rather than view these examples as isolated incidents taking place within or across sectors or disciplines, these are better understood as features of an emerging ‘discursive formation’ , a term Foucault used to describe the way in which particular institutions and/or the state establish a regime of truth, or an accepted social reality and which gives definition to a new historical episteme and subject: in this case that of the self-disciplined and “digitally engaged medical/health patient”. As Foucault explained, once this subject has become fully integrated into and across the social field, it is no longer easy to excavate, since it lies below the surface of articulation and is held together through everyday actions, habits and institutional routines and techniques that appear to be universal, necessary and/normal. The way in which this citizen subject becomes a universal model and norm, however, is not a straightforward or linear story and since we are in the midst of its rise, is not a story with a foretold conclusion. Nevertheless, across a range of different fields of governance: medicine; health and welfare, we can see signs of this emerging figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged patient” constituted from a range of different techniques and practices of self-governance. In Australia, this figure is at the centre of a concerted strategy of service digitisation involving a number of cross sector initiatives such as Australia’s National EHealth Strategy (2008), the National Digital Economy Strategy (2011) and the Australian Public Service Mobile Roadmap (2013). This figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged” patient, aligns well and is entirely compatible with neo-liberal formulations of the individual and the reduced role of the state as a provider of welfare and care. Berry refers to Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as outlined in his lectures to the College de France as a “particular form of post-welfare state politics in which the state essentially outsources the responsibility of the ‘well-being' of the population” (65). In the case of gambling, the neoliberal defined state enables the wedding of two seemingly contradictory stances: promoting gambling as a major source of revenue and capitalisation on the one hand, and identifying and treating gambling addiction as an individual pursuit and potential risk on the other. Risk avoidance strategies are focused on particular groups of people who are targeted for self-treatment to avoid the harm of gambling addiction, which is similarly framed as individual rather than socially and systematically produced. What unites and makes possible this alignment of neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” is first and foremost, the construction of a subject in a chronic state of ill health. This figure is positioned as terminal from the start. They are ‘sick’, a ‘patient’, an ‘addict’: in need of immediate and continuous treatment. Secondly, this neoliberal patient/addict is enabled (we could even go so far as to say ‘empowered’) by digital technology, especially smartphones and the apps available through these devices in the form of a myriad of applications for intervening and treating ones afflictions. These apps range fromself-tracking programs such as mood regulators through to social media interventions. Anti-Pokie Apps and the Neoliberal Gambler We now turn to two examples which illustrate this alignment between neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” in relation to gambling. Anti-gambling apps function to both replace or ‘take the place’ of institutions and individuals actively involved in the treatment of problem gambling and re-engineer this service through the logics of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’. Here, we depart somewhat from Foucault’s model of disciplinary power summed up in the institution (with the prison exemplifying this disciplinary logic) and move towards Deleuze’s understanding of power as exerted by the State not through enclosures but through diffuse and rhizomatic information flows and technologies (Deleuze). At the same time, we retain Foucault’s attention to the role and agency of the user in this power-dynamic, identifiable in the technics of self-regulation and in his ideas on governmentality. We now turn to analyse these apps more closely, and explore the way in which these articulate and perform these disciplinary logics. The app Quit Pokies was a joint venture of the North East Primary Care Partnership, the Victorian Local Governance Association and the Moreland City Council, launched in early 2014. The idea of the rational, self-reflexive and agentic user is evident in the description of the app by app developer Susan Rennie who described it this way: What they need is for someone to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to get out of there… I thought the phone could be that tap on the shoulder. The “tap on the shoulder” feature uses geolocation and works by emitting a sound alert when the user enters a gaming venue. It also provides information about each user’s losses at that venue. This “tap on the shoulder” is both an alert and a reprimand from past gambling sessions. Through the Responsible Gambling Fund, the NSW government also launched an anti-pokie app in 2013, Gambling Terminator, including a similar feature. The app runs on Apple and Android smartphone platforms, and when a person is inside a gambling venue in New South Wales it: sends reminder messages that interrupt gaming-machine play and gives you a chance to re-think your choices. It also provides instant access to live phone and online counselling services which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Google Play Store) Yet an approach that tries to prevent harm by anticipating the harm that will come from gambling at the point of entering a venue, also eliminates the chance of potential negotiations and encounters a user might have during a visit to the pub and how this experience will unfold. It reduces the “tap on the shoulder”, which may involve a far wider set of interactions and affects, to a software operation and it frames the pub or the club (which under some conditions functions as hubs for socialization and community building) as dangerous places that should be avoided. This has the potential to lead to further stigmatisation of gamblers, their isolation and their exclusion from everyday spaces. Moreland Mayor, Councillor Tapinos captures the implicit framing of self-care as a private act in his explanation of the app as a method for problem gamblers to avoid being stigmatised by, for example, publicly attending group meetings. Yet, curiously, the app has the potential to create a new kind of public stigmatisation through potentially drawing other peoples’ attention to users’ gambling play (as the alarm is triggered) generating embarrassment and humiliation at being “caught out” in an act framed as aberrant and literally, “alarming”. Both Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator require their users to perform ‘acts’ of physical and affective labour aimed at behaviour change and developing the skills of self-control. After downloading Quit Pokies on the iPhone and launching the app, the user is presented an initial request: “Before you set up this app. please write a list of the pokies venues that you regularly use because the app will ask you to identify these venues so it can send you alerts if you spend time in these locations. It will also use your set up location to identify other venues you might use so we recommend that you set up the App in the location where you spend most time. Congratulation on choosing Quit Pokies.”Self-performed processes include installation, setting up, updating the app software, programming in gambling venues to be detected by the smartphone’s inbuilt GPS, monitoring and responding to the program’s alerts and engaging in alternate “legitimate” forms of leisure such as going to the movies or the library, having coffee with a friend or browsing Facebook. These self-performed labours can be understood as ‘technologies of the self’, a term used by Foucault to describe the way in which social members are obliged to regulate and police their ‘selves’ through a range of different techniques. While Foucault traces the origins of ‘technologies of the self’ to the Greco-Roman texts with their emphasis on “care of oneself” as one of the duties of citizenry, he notes the shift to “self-knowledge” under Christianity around the 8th century, where it became bound up in ideals of self-renunciation and truth. Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator may signal a recuperation of the ideal of self-care, over confession and disclosure. These apps institute a set of bodily activities and obligations directed to the user’s health and wellbeing, aided through activities of self-examination such as charting your recovery through a Recovery Diary and implementing a number of suggested “Strategies for Change” such as “writing a list” and “learning about ways to manage your money better”. Writing is central to the acts of self-examination. As Jeremy Prangnell, gambling counsellor from Mission Australia for Wollongong and Shellharbour regions explained the app is “like an electronic diary, which is a really common tool for people who are trying to change their behaviour” (Thompson). The labours required by users are also implicated in the functionality and performance of the platform itself suggesting the way in which ‘technologies of the self’ simultaneously function as a form of platform work: user labour that supports and sustains the operation of digital systems and is central to the performance and continuation of digital capitalism in general (Humphry, Demanding Media). In addition to the acts of labour performed on the self and platform, bodies are themselves potentially mobilised (and put into new circuits of consumption and production), as a result of triggers to nudge users away from gambling venues, towards a range of other cultural practices in alternative social spaces considered to be more legitimate.Conclusion Whether or not these technological interventions are effective or successful is yet to be tested. Indeed, the lack of recent activity in the community forums and preponderance of issues reported on installation and use suggests otherwise, pointing to a need for more empirical research into these developments. Regardless, what we’ve tried to identify is the way in which apps such as these embody a new kind of subject-state relation that emphasises self-control of gambling harm and hastens the divestment of institutional and social responsibility at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of expansion in many respects backed by and sanctioned by the state. Patterns of smartphone take up in the mainstream population and the rise of the so called ‘mobile only population’ (ACMA) provide support for this new subject and service paradigm and are often cited as the rationale for digital service reform (APSMR). Media convergence feeds into these dynamics: service delivery becomes the new frontier for the merging of previously separate media distribution systems (Dwyer). Letters, customer service centres, face-to-face meetings and web sites, are combined and in some instances replaced, with online and mobile media platforms, accessible from multiple and mobile devices. These changes are not, however, simply the migration of services to a digital medium with little effective change to the service itself. Health and medical services are re-invented through their technological re-assemblage, bringing into play new meanings, practices and negotiations among the state, industry and neoliberal subjects (in the case of problem gambling apps, a new subjectivity, the ‘neoliberal addict’). These new assemblages are as much about bringing forth a new kind of subject and mode of governance, as they are a solution to problem gambling. This figure of the self-treating “gambler addict” can be seen to be a template for, and prototype of, a more generalised and universalised self-governing citizen: one that no longer needs or makes demands on the state but who can help themselves and manage their own harm. Paradoxically, there is the potential for new risks and harms to the very same users that accompanies this shift: their outright exclusion as a result of deprivation from basic and assumed digital access and literacy, the further stigmatisation of gamblers, the elimination of opportunities for proximal support and their exclusion from everyday spaces. References Albarrán-Torres, César. “Gambling-Machines and the Automation of Desire.” Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 5.1 (2013). Australian Communications and Media Authority. “Australians Cut the Cord.” Research Snapshots. Sydney: ACMA (2013) Berry, David. Critical Theory and the Digital. Broadway, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 Berry, David. Stunlaw: A Critical Review of Politics, Arts and Technology. 2012. ‹http://stunlaw.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/code-foucault-and-neoliberal.html›. Caldwell, G. “Some Historical and Sociological Characteristics of Australian Gambling.” Gambling in Australia. Eds. G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson, and L. Sylan. Sydney: Croom Helm Australia, 1985. 18-27. Cervini, E. “High Stakes for Gambling Students.” The Age 8 Nov. 2013. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/high-stakes-for-gambling-students-20131108-2x5cl.html›. Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October (1992): 3-7. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988 Hastings, E. “Online Gamblers More at Risk of Addiction.” Herald Sun 13 Oct. 2013. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/online-gamblers-more-at-risk-of-addiction/story-fni0fiyv-1226739184629#!›.Hayatbakhsh, Mohammad R., et al. "Young Adults' Gambling and Its Association with Mental Health and Substance Use Problems." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 36.2 (2012): 160-166. Hing, Nerilee, and Helen Breen. "A Profile of Gaming Machine Players in Clubs in Sydney, Australia." Journal of Gambling Studies 18.2 (2002): 185-205. Holdsworth, Louise, Margaret Tiyce, and Nerilee Hing. "Exploring the Relationship between Problem Gambling and Homelessness: Becoming and Being Homeless." Gambling Research 23.2 (2012): 39. Humphry, Justine. “Demanding Media: Platform Work and the Shaping of Work and Play.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 10.2 (2013): 1-13. Humphry, Justine. “Homeless and Connected: Mobile Phones and the Internet in the Lives of Homeless Australians.” Australian Communications Consumer Action Network. Sep. 2014. ‹https://www.accan.org.au/grants/completed-grants/619-homeless-and-connected›.Lee, Timothy Jeonglyeol. "Distinctive Features of the Australian Gambling Industry and Problems Faced by Australian Women Gamblers." Tourism Analysis 14.6 (2009): 867-876. Lupton, D. “The Digitally Engaged Patient: Self-Monitoring and Self-Care in the Digital Health Era.” Social Theory & Health 11.3 (2013): 256-70. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Packer’s Barangaroo Casino and the Inevitability of Pokies.” The Conversation 9 July 2013. ‹http://theconversation.com/packers-barangaroo-casino-and-the-inevitability-of-pokies-15892›. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Who Wins from ‘Big Gambling’ in Australia?” The Conversation 6 Mar. 2014. ‹http://theconversation.com/who-wins-from-big-gambling-in-australia-22930›.McMillen, Jan, and Katie Donnelly. "Gambling in Australian Indigenous Communities: The State of Play." The Australian Journal of Social Issues 43.3 (2008): 397. Ohtsuka, Keis, and Thai Ohtsuka. “Vietnamese Australian Gamblers’ Views on Luck and Winning: Universal versus Culture-Specific Schemas.” Asian Journal of Gambling Issues and Public Health 1.1 (2010): 34-46. Scull, Sue, Geoffrey Woolco*ck. “Problem Gambling in Non-English Speaking Background Communities in Queensland, Australia: A Qualitative Exploration.” International Gambling Studies 5.1 (2005): 29-44. Tanasornnarong, Nattap*rn, Alun Jackson, and Shane Thomas. “Gambling among Young Thai People in Melbourne, Australia: An Exploratory Study.” International Gambling Studies 4.2 (2004): 189-203. Thompson, Angela, “Live Gambling Odds Tipped for the Chop.” Illawarra Mercury 22 May 2013: 6. Metherell, Mark. “Virtual Pokie App a Hit - But ‘Not Gambling.’” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2013. ‹http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/virtual-pokie-app-a-hit--but-not-gambling-20130112-2cmev.html#ixzz2QVlsCJs1›. Worthington, Andrew, et al. "Gambling Participation in Australia: Findings from the National Household Expenditure Survey." Review of Economics of the Household 5.2 (2007): 209-221. Young, Martin, et al. "The Changing Landscape of Indigenous Gambling in Northern Australia: Current Knowledge and Future Directions." International Gambling Studies 7.3 (2007): 327-343. Ziolkowski, S. “The World Count of Gaming Machines 2013.” Gaming Technologies Association, 2014. ‹http://www.gamingta.com/pdf/World_Count_2014.pdf›.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The article considers several different options for materials for external wall insulation and their advantages from an economic and structural point of view, taking into account the characteristics of some of the most popular insulation and the feasibility of use in a given case. Currently, energy saving and reducing the use of fuel resources is one of the most pressing issues, both in the construction of new buildings and in the case of reconstruction of the existing building stock and means the need to have structures that will minimize heat loss. It is understood why high-quality thermal insulation is an investment for many years in the conditions of unstable energy prices and the economic advantages of reliable insulation from different directions are described. The comparative technical characteristics of the most popular materials of polyfoam and mineral wool in thermal insulation of walls are given, features of their use in different conditions are analyzed, the average prices for the device for the city of Kiev are compared. For a cheaper option, the calculation of the economic effect for the city of Kyiv is performed. It is determined that one of the most important factors of comfortable life is maintaining a comfortable microclimate in the building for many years, regardless of the weather outside, where you can feel as safe and comfortable as possible, and its direct dependence on quality protection of structures outside. Emphasis is placed on the fact that reliable protection of structures is also an investment in the peace of mind of the building owner and the confidence that the structures will not require repair in a short period of time. Whatever new forms of buildings and structures are invented today by developers, high-quality and modern insulation is an integral part of modern and comfortable housing, a part that should not be neglected and first of all perform all work qualitatively and pay special attention to joints of sheets of insulation material, to have as little chance as possible of external influences on warming which action can reduce service life not only of a design of warming, but also of the building as a whole.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Nowadays, with the improvement in people’s quality of life, more and more people choose to travel abroad in leisure time. Therefore, the great difference in lifestyles could cause culture shock, which make tourists’ trip a relative awful experience, especially in the popular resorts of some countries such as Europe and America, where tips are given whenever there is a service being provided, and this behaviour confused lots of tourists from Asia, Africa or even European countries. Based on decision tree, this study aimed to share troubles of those tourists with needs by taking the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission’s database as research’s target, thereby analysing factors that may cause variation in tipping rates. Finally, it is found that distance and duration contributed most to trip fare. Also, besides accurately predicting the tip amount, how each factor contributes to the trip needs to be known; thus, linear regression is used to check the validity of the result, and a 14.1% rate of all distance as a fee is achieved. This study provides a model – which can also be used in many different places – that tremendously improve people’s quality of life, and the main idea is relative to the fuzzy system in solving social problems.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Al Gore brought climate change into … our living rooms. … The 2008 oil price hikes [and the global financial crisis] awakened the world to potential economic hardship in a rapidly urbanising world where the petrol-driven automobile is still king. (Mouritz 47) Six hundred million cars (Urry, “Climate Change” 265) traverse the world’s roads, or sit idly in garages and clogging city streets. The West’s economic progress has been built in part around the success of the automotive industry, where the private car rules the spaces and rhythms of daily life. The problem of “automobile dependence” (Newman and Kenworthy) is often cited as one of the biggest challenges facing countries attempting to combat anthropogenic climate change. Sociologist John Urry has claimed that automobility is an “entire culture” that has re-defined movement in the contemporary world (Urry Mobilities 133). As such, it is the single most significant environmental challenge “because of the intensity of resource use, the production of pollutants and the dominant culture which sustains the major discourses of what constitutes the good life” (Urry Sociology 57-8). Climate change has forced a re-thinking of not only how we produce and dispose of cars, but also how we use them. What might a society not dominated by the private, petrol-driven car look like? Some of the pre-eminent writers on climate change futures, such as Gwynne Dyer, James Lovelock and John Urry, discuss one possibility that might emerge when oil becomes scarce: societies will descend into civil chaos, “a Hobbesian war of all against all” where “regional warlordism” and the most brutish, barbaric aspects of human nature come to the fore (Urry, “Climate Change” 261). Discussing a post-car society, John Urry also proffers another scenario in his “sociologies of the future:” an Orwellian “digital panopticon” in which other modes of transport, far more suited to a networked society, might emerge on a large scale and, in the long run, “might tip the system” into post-car one before it is too late (Urry, “Climate Change” 261). Amongst the many options he discusses is car sharing. Since its introduction in Germany more than 30 years ago, most of the critical literature has been devoted to the planning, environmental and business innovation aspects of car sharing; however very little has been written on its cultural dimensions. This paper analyses this small but developing trend in many Western countries, but more specifically its emergence in Sydney. The convergence of climate change discourse with that of the global financial crisis has resulted in a focus in the mainstream media, over the last few months, on technologies and practices that might save us money and also help the environment. For instance, a Channel 10 News story in May 2009 focused on the boom in car sharing in Sydney (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=EPTT8vYVXro). Car sharing is an adaptive technology that doesn’t do away with the car altogether, but rather transforms the ways in which cars are used, thought about and promoted. I argue that car sharing provides a challenge to the dominant consumerist model of the privately owned car that has sustained capitalist structures for at least the last 50 years. In addition, through looking at some marketing and promotion tactics of car sharing in Australia, I examine some emerging car sharing subjectivities that both extend and subvert the long-established discourses of the automobile’s flexibility and autonomy to tempt monogamous car buyers into becoming philandering car sharers. Much literature has emerged over the last decade devoted to the ubiquitous phenomenon of automobility. “The car is the literal ‘iron cage’ of modernity, motorised, moving and domestic,” claims Urry (“Connections” 28). Over the course of twentieth century, automobility became “the dominant form of daily movement over much of the planet (dominating even those who do not move by cars)” (Paterson 132). Underpinning Urry’s prolific production of literature is his concept of automobility. This he defines as a complex system of “intersecting assemblages” that is not only about driving cars but the nexus between “production, consumption, machinic complexes, mobility, culture and environmental resource use” (Urry, “Connections” 28). In addition, Matthew Paterson, in his Automobile Politics, asserts that “automobility” should be viewed as everything that makes driving around in a car possible: highways, parking structures and traffic rules (87). While the private car seems an inevitable outcome of a capitalistic, individualistic modern society, much work has gone into the process of naturalising a dominant notion of automobility on drivers’ horizons. Through art, literature, popular music and brand advertising, the car has long been associated with seductive forms of identity, and societies have been built around a hegemonic culture of car ownership and driving as the pre-eminent, modern mode of self-expression. And more than 50 years of a popular Hollywood film genre—road movies—has been devoted to glorifying the car as total freedom, or in its more nihilistic version, “freedom on the road to nowhere” (Corrigan). As Paterson claims, “autonomous mobility of car driving is socially produced … by a range of interventions that have made it possible” (18). One of the main reasons automobility has been so successful, he claims, is through its ability to reproduce capitalist society. It provided a commodity around which a whole set of symbols, images and discourses could be constructed which served to effectively legitimise capitalist society. (30) Once the process is locked-in, it then becomes difficult to reverse as billions of agents have adapted to it and built their lives around “automobility’s strange mixture of co-ercion and flexibility” (Urry, “Climate Change” 266). The Decline of the Car Globally, the greatest recent rupture in the automobile’s meta-narrative of success came about in October 2008 when three CEOs from the major US car firms (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) begged the United States Senate for emergency loan funds to avoid going bankrupt. To put the economic significance of this into context, Emma Rothschild notes “when the listing of the ‘Fortune 500’ began in 1955, General Motors was the largest American corporation, and it was one of the three largest, measured in revenues, every year until 2007” (Rothschilds, “Can we transform”). Curiously, instead of focusing on the death of the car (industry), as we know it, that this scenario might inevitably herald, much of the media attention focused on the hypocrisy and environmental hubris of the fact that all the CEOs had flown in private luxury jets to Washington. “Couldn’t they have at least jet-pooled?” complained one Democrat Senator (Wutkowski). In their next visit to Washington, most of them drove up in experimental vehicles still in pre-production, including plug-in hybrids. Up until that point no other manufacturing industry had been bailed out in the current financial crisis. Of course it’s not the first time the automobile industries have been given government assistance. The Australian automotive industry has received on-going government subsidies since the 1980s. Most recently, PM Kevin Rudd granted a 6.2 billion dollar ‘green car’ package to Australian automotive manufacturers. His justification to the growing chorus of doubts about the economic legitimacy of such a move was: “Some might say it's not worth trying to have a car industry, that is not my view, it is not the view of the Australian government and it never will be the view of any government which I lead” (The Australian). Amongst the many reasons for the government support of these industries must include the extraordinary interweaving of discourses of nationhood and progress with the success of the car industry. As the last few months reveal, evidently the mantra still prevails of “what’s good for the country is good for GM and vice versa”, as the former CEO of General Motors, Charles “Engine” Wilson, argued back in 1952 (Hirsch). In post-industrial societies like Australia it’s not only the economic aspects of the automotive industries that are criticised. Cars seem to be slowly losing their grip on identity-formation that they managed to maintain throughout “the century of the car” (Gilroy). They are no longer unproblematically associated with progress, freedom, youthfulness and absolute autonomy. The decline and eventual death of the automobile as we know it will be long, arduous and drawn-out. But there are some signs of a post-automobile society emerging, perhaps where cars will still be used but they will not dominate our society, urban space and culture in quite the same way that they have over the last 50 years. Urry discusses six transformations that might ‘tip’ the hegemonic system of automobility into a post-car one. He mentions new fuel systems, new materials for car construction, the de-privatisation of cars, development of communications technologies and integration of networked public transport through smart card technology and systems (Urry, Mobilities 281-284). As Paterson and others have argued, computers and mobile phones have somehow become “more genuine symbols of mobility and in turn progress” than the car (157). As a result, much automobile advertising now intertwines communications technologies with brand to valorise mobility. Car sharing goes some way in not only de-privatising cars but also using smart card technology and networked systems enabling an association with mobility futures. In Automobile Politics Paterson asks, “Is the car fundamentally unsustainable? Can it be greened? Has the car been so naturalised on our mobile horizons that we can’t imagine a society without it?” (27). From a sustainability perspective, one of the biggest problems with cars is still the amount of space devoted to them; highways, garages, car parks. About one-quarter of the land in London and nearly one-half of that in Los Angeles is devoted to car-only environments (Urry, “Connections” 29). In Sydney, it is more like a quarter. We have to reduce the numbers of cars on our roads to make our societies livable (Newman and Kenworthy). Car sharing provokes a re-thinking of urban space. If one quarter of Sydney’s population car shared and we converted this space into green use or local market gardens, then we’d have a radically transformed city. Car sharing, not to be confused with ‘ride sharing’ or ‘car pooling,’ involves a number of people using cars that are parked centrally in dedicated car bays around the inner city. After becoming a member (much like a 6 or 12 monthly gym membership), the cars can be booked (and extended) by the hour via the web or phone. They can then be accessed via a smart card. In Sydney there are 3 car sharing organisations operating: Flexicar (http://www.flexicar.com.au/), CharterDrive (http://www.charterdrive.com.au/) and GoGet (http://www.goget.com.au/).[1] The largest of these, GoGet, has been operating for 6 years and has over 5000 members and 200 cars located predominantly in the inner city suburbs. Anecdotally, GoGet claims its membership is primarily drawn from professionals living in the inner-urban ring. Their motivation for joining is, firstly, the convenience that car sharing provides in a congested, public transport-challenged city like Sydney; secondly, the financial savings derived; and thirdly, members consider the environmental and social benefits axiomatic. [2] The promotion tactics of car sharing seems to reflect this by barely mentioning the environment but focusing on those aspects which link car sharing to futuristic and flexible subjectivities which I outline in the next section. Unlike traditional car rental, the vehicles in car sharing are scattered through local streets in a network allowing local residents and businesses access to the vehicles mostly on foot. One car share vehicle is used by 22-24 members and gets about seven cars off the street (Mehlman 22). With lots of different makes and models of vehicles in each of their fleets, Flexicar’s website claims, “around the corner, around the clock” “Flexicar offers you the freedom of driving your own car without the costs and hassles of owning one,” while GoGet asserts, “like owning a car only better.” Due to the initial lack of interest from government, all the car sharing organisations in Australia are privately owned. This is very different to the situation in Europe where governments grant considerable financial assistance and have often integrated car sharing into pre-existing public transport networks. Urry discusses the spread of car sharing across the Western world: Six hundred plus cities across Europe have developed car-sharing schemes involving 50,000 people (Cervero, 2001). Prototype examples are found such as Liselec in La Rochelle, and in northern California, Berlin and Japan (Motavalli, 2000: 233). In Deptford there is an on-site car pooling service organized by Avis attached to a new housing development, while in Jersey electric hire cars have been introduced by Toyota. (Urry, “Connections” 34) ‘Collaborative Consumption’ and Flexible, Philandering Subjectivities Car sharing shifts the dominant conception of a car from being a ‘commodity’, which people purchase and subsequently identify with, to a ‘service’ or network of vehicles that are collectively used. It does this through breaking down the one car = one person (or one family) ratio with one car instead servicing 20 or more people. One of Paterson’s biggest criticisms concerns car driving as “a form of social exclusion” (44). Car sharing goes some way in subverting the model of hyper-individualism that supports both hegemonic automobility and capitalist structures, whereby the private motorcar produces a “separation of individuals from one another driving in their own private universes with no account for anyone else” (Paterson 90). As a car sharer, the driver has to acknowledge that this is not their private domain, and the car no longer becomes an extension of their living room or bedroom, as is noted in much literature around car cultures (Morris, Sheller, Simpson). There are a community of people using the car, so the driver needs to be attentive to things like keeping the car clean and bringing it back on time so another person can use it. So while car sharing may change the affective relationship and self-identification with the vehicle itself, it doesn’t necessarily change the phenomenological dimensions of car driving, such as the nostalgic pleasure of driving on the open road, or perhaps more realistically in Sydney, the frustration of being caught in a traffic jam. However, the fact the driver doesn’t own the vehicle does alter their relationship to the space and the commodity in a literal as well as a figurative way. Like car ownership, evidently car sharing also produces its own set of limitations on freedom and convenience. That mobility and car ownership equals freedom—the ‘freedom to drive’—is one imaginary which car firms were able to successfully manipulate and perpetuate throughout the twentieth century. However, car sharing also attaches itself to the same discourses of freedom and pervasive individualism and then thwarts them. For instance, GoGet in Sydney have run numerous marketing campaigns that attempt to contest several ‘self-evident truths’ about automobility. One is flexibility. Flexibility (and associated convenience) was one thing that ownership of a car in the late twentieth century was firmly able to affiliate itself with. However, car ownership is now more often associated with being expensive, a hassle and a long-term commitment, through things like buying, licensing, service and maintenance, cleaning, fuelling, parking permits, etc. Cars have also long been linked with sexuality. When in the 1970s financial challenges to the car were coming as a result of the oil shocks, Chair of General Motors, James Roche stated that, “America’s romance with the car is not over. Instead it has blossomed into a marriage” (Rothschilds, Paradise Lost). In one marketing campaign GoGet asked, ‘Why buy a car when all you need is a one night stand?’, implying that owning a car is much like a monogamous relationship that engenders particular commitments and responsibilities, whereas car sharing can just be a ‘flirtation’ or a ‘one night stand’ and you don’t have to come back if you find it a hassle. Car sharing produces a philandering subjectivity that gives individuals the freedom to have lots of different types of cars, and therefore relationships with each of them: I can be a Mini Cooper driver one day and a Falcon driver the next. This disrupts the whole kind of identification with one type of car that ownership encourages. It also breaks down a stalwart of capitalism—brand loyalty to a particular make of car with models changing throughout a person’s lifetime. Car sharing engenders far more fluid types of subjectivities as opposed to those rigid identities associated with ownership of one car. Car sharing can also be regarded as part of an emerging phenomenon of what Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers have called “collaborative consumption”—when a community gets together “through organized sharing, swapping, bartering, trading, gifting and renting to get the same pleasures of ownership with reduced personal cost and burden, and lower environmental impact” (www.collaborativeconsumption.com). As Urry has stated, these developments indicate a gradual transformation in current economic structures from ownership to access, as shown more generally by many services offered and accessed via the web (Urry Mobilities 283). Rogers and Botsman maintain that this has come about through the “convergence of online social networks increasing cost consciousness and environmental necessity." In the future we could predict an increasing shift to payment to ‘access’ for mobility services, rather than the outright private ownerships of vehicles (Urry, “Connections”). Networked-Subjectivities or a ‘Digital Panopticon’? Cars, no longer able on their own to signify progress in either technical or social terms, attain their symbolic value through their connection to other, now more prevalently ‘progressive’ technologies. (Paterson 155) The term ‘digital panopticon’ has often been used to describe a dystopian world of virtual surveillance through such things as web-enabled social networking sites where much information is public, or alternatively, for example, the traffic surveillance system in London whereby the public can be constantly scrutinised through the centrally monitored cameras that track people’s/vehicle’s movements on city streets. In his “sociologies of the future,” Urry maintains that one thing which might save us from descending into post-car civil chaos is a system governed by a “digital panopticon” mobility system. This would be governed by a nexus system “that orders, regulates, tracks and relatively soon would ‘drive’ each vehicle and monitor each driver/passenger” (Urry, “Connections” 33). The transformation of mobile technologies over the last decade has made car sharing, as a viable business model, possible. Through car sharing’s exploitation of an online booking system, and cars that can be tracked, monitored and traced, the seeds of a mobile “networked-subjectivity” are emerging. But it’s not just the technology people are embracing; a cultural shift is occurring in the way that people understand mobility, their own subjectivity, and more importantly, the role of cars. NETT Magazine did a feature on car sharing, and advertised it on their front cover as “GoGet’s web and mobile challenge to car owners” (May 2009). Car sharing seems to be able to tap into more contemporary understandings of what mobility and flexibility might mean in the twenty-first century. In their marketing and promotion tactics, car sharing organisations often discursively exploit science fiction terminology and generate a subjectivity much more dependent on networks and accessibility (158). In the suburbs people park their cars in garages. In car sharing, the vehicles are parked not in car bays or car parks, but in publically accessible ‘pods’, which promotes a futuristic, sci-fi experience. Even the phenomenological dimensions of swiping a smart card over the front of the windscreen to open the car engender a transformation in access to the car, instead of through a key. This is service-technology of the future while those stuck in car ownership are from the old economy and the “century of the car” (Gilroy). The connections between car sharing and the mobile phone and other communications technologies are part of the notion of a networked, accessible vehicle. However, the more problematic side to this is the car under surveillance. Nic Lowe, of his car sharing organisation GoGet says, “Because you’re tagged on and we know it’s you, you are able to drive the car… every event you do is logged, so we know what time you turned the key, what time you turned it off and we know how far you drove … if a car is lost we can sound the horn to disable it remotely to prevent theft. We can track how fast you were going and even how fast you accelerated … track the kilometres for billing purposes and even find out when people are using the car when they shouldn’t be” (Mehlman 27). The possibility with the GPS technology installed in the car is being able to monitor speeds at which people drive, thereby fining then every minute spent going over the speed limit. While this conjures up the notion of the car under surveillance, it is also a much less bleaker scenario than “a Hobbesian war of all against all”. Conclusion: “Hundreds of Cars, No Garage” The prospect of climate change is provoking innovation at a whole range of levels, as well as providing a re-thinking of how we use taken-for-granted technologies. Sometime this century the one tonne, privately owned, petrol-driven car will become an artefact, much like Sydney trams did last century. At this point in time, car sharing can be regarded as an emerging transitional technology to a post-car society that provides a challenge to hegemonic automobile culture. It is evidently not a radical departure from the car’s vast machinic complex and still remains a part of what Urry calls the “system of automobility”. From a pro-car perspective, its networked surveillance places constraints on the free agency of the car, while for those of the deep green variety it is, no doubt, a compromise. Nevertheless, it provides a starting point for re-thinking the foundations of the privately-owned car. While Urry makes an important point in relation to a society moving from ownership to access, he doesn’t take into account the cultural shifts occurring that are enabling car sharing to be attractive to prospective members: the notion of networked subjectivities, the discursive constructs used to establish car sharing as a thing of the future with pods and smart cards instead of garages and keys. If car sharing became mainstream it could have radical environmental impacts on things like urban space and pollution, as well as the dominant culture of “automobile dependence” (Newman and Kenworthy), as Australia attempts to move to a low carbon economy. Notes [1] My partner Bruce Jeffreys, together with Nic Lowe, founded Newtown Car Share in 2002, which is now called GoGet. [2] Several layers down in the ‘About Us’ link on GoGet’s website is the following information about the environmental benefits of car sharing: “GoGet's aim is to provide a reliable, convenient and affordable transport service that: allows people to live car-free, decreases car usage, improves local air quality, removes private cars from local streets, increases patronage for public transport, allows people to lead more active lives” (http://www.goget.com.au/about-us.html). References The Australian. “Kevin Rudd Throws $6.2bn Lifeline to Car Industry.” 10 Nov. 2008. < http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/ 0,28124,24628026-5018011,00.html >.Corrigan, Tim. “Genre, Gender, and Hysteria: The Road Movie in Outer Space.” A Cinema Without Walls: Movies, Culture after Vietnam. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Dwyer, Gwynne. Climate Wars. North Carlton: Scribe, 2008. Featherstone, Mike. “Automobilities: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society 21.4-5 (2004): 1-24. Gilroy, Paul. “Driving while Black.” Car Cultures. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Hirsch, Michael. “Barack the Saviour.” Newsweek 13 Nov. 2008. < http://www.newsweek.com/id/168867 >. Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. Penguin, 2007. Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Penguin, 2009. Mehlman, Josh. “Community Driven Success.” NETT Magazine (May 2009): 22-28. Morris, Meaghan. “Fate and the Family Sedan.” East West Film Journal 4.1 (1989): 113-134. Mouritz, Mike. “City Views.” Fast Thinking Winter 2009: 47-50. Newman, P. and J. Kenworthy. Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence. Washington DC: Island Press, 1999. Paterson, Matthew. Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Rothschilds, Emma. Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age. New York: Radom House, 1973. Rothschilds, Emma. “Can We Transform the Auto-Industrial Society?” New York Review of Books 56.3 (2009). < http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22333 >. Sheller, Mimi. “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car.” Theory, Culture and Society 21 (2004): 221–42. Simpson, Catherine. “Volatile Vehicles: When Women Take the Wheel.” Womenvision. Ed. Lisa French. Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 2003. 197-210. Urry, John. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2000. Urry, John. “Connections.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 27-37. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge, and Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2008. Urry, John. “Climate Change, Travel and Complex Futures.” British Journal of Sociology 59. 2 (2008): 261-279. Watts, Laura, and John Urry. “Moving Methods, Travelling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (2008): 860-874. Wutkowski, Karey. “Auto Execs' Private Flights to Washington Draw Ire.” Reuters News Agency 19 Nov. 2008. < http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AI8C520081119 >.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction As the country with the fifth largest population in the world, Indonesia is a massive potential market for mobile technology adoption and development. Despite an annual per capita income of only $1,280 USD (World Bank), there are 63 million mobile phone users in Indonesia (Suhartono, sec. 1.7) and it is predicted to reach 80 million in 2007 (Jakarta Post 1). Mobile phones are not only a symbol of Indonesian modernity (Barendregt 5), but like other communication technology can become a platform through which to explore socio-political issues (Winner 28). In this article we explore the role mobile phone technology in contemporary forms of social, intimate, and sexual relationships in Indonesia. We argue that new forms of expression and relations are facilitated by the particular features of mobile technology. We discuss two cases from contemporary Indonesia: a mobile dating service (BEDD) and mobile phone p*rnography. For each case study, we first discuss the socio-political background in Indonesia, then describe the technological affordances of the mobile phone which facilitate dating and p*rnography, and finally give examples of how the mobile phone is effecting change in dating and p*rnographic practices. This study is placed at a time when social relations, intimacy, and sexuality in Indonesia have become central public issues. Since the end of the New Order whilst many people have embraced the new freedoms of reformasi and democratization, there is also a high degree of social anxiety, tension and uncertainty (Juliastuti 139-40). These social changes and desires have played out in the formations of new and exciting modes of creativity, solidarity, and sociality (Heryanto and Hadiz 262) and equally violence, terror and criminality (Heryanto and Hadiz 256). The diverse and plural nature of Indonesian society is alive with a myriad of people and activities, and it is into this diverse social body that the mobile phone has become a central and prominent feature of interaction. The focus of our study is dating and p*rnography as mediated by the mobile phone; however, we do not suggest that these are new experiences in Indonesia. Rather over the last decade social, intimate, and sexual relationships have all been undergoing change and their motivations can be traced to a variety of sources including the factors of globalization, democratization and modernization. Throughout Asia “new media have become a crucial site for constituting new Asian sexual identities and communities” (Berry, Martin, and Yue 13) as people are connecting through new communication technologies. In this article we suggest that mobile phone technology opens new possibilities and introduces new channels, dynamics, and intensities of social interaction. Mobile phones are particularly powerful communication tools because of their mobility, accessibility, and convergence (Ling 16-19; Ito 14-15; Katz and Aakhus 303). These characteristics of mobile phones do not in and of themselves bring about any particular changes in dating and p*rnography, but they may facilitate changes already underway (Barendegt 7-9; Barker 9). Mobile Dating Background The majority of Indonesians in the 1960s and 1970s had arranged marriages (Smith-Hefner 443). Education reform during the 70s and 80s encouraged more women to attain an education which in turn led to the delaying of marriage and the changing of courtship practices (Smith-Hefner 450). “Compared to previous generations, [younger Indonesians] are freer to mix with the opposite sex and to choose their own marriage,” (Utomo 225). Modern courtship in Java is characterized by “self-initiated romance” and dating (Smith-Hefner 451). Mobile technology is beginning to play a role in initiating romance between young Indonesians. Technology One mobile matching or dating service available in Indonesia is called BEDD (www.bedd.com). BEDD is a free software for mobile phones in which users fill out a profile about themselves and can meet BEDD members who are within 20-30 feet using a Bluetooth connection on their mobile devices. BEDD members’ phones automatically exchange profile information so that users can easily meet new people who match their profile requests. BEDD calls itself mobile social networking community; “BEDD is a new Bluetooth enabled mobile social medium that allows people to meet, interact and communicate in a new way by letting their mobile phones do all the work as they go throughout their day.” As part of a larger project on mobile social networking (Humphreys 6), a field study was conducted of BEDD users in Jakarta, Indonesia and Singapore (where BEDD is based) in early 2006. In-depth interviews and open-ended user surveys were conducted with users, BEDD’s CEO and strategic partners in order to understand the social uses and effects BEDD. The majority of BEDD members (which topped 100,000 in January 2006) are in Indonesia thanks to a partnership with Nokia where BEDD came pre-installed on several phone models. In management interviews, both BEDD and Nokia explained that they partnered because both companies want to help “build community”. They felt that Bluetooth technology such as BEDD could be used to help youth meet new people and keep in touch with old friends. Examples One of BEDD’s functions is to help lower barriers to social interaction in public spaces. By sharing profile information and allowing for free text messaging, BEDD can facilitate conversations between BEDD members. According to users, mediating the initial conversation also helps to alleviate social anxiety, which often accompanies meeting new people. While social mingling and hanging out between Jakarta teenagers is a relatively common practice, one user said that BEDD provides a new and fun way to meet and flirt. In a society that must balance between an “idealized morality” and an increasingly sexualized popular culture (Utomo 226), BEDD provides a modern mode of self-initiated matchmaking. While BEDD was originally intended to aid in the matchmaking process of dating, it has been appropriated into everyday life in Indonesia because of its interpretive flexibility (Pinch & Bjiker 27). Though BEDD is certainly used to meet “beautiful girls” (according to one Indonesian male user), it is also commonly used to text message old friends. One member said he uses BEDD to text his friends in class when the lecture gets boring. BEDD appears to be a helpful modern communication tool when people are physically proximate but cannot easily talk to one another. BEDD can become a covert way to exchange messages with people nearby for free. Another potential explanation for BEDD’s increasing popularity is its ability to allow users to have private conversations in public space. Bennett notes that courtship in private spaces is seen as dangerous because it may lead to sexual impropriety (154). Dating and courtship in public spaces are seen as safer, particularly for conserving the reputation young Indonesian women. Therefore Bluetooth connections via mobile technologies can be a tool to make private social connections between young men and women “safer”. Bluetooth communication via mobile phones has also become prevalent in more conservative Muslim societies (Sullivan, par. 7; Braude, par. 3). There are, however, safety concerns about meeting strangers in public spaces. When asked, “What advice would you give a first time BEDD user?” one respondent answered, “harus bisa mnilai seseorang krn itu sangat penting, kita mnilai seseorang bukan cuma dari luarnya” (translated: be careful in evaluating (new) people, and don’t ever judge the book by its cover”). Nevertheless, only one person participating in this study mentioned this concern. To some degree meeting someone in a public may be safer than meeting someone in an online environment. Not only are there other people around in public spaces to physically observe, but co-location means there may be some accountability for how BEDD members present themselves. The development and adoption of matchmaking services such as BEDD suggests that the role of the mobile phone in Indonesia is not just to communicate with friends and family but to act as a modern social networking tool as well. For young Indonesians BEDD can facilitate the transfer of social information so as to encourage the development of new social ties. That said, there is still debate about exactly whom BEDD is connecting and for what purposes. On one hand, BEDD could help build community in Indonesia. One the other hand, because of its privacy it could become a tool for more promiscuous activities (Bennett 154-5). There are user profiles to suggest that people are using BEDD for both purposes. For example, note what four young women in Jakarta wrote in the BEDD profiles: Personal Description Looking For I am a good prayer, recite the holy book, love saving (money), love cycling… and a bit narcist. Meaning of life Ordinary gurl, good student, single, Owen lover, and the rest is up to you to judge. Phrenz ?! Peace?! Wondeful life! I am talkative, have no patience but so sweet. I am so girly, narcist, shy and love cute guys. Check my fs (Friendster) account if you’re so curious. Well, I am just an ordinary girl tho. Anybody who wants to know me. A boy friend would be welcomed. Play Station addict—can’t live without it! I am a rebel, love rock, love hiphop, naughty, if you want proof dial 081********* phrenz n cute guyz As these profiles suggest, the technology can be used to send different kinds of messages. The mobile phone and the BEDD software merely facilitate the process of social exchange, but what Indonesians use it for is up to them. Thus BEDD and the mobile phone become tools through which Indonesians can explore their identities. BEDD can be used in a variety of social and communicative contexts to allow users to explore their modern, social freedoms. Mobile p*rnography Background Mobile phone p*rnography builds on a long tradition of p*rnography and sexually explicit material in Indonesia through the use of a new technology for an old art and product. Indonesia has a rich sexual history with a documented and prevalent sex industry (Suryakusuma 115). Lesmana suggests that the country has a tenuous p*rnographic industry prone to censorship and nationalist politics intent on its destruction. Since the end of the New Order and opening of press freedoms there has been a proliferation in published material including a mushrooming of tabloids, men’s magazines such as FHM, Maxim and Playboy, which are often regarded as p*rnographic. This is attributed to the decline of the power of the bureaucracy and government and the new role of capital in the formation of culture (Chua 16). There is a parallel p*rnography industry, however, that is more amateur, local, and homemade (Barker 6). It is into this range of material that mobile phone p*rnography falls. Amongst the myriad forms of p*rnography and sexually explicit material available in Indonesia, the mobile phone in recent years has emerged as a new platform for production, distribution, and consumption. This section will not deal with the ethics of representation nor engage with the debate about definitions and the rights and wrongs of p*rnography. Instead what will be shown is how the mobile phone can be and has been used as an instrument/medium for the production and consumption of p*rnography within contemporary social relationships. Technology There are several technological features of the mobile phone that make p*rnography possible. As has already been noted the mobile phone has had a large adoption rate in Indonesia, and increasingly these phones come equipped with cameras and the ability to send data via MMS and Bluetooth. Coupled with the mobility of the phone, the convergence of technology in the mobile phone makes it possible for p*rnography to be produced and consumed in a different way than what has been possible before. It is only recently that the mobile phone has been marketed as a video camera with the release of the Nokia N90; however, quality and recording time are severely limited. Still, the mobile phone is a convenient and at-hand tool for the production and consumption of individually made, local, and non-professional pieces of p*rn, sex and sexuality. It is impossible to know how many such films are in circulation. A number of websites that offer these films for downloads host between 50 and 100 clips in .3gp file format, with probably more in actual circulation. At the very least, this is a tenfold increase in number compared to the recent emergence of non-professional VCD films (Barker 3). This must in part be attributed to the advantages that the mobile phone has over standard video cameras including cost, mobility, convergence, and the absence of intervening data processing and disc production. Examples There are various examples of mobile p*rnography in Indonesia. These range from the p*rnographic text message sent between lovers to the mobile phone video of explicit sexual acts (Barendregt 14-5). The mobile phone affords privacy for the production and exchange of p*rnographic messages and media. Because mobile devices are individually owned, however, p*rnographic material found on mobile phones can be directly tied to the individual owners. For example, police in Kotabaru inspected the phones of high school students in search of p*rnographic materials and arrested those individuals on whose phones it was found (Barendregt 18). Mobile phone p*rnography became a national political issue in 2006 when an explicit one-minute clip of a singer and an Indonesian politician became public. Videoed in 2004, the clip shows Maria Eva, a 27 year-old dangdut singer (see Browne, 25-6) and Yahya Zaini, a married 42 year-old who was head of religious affairs for the Golkar political party. Their three-year affair ended in 2005, but the film did not become public until 2006. It spread like wildfire between phones and across the internet, however, and put an otherwise secret relationship into the limelight. These types of affairs and relationships were common knowledge to people through gossip, exposes such as Jakarta Undercover (Emka 93-108) and stories in tabloids; yet this culture of adultery and prostitution continued and remained anonymous because of bureaucratic control of evidence and information (Suryakusuma 115). In this case, however, the filming of Maria Eva once public proves the identities of those involved and their infidelity. As a result of the scandal it was further revealed that Maria Eva had been forced by Yayha Zaini and his wife to have an abortion, deepening the moral crisis. Yahya Zaini later resigned as his party’s head of Religious Affairs (Asmarani, sec. 1-2), due to what was called the country’s “first real sex scandal” (Naughton, par. 2). As these examples show, there are definite risks and consequences involved in the production of mobile p*rnography. Even messages/media that are meant to be shared between two consenting individuals can eventually make their way into the public mobile realm and have serious consequences for those involved. Mobile video and photography does, however, represent a potential new check on the Indonesian bureaucratic elite which has not been previously available by other means such as a watchdog media. “The role of the press as a control mechanism is practically nonexistent [in Jakarta], which in effect protects corruption, nepotism, financial manipulation, social injustice, and repression, as well as the murky sexual life of the bureaucratic power elite,” (Suryakusuma 117). Thus while originally a mobile video may have been created for personal pleasure, through its mass dissemination via new media it can become a means of sousveillance (Mann, Nolan and Wellman 332-3) whereby the control of surveillance is flipped to reveal the often hidden abuses of power by officials. Whilst the debates over p*rnography in Indonesia tend to focus on the moral aspects of it, the broader social impacts of technology on relationships are often ignored. Issues related to power relations or even media as cultural expression are often disregarded as moral judgments cast a heavy shadow over discussions of locally produced Indonesian mobile p*rnography. It is possible to move beyond the moral critique of p*rnographic media to explore the social significance of its proliferation as a cultural product. Conclusion In these two case studies we have tried to show how the mobile phone in Indonesia has become a mode of interaction but also a platform through which to explore other current issues and debates related to dating, sexuality and media. Since 1998 and the fall of the New Order, Indonesia has been struggling with blending old and new, a desire of change and nostalgia for past, and popular desire for a “New Indonesia” (Heryanto, sec. Post-1998). Cultural products within Indonesia have played an important role in exploring these issues. The mobile phone in Indonesia is not just a technology, but also a product in and through which these desires are played out. Changes in dating and p*rnography practices have been occurring in Indonesia for some time. As people use mobile technology to produce, communicate, and consume, the device becomes intricately related to identity struggle and cultural production within Indonesia. It is important to keep in mind, however, that while mobile technology adoption within Indonesia is growing, it is still limited to a particular subset of the population. As has been previously observed (Barendregt 3), it is wealthier, young people in urban areas who are most intensely involved in mobile technology. As handset prices decrease and availability in rural areas increases, however, no longer will mobile technology be so demographically confined in Indonesia. The convergent technology of the mobile phone opens many possibilities for creative adoption and usage. As a communication device it allows for the creation, sharing, and viewing of messages. Therefore, the technology itself facilitates social connections and networking. As demonstrated in the cases of dating and p*rnography, the mobile phone is both a tool for meeting new people and disseminating sexual messages/media because it is a networked technology. The mobile phone is not fundamentally changing dating and p*rnography practices, but it is accelerating social and cultural trends already underway in Indonesia by facilitating the exchange and dissemination of messages and media. As these case studies show, what kinds of messages Indonesians choose to create and share are up to them. The same device can be used for relatively innocuous behavior as well as more controversial behavior. With increased adoption in Indonesia, the mobile will continue to be a lens through which to further explore modern socio-political issues. References Asmarani, Devi. “Indonesia: Top Golkar Official Quits over Sex Video.” The Straits Times 6 Dec. 2006. Barendregt, Bart. “Between M-Governance and Mobile Anarchies: p*rnoaksi and the Fear of New Media in Present Day Indonesia.” European Association of Social Anthropologists Media Anthropology Network e-Seminar Series, 2006. Barker, Thomas. “VCD p*rnography of Indonesia.” Asian Studies Association of Australia, Wollongong, 2006. BEDD Press Release. “World’s First Mobile Communities Software Is Bringing People Together in Singapore.” 8 June 2004. Bennett, Linda Rae. Women, Islam and Modernity: Single Women, Sexuality and Reproductive Health in Contemporary Indonesia. London: Routledge Curzon, 2005. Berry, Chris, Fran Martin, and Audrey Yue, eds. Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Braude, Joseph. “How Bluetooth Helps Young Kuwaitis Get It On.” The New Republic Online 14 Sep. 2006. Browne, Susan. “The Gender Implications of Dangdut Kampungan: Indonesian ‘Low Class’ Popular Music.”* *Working Paper 109, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. 2000. Chua, Beng-Huat. “Consuming Asians: Ideas and Issues.” Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities. Ed. Beng-Huat Chua. London: Routledge, 2003. 1-34. Emka, Moammar. Jakarta Undercover: Sex n’ the City. Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2002. Heryanto, Ariel. “New Media and Pop Cultures in(ter) Asia.” Soft Power and Spheres of Influence in South and Southeast Asia. National University of Singapore, 2006. Heryanto, Ariel, and Vedi Hadiz. “Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Comparative Southeast Asian Perspective.” Critical Asian Studies 37.2 (2005): 251-75. Humphreys, Lee. “Mobile Devices and Social Networking.” Mobile Pre-Conference at the International Communication Association. Erfurt, Germany, 2006. Ito, Mizuko. “Introduction: Personal, Portable, Pedestrian.” Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Eds. Mizuko Ito, Diasuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 1-16. JakartaPost.com. “Cell-Phone Users May Reach 80m This Year.” 6 Jan. 2006. http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailheadlines.asp? fileid=20070106.@02&irec=1>. Juliastuti, Nuraini. “Whatever I Want: Media and Youth in Indonesia before and after 1998.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7 (2006): 1. Katz, James E., and Mark Aakhus, eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. Lesmana, Tjipta. p*rnografi dalam Media Massa. Jakarta: Puspa Swara, 1994. Ling, Richard. The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004. Mann, Steve, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman. “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments.” Surveillance and Society 1.3 (2003): 331-55. Naughton, Philippe. “Video Sex Scandal Claims Indonesian MP.” The Times Online 8 Dec. 2006. Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.” The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Direction in the Sociology and History of Technology. Eds. W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes and T.J. Pinch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 17-51. Smith-Hefner, Nancy J. “The New Muslim Romance: Changing Patterns of Courtship and Marriage among Educated Javanese Youth.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36.3 (2005): 441-59. Suhartono, Harry. “Mobile Penetration to Drive Market Leader’s Profit Gain.” Reuters News 27 Oct. 2006. Sullivan, Kevin. “Saudi Youth Use Cellphone Savvy to Outwit the Sentries of Romance.” The Washington Post 6 Aug. 2006: A01. Suryakusuma, Julia. “The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia.” Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia. Ed. Laurie J. Sears. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996. 92-119. Utomo, Iwu Dwisetyani. “Sexual Values and Early Experiences among Young People in Jakarta: Youth, Courtship and Sexuality.” Coming of Age in South and Southeast Asia. Eds. Lenore Manderson and Pranee Liamputtong. Surey: Curzon, 2002. 207-27. Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Social Shaping of Technology. 2nd ed. Eds. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman. Buckingham, UK: Open UP, 2002. 28-40. World Bank. 2004 Indonesia Data & Statistics. 4 Jan. 2006. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/ EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/INDONESIAEXTN/0,,menuPK:287097~pagePK: 141132~piPK:141109~theSitePK:226309,00.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Humphreys, Lee, and Thomas Barker. "Modernity and the Mobile Phone: Exploring Tensions about Dating and Sex in Indonesia." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/06-humphreys-barker.php>. APA Style Humphreys, L., and T. Barker. (Mar. 2007) "Modernity and the Mobile Phone: Exploring Tensions about Dating and Sex in Indonesia," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/06-humphreys-barker.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction With a deluge of mouthwatering pre-publicity, the opening of The Spotted Pig, the USA’s first self-identified British-styled gastropub, in Manhattan in February 2004 was much anticipated. The late Australian chef, food writer and restauranteur Mietta O’Donnell has noted how “taking over a building or business which has a long established reputation can be a mixed blessing” because of the way that memories “can enrich the experience of being in a place or they can just make people nostalgic”. Bistro Le Zoo, the previous eatery on the site, had been very popular when it opened almost a decade earlier, and its closure was mourned by some diners (Young; Kaminsky “Feeding Time”; Steinhauer & McGinty). This regret did not, however, appear to affect The Spotted Pig’s success. As esteemed New York Times reviewer Frank Bruni noted in his 2006 review: “Almost immediately after it opened […] the throngs started to descend, and they have never stopped”. The following year, The Spotted Pig was awarded a Michelin star—the first year that Michelin ranked New York—and has kept this star in the subsequent annual rankings. Writing Restaurant Biography Detailed studies have been published of almost every type of contemporary organisation including public institutions such as schools, hospitals, museums and universities, as well as non-profit organisations such as charities and professional associations. These are often written to mark a major milestone, or some significant change, development or the demise of the organisation under consideration (Brien). Detailed studies have also recently been published of businesses as diverse as general stores (Woody), art galleries (Fossi), fashion labels (Koda et al.), record stores (Southern & Branson), airlines (Byrnes; Jones), confectionary companies (Chinn) and builders (Garden). In terms of attracting mainstream readerships, however, few such studies seem able to capture popular reader interest as those about eating establishments including restaurants and cafés. This form of restaurant life history is, moreover, not restricted to ‘quality’ establishments. Fast food restaurant chains have attracted their share of studies (see, for example Love; Jakle & Sculle), ranging from business-economic analyses (Liu), socio-cultural political analyses (Watson), and memoirs (Kroc & Anderson), to criticism around their conduct and effects (Striffler). Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the most well-known published critique of the fast food industry and its effects with, famously, the Rolling Stone article on which it was based generating more reader mail than any other piece run in the 1990s. The book itself (researched narrative creative nonfiction), moreover, made a fascinating transition to the screen, transformed into a fictionalised drama (co-written by Schlosser) that narrates the content of the book from the point of view of a series of fictional/composite characters involved in the industry, rather than in a documentary format. Akin to the range of studies of fast food restaurants, there are also a variety of studies of eateries in US motels, caravan parks, diners and service station restaurants (see, for example, Baeder). Although there has been little study of this sub-genre of food and drink publishing, their popularity can be explained, at least in part, because such volumes cater to the significant readership for writing about food related topics of all kinds, with food writing recently identified as mainstream literary fare in the USA and UK (Hughes) and an entire “publishing subculture” in Australia (Dunstan & Chaitman). Although no exact tally exists, an informed estimate by the founder of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and president of the Paris Cookbook Fair, Edouard Cointreau, has more than 26,000 volumes on food and wine related topics currently published around the world annually (ctd. in Andriani “Gourmand Awards”). The readership for publications about restaurants can also perhaps be attributed to the wide range of information that can be included a single study. My study of a selection of these texts from the UK, USA and Australia indicates that this can include narratives of place and architecture dealing with the restaurant’s location, locale and design; narratives of directly food-related subject matter such as menus, recipes and dining trends; and narratives of people, in the stories of its proprietors, staff and patrons. Detailed studies of contemporary individual establishments commonly take the form of authorised narratives either written by the owners, chefs or other staff with the help of a food journalist, historian or other professional writer, or produced largely by that writer with the assistance of the premise’s staff. These studies are often extensively illustrated with photographs and, sometimes, drawings or reproductions of other artworks, and almost always include recipes. Two examples of these from my own collection include a centennial history of a famous New Orleans eatery that survived Hurricane Katrina, Galatoire’s Cookbook. Written by employees—the chief operating officer/general manager (Melvin Rodrigue) and publicist (Jyl Benson)—this incorporates reminiscences from both other staff and patrons. The second is another study of a New Orleans’ restaurant, this one by the late broadcaster and celebrity local historian Mel Leavitt. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant, compiled with the assistance of the Two Sisters’ proprietor, Joseph Fein Joseph III, was first published in 1992 and has been so enduringly popular that it is in its eighth printing. These texts, in common with many others of this type, trace a triumph-over-adversity company history that incorporates a series of mildly scintillating anecdotes, lists of famous chefs and diners, and signature recipes. Although obviously focused on an external readership, they can also be characterised as an instance of what David M. Boje calls an organisation’s “story performance” (106) as the process of creating these narratives mobilises an organisation’s (in these cases, a commercial enterprise’s) internal information processing and narrative building activities. Studies of contemporary restaurants are much more rarely written without any involvement from the eatery’s personnel. When these are, the results tend to have much in common with more critical studies such as Fast Food Nation, as well as so-called architectural ‘building biographies’ which attempt to narrate the historical and social forces that “explain the shapes and uses” (Ellis, Chao & Parrish 70) of the physical structures we create. Examples of this would include Harding’s study of the importance of the Boeuf sur le Toit in Parisian life in the 1920s and Middlebrook’s social history of London’s Strand Corner House. Such work agrees with Kopytoff’s assertion—following Appadurai’s proposal that objects possess their own ‘biographies’ which need to be researched and expressed—that such inquiry can reveal not only information about the objects under consideration, but also about readers as we examine our “cultural […] aesthetic, historical, and even political” responses to these narratives (67). The life story of a restaurant will necessarily be entangled with those of the figures who have been involved in its establishment and development, as well as the narratives they create around the business. This following brief study of The Spotted Pig, however, written without the assistance of the establishment’s personnel, aims to outline a life story for this eatery in order to reflect upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining practice in New York as raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, product, brand, symbol and marketing tool, as well as, at times, purely as an animal identity. The Spotted Pig Widely profiled before it even opened, The Spotted Pig is reportedly one of the city’s “most popular” restaurants (Michelin 349). It is profiled in all the city guidebooks I could locate in print and online, featuring in some of these as a key stop on recommended itineraries (see, for instance, Otis 39). A number of these proclaim it to be the USA’s first ‘gastropub’—the term first used in 1991 in the UK to describe a casual hotel/bar with good food and reasonable prices (Farley). The Spotted Pig is thus styled on a shabby-chic version of a traditional British hotel, featuring a cluttered-but-well arranged use of pig-themed objects and illustrations that is described by latest Michelin Green Guide of New York City as “a country-cute décor that still manages to be hip” (Michelin 349). From the three-dimensional carved pig hanging above the entrance in a homage to the shingles of traditional British hotels, to the use of its image on the menu, website and souvenir tee-shirts, the pig as motif proceeds its use as a foodstuff menu item. So much so, that the restaurant is often (affectionately) referred to by patrons and reviewers simply as ‘The Pig’. The restaurant has become so well known in New York in the relatively brief time it has been operating that it has not only featured in a number of novels and memoirs, but, moreover, little or no explanation has been deemed necessary as the signifier of “The Spotted Pig” appears to convey everything that needs to be said about an eatery of quality and fashion. In the thriller Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel, when John Locke’s hero has to leave the restaurant and becomes involved in a series of dangerous escapades, he wants nothing more but to get back to his dinner (107, 115). The restaurant is also mentioned a number of times in Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle in relation to a (fictional) new movie of the same name. The joke in the book is that the character doesn’t know of the restaurant (26). In David Goodwillie’s American Subversive, the story of a journalist-turned-blogger and a homegrown terrorist set in New York, the narrator refers to “Scarlett Johansson, for instance, and the hostess at the Spotted Pig” (203-4) as the epitome of attractiveness. The Spotted Pig is also mentioned in Suzanne Guillette’s memoir, Much to Your Chagrin, when the narrator is on a dinner date but fears running into her ex-boyfriend: ‘Jack lives somewhere in this vicinity […] Vaguely, you recall him telling you he was not too far from the Spotted Pig on Greenwich—now, was it Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street?’ (361). The author presumes readers know the right answer in order to build tension in this scene. Although this success is usually credited to the joint efforts of backer, music executive turned restaurateur Ken Friedman, his partner, well-known chef, restaurateur, author and television personality Mario Batali, and their UK-born and trained chef, April Bloomfield (see, for instance, Batali), a significant part has been built on Bloomfield’s pork cookery. The very idea of a “spotted pig” itself raises a central tenet of Bloomfield’s pork/food philosophy which is sustainable and organic. That is, not the mass produced, industrially farmed pig which produces a leaner meat, but the fatty, tastier varieties of pig such as the heritage six-spotted Berkshire which is “darker, more heavily marbled with fat, juicier and richer-tasting than most pork” (Fabricant). Bloomfield has, indeed, made pig’s ears—long a Chinese restaurant staple in the city and a key ingredient of Southern US soul food as well as some traditional Japanese and Spanish dishes—fashionable fare in the city, and her current incarnation, a crispy pig’s ear salad with lemon caper dressing (TSP 2010) is much acclaimed by reviewers. This approach to ingredients—using the ‘whole beast’, local whenever possible, and the concentration on pork—has been underlined and enhanced by a continuing relationship with UK chef Fergus Henderson. In his series of London restaurants under the banner of “St. John”, Henderson is famed for the approach to pork cookery outlined in his two books Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, published in 1999 (re-published both in the UK and the US as The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating), and Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part II (coauthored with Justin Piers Gellatly in 2007). Henderson has indeed been identified as starting a trend in dining and food publishing, focusing on sustainably using as food the entirety of any animal killed for this purpose, but which mostly focuses on using all parts of pigs. In publishing, this includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect, subtitled Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them, John Barlow’s Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain and Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes (2008). In restaurants, it certainly includes The Spotted Pig. So pervasive has embrace of whole beast pork consumption been in New York that, by 2007, Bruni could write that these are: “porky times, fatty times, which is to say very good times indeed. Any new logo for the city could justifiably place the Big Apple in the mouth of a spit-roasted pig” (Bruni). This demand set the stage perfectly for, in October 2007, Henderson to travel to New York to cook pork-rich menus at The Spotted Pig in tandem with Bloomfield (Royer). He followed this again in 2008 and, by 2009, this annual event had become known as “FergusStock” and was covered by local as well as UK media, and a range of US food weblogs. By 2009, it had grown to become a dinner at the Spotted Pig with half the dishes on the menu by Henderson and half by Bloomfield, and a dinner the next night at David Chang’s acclaimed Michelin-starred Momof*cku Noodle Bar, which is famed for its Cantonese-style steamed pork belly buns. A third dinner (and then breakfast/brunch) followed at Friedman/Bloomfield’s Breslin Bar and Dining Room (discussed below) (Rose). The Spotted Pig dinners have become famed for Henderson’s pig’s head and pork trotter dishes with the chef himself recognising that although his wasn’t “the most obvious food to cook for America”, it was the case that “at St John, if a couple share a pig’s head, they tend to be American” (qtd. in Rose). In 2009, the pigs’ head were presented in pies which Henderson has described as “puff pastry casing, with layers of chopped, cooked pig’s head and potato, so all the lovely, bubbly pig’s head juices go into the potato” (qtd. in Rose). Bloomfield was aged only 28 when, in 2003, with a recommendation from Jamie Oliver, she interviewed for, and won, the position of executive chef of The Spotted Pig (Fabricant; Q&A). Following this introduction to the US, her reputation as a chef has grown based on the strength of her pork expertise. Among a host of awards, she was named one of US Food & Wine magazine’s ten annual Best New Chefs in 2007. In 2009, she was a featured solo session titled “Pig, Pig, Pig” at the fourth Annual International Chefs Congress, a prestigious New York City based event where “the world’s most influential and innovative chefs, pastry chefs, mixologists, and sommeliers present the latest techniques and culinary concepts to their peers” (Starchefs.com). Bloomfield demonstrated breaking down a whole suckling St. Canut milk raised piglet, after which she butterflied, rolled and slow-poached the belly, and fried the ears. As well as such demonstrations of expertise, she is also often called upon to provide expert comment on pork-related news stories, with The Spotted Pig regularly the subject of that food news. For example, when a rare, heritage Hungarian pig was profiled as a “new” New York pork source in 2009, this story arose because Bloomfield had served a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed pig belly and trotter dish with Agen prunes (Sanders) at The Spotted Pig. Bloomfield was quoted as the authority on the breed’s flavour and heritage authenticity: “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven […] This pork has that same authentic taste” (qtd. in Sanders). Bloomfield has also used this expert profile to support a series of pork-related causes. These include the Thanksgiving Farm in the Catskill area, which produces free range pork for its resident special needs children and adults, and helps them gain meaningful work-related skills in working with these pigs. Bloomfield not only cooks for the project’s fundraisers, but also purchases any excess pigs for The Spotted Pig (Estrine 103). This strong focus on pork is not, however, exclusive. The Spotted Pig is also one of a number of American restaurants involved in the Meatless Monday campaign, whereby at least one vegetarian option is included on menus in order to draw attention to the benefits of a plant-based diet. When, in 2008, Bloomfield beat the Iron Chef in the sixth season of the US version of the eponymous television program, the central ingredient was nothing to do with pork—it was olives. Diversifying from this focus on ‘pig’ can, however, be dangerous. Friedman and Bloomfield’s next enterprise after The Spotted Pig was The John Dory seafood restaurant at the corner of 10th Avenue and 16th Street. This opened in November 2008 to reviews that its food was “uncomplicated and nearly perfect” (Andrews 22), won Bloomfield Time Out New York’s 2009 “Best New Hand at Seafood” award, but was not a success. The John Dory was a more formal, but smaller, restaurant that was more expensive at a time when the financial crisis was just biting, and was closed the following August. Friedman blamed the layout, size and neighbourhood (Stein) and its reservation system, which limited walk-in diners (ctd. in Vallis), but did not mention its non-pork, seafood orientation. When, almost immediately, another Friedman/Bloomfield project was announced, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room (which opened in October 2009 in the Ace Hotel at 20 West 29th Street and Broadway), the enterprise was closely modeled on the The Spotted Pig. In preparation, its senior management—Bloomfield, Friedman and sous-chefs, Nate Smith and Peter Cho (who was to become the Breslin’s head chef)—undertook a tasting tour of the UK that included Henderson’s St. John Bread & Wine Bar (Leventhal). Following this, the Breslin’s menu highlighted a series of pork dishes such as terrines, sausages, ham and potted styles (Rosenberg & McCarthy), with even Bloomfield’s pork scratchings (crispy pork rinds) bar snacks garnering glowing reviews (see, for example, Severson; Ghorbani). Reviewers, moreover, waxed lyrically about the menu’s pig-based dishes, the New York Times reviewer identifying this focus as catering to New York diners’ “fetish for pork fat” (Sifton). This representative review details not only “an entree of gently smoked pork belly that’s been roasted to tender goo, for instance, over a drift of buttery mashed potatoes, with cabbage and bacon on the side” but also a pig’s foot “in gravy made of reduced braising liquid, thick with pillowy shallots and green flecks of deconstructed brussels sprouts” (Sifton). Sifton concluded with the proclamation that this style of pork was “very good: meat that is fat; fat that is meat”. Concluding remarks Bloomfield has listed Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie as among her favourite food books. Publishers Weekly reviewer called Ruhlman “a food poet, and the pig is his muse” (Q&A). In August 2009, it was reported that Bloomfield had always wanted to write a cookbook (Marx) and, in July 2010, HarperCollins imprint Ecco publisher and foodbook editor Dan Halpern announced that he was planning a book with her, tentatively titled, A Girl and Her Pig (Andriani “Ecco Expands”). As a “cookbook with memoir running throughout” (Maurer), this will discuss the influence of the pig on her life as well as how to cook pork. This text will obviously also add to the data known about The Spotted Pig, but until then, this brief gastrobiography has attempted to outline some of the human, and in this case, animal, stories that lie behind all businesses. References Andrews, Colman. “Its Up To You, New York, New York.” Gourmet Apr. (2009): 18-22, 111. Andriani, Lynn. “Ecco Expands Cookbook Program: HC Imprint Signs Up Seven New Titles.” Publishers Weekly 12 Jul. (2010) 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/43803-ecco-expands-cookbook-program.html Andriani, Lynn. “Gourmand Awards Receive Record Number of Cookbook Entries.” Publishers Weekly 27 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/44573-gourmand-awards-receive-record-number-of-cookbook-entries.html Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2003. First pub. 1986. Baeder, John. Gas, Food, and Lodging. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982. Barlow, John. Everything But the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Batali, Mario. “The Spotted Pig.” Mario Batali 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.mariobatali.com/restaurants_spottedpig.cfm Boje, David M. “The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance in an Office-Supply Firm.” Administrative Science Quarterly 36.1 (1991): 106-126. Brien, Donna Lee. “Writing to Understand Ourselves: An Organisational History of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 1996–2010.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses Apr. 2010 http://www.textjournal.com.au/april10/brien.htm Bruni, Frank. “Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate.” New York Times 13 Jun. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/dining/13glut.html Bruni, Frank. “Stuffed Pork.” New York Times 25 Jan. 2006. 4 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/dining/reviews/25rest.html Bushnell, Candace. Lipstick Jungle. New York: Hyperion Books, 2008. Byrnes, Paul. Qantas by George!: The Remarkable Story of George Roberts. Sydney: Watermark, 2000. Chinn, Carl. The Cadbury Story: A Short History. Studley, Warwickshire: Brewin Books, 1998. Dunstan, David and Chaitman, Annette. “Food and Drink: The Appearance of a Publishing Subculture.” Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007: 333-351. Ellis, W. Russell, Tonia Chao and Janet Parrish. “Levi’s Place: A Building Biography.” Places 2.1 (1985): 57-70. Estrine, Darryl. Harvest to Heat: Cooking with America’s Best Chefs, Farmers, and Artisans. Newton CT: The Taunton Press, 2010 Fabricant, Florence. “Food stuff: Off the Menu.” New York Times 26 Nov. 2003. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/26/dining/food-stuff-off-the-menu.html?ref=april_bloomfield Fabricant, Florence. “Food Stuff: Fit for an Emperor, Now Raised in America.” New York Times 23 Jun. 2004. 2 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/dining/food-stuff-fit-for-an-emperor-now-raised-in-america.html Farley, David. “In N.Y., An Appetite for Gastropubs.” The Washington Post 24 May 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201105.html Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. The River Cottage Meat Book. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004. Food & Wine Magazine. “Food & Wine Magazine Names 19th Annual Best New Chefs.” Food & Wine 4 Apr. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/2007-best-new-chefs Fossi, Gloria. Uffizi Gallery: Art, History, Collections. 4th ed. Florence Italy: Giunti Editore, 2001. Garden, Don. Builders to the Nation: The A.V. Jennings Story. Carlton: Melbourne U P, 1992. Ghorbani, Liza. “Boîte: In NoMad, a Bar With a Pub Vibe.” New York Times 26 Mar. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/fashion/28Boite.html Goodwillie, David. American Subversive. New York: Scribner, 2010. Guillette, Suzanne. Much to Your Chagrin: A Memoir of Embarrassment. New York, Atria Books, 2009. Henderson, Fergus. Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking. London: Pan Macmillan, 1999 Henderson, Fergus and Justin Piers Gellatly. Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part I1. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. Hughes, Kathryn. “Food Writing Moves from Kitchen to bookshelf.” The Guardian 19 Jun. 2010. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/19/anthony-bourdain-food-writing Jakle, John A. and Keith A. Sculle. Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1999. Jones, Lois. EasyJet: The Story of Britain's Biggest Low-cost Airline. London: Aurum, 2005. Kaminsky, Peter. “Feeding Time at Le Zoo.” New York Magazine 12 Jun. 1995: 65. Kaminsky, Peter. Pig Perfect: Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways To Cook Them. New York: Hyperion 2005. Koda, Harold, Andrew Bolton and Rhonda K. Garelick. Chanel. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge U P, 2003. 64-94. (First pub. 1986). Kroc, Ray and Robert Anderson. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, Chicago: H. Regnery, 1977 Leavitt, Mel. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2005. Pub. 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003. Leventhal, Ben. “April Bloomfield & Co. Take U.K. Field Trip to Prep for Ace Debut.” Grub Street 14 Apr. 2009. 3 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/04/april_bloomfield_co_take_uk_field_trip_to_prep_for_ace_debut.html Fast Food Nation. R. Linklater (Dir.). Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. Liu, Warren K. KFC in China: Secret Recipe for Success. Singapore & Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley (Asia), 2008. Locke, John. Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2009. Love, John F. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. Toronto & New York: Bantam, 1986. Marx, Rebecca. “Beyond the Breslin: April Bloomfield is Thinking Tea, Bakeries, Cookbook.” 28 Aug. 2009. 3 Sep. 2010 http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2009/08/beyond_the_bres.php Maurer, Daniel. “Meatball Shop, April Bloomfield Plan Cookbooks.” Grub Street 12 Jul. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/07/meatball_shop_april_bloomfield.html McLagan, Jennifer. Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008. Michelin. Michelin Green Guide New York City. Michelin Travel Publications, 2010. O’Donnell, Mietta. “Burying and Celebrating Ghosts.” Herald Sun 1 Dec. 1998. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.miettas.com.au/restaurants/rest_96-00/buryingghosts.html Otis, Ginger Adams. New York Encounter. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, 2007. “Q and A: April Bloomfield.” New York Times 18 Apr. 2008. 3 Sep. 2010 http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/q-and-a-april-bloomfield Rodrigue, Melvin and Jyl Benson. Galatoire’s Cookbook: Recipes and Family History from the Time-Honored New Orleans Restaurant. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2005. Rose, Hilary. “Fergus Henderson in New York.” The Times (London) Online, 5 Dec. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/recipes/article6937550.ece Rosenberg, Sarah & Tom McCarthy. “Platelist: The Breslin’s April Bloomfield.” ABC News/Nightline 4 Dec. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/april-bloomfield-spotted-pig-interview/story?id=9242079 Royer, Blake. “Table for Two: Fergus Henderson at The Spotted Pig.” The Paupered Chef 11 Oct. 2007. 23 Aug. 2010 http://thepauperedchef.com/2007/10/table-for-two-f.html Ruhlman, Michael and Brian Polcyn. Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. New York: W. Norton, 2005. Sanders, Michael S. “An Old Breed of Hungarian Pig Is Back in Favor.” New York Times 26 Mar. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/dining/01pigs.html?ref=april_bloomfield Schlosser, Eric. “Fast Food Nation: The True History of the America’s Diet.” Rolling Stone Magazine 794 3 Sep. 1998: 58-72. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Severson, Kim. “From the Pig Directly to the Fish.” New York Times 2 Sep. 2008. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/dining/03bloom.html Severson, Kim. “For the Big Game? Why, Pigskins.” New York Times 3 Feb. 2010. 23 Aug. 2010 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9502E2DB143DF930A35751C0A9669D8B63&ref=april_bloomfield Sifton, Sam. “The Breslin Bar and Dining Room.” New York Times 12 Jan. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/dining/reviews/13rest.htm Southern, Terry & Richard Branson. Virgin: A History of Virgin Records. London: A. Publishing, 1996. Starchefs.com. 4th Annual StarChefs.com International Chefs Congress. 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.starchefs.com/cook/icc-2009 Stein, Joshua David. “Exit Interview: Ken Friedman on the Demise of the John Dory.” Grub Street 15 Sep. 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/09/exit_interview_ken_friedman_on.html Steinhauer, Jennifer & Jo Craven McGinty. “Yesterday’s Special: Good, Cheap Dining.” New York Times 26 Jun. 2005. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/nyregion/26restaurant.html Striffler, Steve. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. The Spotted Pig (TSP) 2010 The Spotted Pig website http://www.thespottedpig.com Time Out New York. “Eat Out Awards 2009. Best New Hand at Seafood: April Bloomfield, the John Dory”. Time Out New York 706, 9-15 Apr. 2009. 10 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/eat-out-awards/73170/eat-out-awards-2009-best-new-hand-at-seafood-a-april-bloomfield-the-john-dory Vallis, Alexandra. “Ken Friedman on the Virtues of No Reservations.” Grub Street 27 Aug. 2009. 10 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/08/ken_friedman_on_the_virtues_of.html Watson, James L. Ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1997.Woody, Londa L. All in a Day's Work: Historic General Stores of Macon and Surrounding North Carolina Counties. Boone, North Carolina: Parkway Publishers, 2001. Young, Daniel. “Bon Appetit! It’s Feeding Time at Le Zoo.” New York Daily News 28 May 1995. 2 Sep. 2010 http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/lifestyle/1995/05/28/1995-05-28_bon_appetit__it_s_feeding_ti.html

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

On October 28th 2013 Hurricane Sandy hit land on the East Coast of the United States. The deadliest storm to hit the country since 2005 it caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, destroyed thousands of homes, left millions without electric service, and caused 117 deaths in the United States, including 53 in New York, making Sandy the most life costly hurricane to hit the United States mainland since Hurricane Katrina. In all an estimated 186 people were killed across the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada. In the immediate aftermath of the storm not only did the emergency services, state and federal government implement emergency plans of action, including both direct intervention on the ground and massive financial support, so too did a number of charities, community and residents groups across the US. One of the most surprising of these groups was what became known as Occupy Sandy. As noted by the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute: “Within hours of Sandy’s landfall, members from the Occupy Wall Street movement used social media to tap the wider Occupy network for volunteers and aid. Overnight, a volunteer army of young, educated, tech-savvy individuals with time and a desire to help others emerged. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, “Occupy Sandy” became one of the leading humanitarian groups providing relief to survivors across New York City and New Jersey. At its peak, it had grown to an estimated 60,000 volunteers—more than four times the number deployed by the American Red Cross.” What this phenomenon clearly demonstrates is the potential for digital networking to improve response to catastrophic storm events at a community level. Far from being solely a question of material support and logistics, the response to the disaster was one equally definable as digital. Pointing to the possible rethinking of issues around the extreme and localised consequences of climate change and responses to it in purely traditional infrastructural terms, the social media focused organisation of Occupy Sandy potentially offers us a new frame of reference to deal with these, and less catastrophic issues around climate change and our response to it. This paper provides a discussion of the projected impacts of global environmental change in urban environments in the United States, with a particular focus on their impact on existing storm and sanitary water infrastructure. However, it theorizes a new approach to this archaic system of infrastructure that exploits social networking tools and digital technologies to build greater networks for climate change resilience across the United States and, by extension, elsewhere.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. —Marshall McLuhan. What is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action upon them. —Henri Bergson. Introduction: Subjective Maps as ‘Contact Zones’ Maps feature heavily in a variety of media; they appear in textbooks, on television, in print, and on the screens of our handheld devices. The production of cartographic texts is a process that is imbued with power relations and bound up with the production and reproduction of social life (Pinder 405). Mapping involves choices as to what information is and is not included. In their organisation, categorisation, modeling, and representation maps show and they hide. Thus “the idea that a small number of maps or even a single (and singular) map might be sufficient can only apply in a spatialised area of study whose own self-affirmation depends on isolation from its context” (Lefebvre 85–86). These isolations determine the way we interpret the physical, biological, and social worlds. The map can be thought of as a schematic for political systems within a confined set of spatial relations, or as a container for political discourse. Mapping contributes equally to the construction of experiential realities as to the representation of physical space, which also contains the potential to incorporate representations of temporality and rhythm to spatial schemata. Thus maps construct realities as much as they represent them and coproduce space as much as the political identities of people who inhabit them. Maps are active texts and have the ability to promote social change (Pickles 146). It is no wonder, then, that artists, theorists and activists alike readily engage in the conflicted praxis of mapping. This critical engagement “becomes a method to track the past, embody memories, explain the unexplainable” and manifest the latent (Ibarra 66). In this paper I present a short case study of Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies a new media art project that aims to model a citizen driven effort to participate in a critical form of cartography, which challenges dominant representations of the city-space. I present a critical textual analysis of the maps produced in the workshops, the artist statements relating to these works used in the exhibition setting, and statements made by the participants on the project’s blog. This “praxis-logical” approach allows for a focus on the project as a space of aggregation and the communicative processes set in motion within them. In analysing such projects we could (and should) be asking questions about the functions served by the experimental concepts under study—who has put it forward? Who is utilising it and under what circ*mstances? Where and how has it come into being? How does discourse circulate within it? How do these spaces as sites of emergent forms of resistance within global capitalism challenge traditional social movements? How do they create self-reflexive systems?—as opposed to focusing on ontological and technical aspects of digital mapping (Renzi 73). In de-emphasising the technology of digital cartography and honing in on social relations embedded within the text(s), this study attempts to complement other studies on digital mapping (see Strom) by presenting a case from the field of politically oriented tactical media. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has been selected for analysis, in this exploration of media as “zone.” It goes some way to incorporating subjective narratives into spatial texts. This is a three-step process where participants tapped into spatial subjectivities by data collection or environmental sensing led by personal reflection or ethnographic enquiry, documenting and geo-tagging their findings in the map. Finally they engaged an imaginative or ludic process of synthesising their data in ways not inherent within the traditional conventions of cartography, such as the use of sound and distortion to explicate the intensity of invisible phenomena at various coordinates in the city-space. In what follows I address the “zone” theme by suggesting that if we apply McLuhan’s notion of media as environment together with Henri Bergson’s assertion that visibility and tangibility constitutes the potential for action to digital maps, projects such as Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies constitute a “contact zone.” A type of zone where groups come together at the local level and flows of discourse about art, information communication, media, technology, and environment intersect with local histories and cultures within the cartographic text. A “contact zone,” then, is a site where latent subjectivities are manifested and made potentially politically potent. “Contact zones,” however, need not be spaces for the aggrieved or excluded (Renzi 82), as they may well foster the ongoing cumulative politics of the mundane capable of developing into liminal spaces where dominant orders may be perforated. A “contact zone” is also not limitless and it must be made clear that the breaking of cartographic convention, as is the case with the project under study here, need not be viewed as resistances per se. It could equally represent thresholds for public versus private life, the city-as-text and the city-as-social space, or the zone where representations of space and representational spaces interface (Lefebvre 233), and culture flows between the mediated and ideated (Appadurai 33–36). I argue that a project like Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies demonstrates that maps as urban text form said “contact zones,” where not only are media forms such as image, text, sound, and video are juxtaposed in a singular spatial schematic, but narratives of individual and collective subjectivities (which challenge dominant orders of space and time, and city-rhythm) are contested. Such a “contact zone” in turn may not only act as a resource for citizens in the struggle of urban design reform and a democratisation of the facilities it produces, but may also serve as a heuristic device for researchers of new media spatiotemporalities and their social implications. Critical Cartography and Media Tactility Before presenting this brief illustrative study something needs to be said of the context from which Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has arisen. Although a number of Web 2.0 applications have come into existence since the introduction of Google Maps and map application program interfaces, which generate a great deal of geo-tagged user generated content aimed at reconceptualising the mapped city-space (see historypin for example), few have exhibited great significance for researchers of media and communications from the perspective of building critical theories relating to political potential in mediated spaces. The expression of power through mapping can be understood from two perspectives. The first—attributed largely to the Frankfurt School—seeks to uncover the potential of a society that is repressed by capitalist co-opting of the cultural realm. This perspective sees maps as a potential challenge to, and means of providing emancipation from, existing power structures. The second, less concerned with dispelling false ideologies, deals with the politics of epistemology (Crampton and Krygier 14). According to Foucault, power was not applied from the top down but manifested laterally in a highly diffused manner (Foucault 117; Crampton and Krygier 14). Foucault’s privileging of the spatial and epistemological aspects of power and resistance complements the Frankfurt School’s resistance to oppression in the local. Together the two perspectives orient power relative to spatial and temporal subjectivities, and thus fit congruently into cartographic conventions. In order to make sense of these practices the post-oppositional character of tactical media maps should be located within an economy of power relations where resistance is never outside of the field of forces but rather is its indispensable element (Renzi 72). Such exercises in critical cartography are strongly informed by the critical politico-aesthetic praxis of political/art collective The Situationist International, whose maps of Paris were inherently political. The Situationist International incorporated appropriated texts into, and manipulated, existing maps to explicate city-rhythms and intensities to construct imaginative and alternate representations of the city. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies adopts a similar approach. The artists’ statement reads: We build our subjective maps by combining different methods: photography, film, and sound recording; […] to explore the visible and invisible […] city; […] we adopt psycho-geographical approaches in exploring territory, defined as the study of the precise effects of the geographical environment, consciously developed or not, acting directly on the emotional behaviour of individuals. The project proposals put forth by workshop participants also draw heavily from the Situationists’s A New Theatre of Operations for Culture. A number of Situationist theories and practices feature in the rationale for the maps created in the Bangalore Subjective Cartographies workshop. For example, the Situationists took as their base a general notion of experimental behaviour and permanent play where rationality was approached on the basis of whether or not something interesting could be created out of it (Wark 12). The dérive is the rapid passage through various ambiences with a playful-constructive awareness of the psychographic contours of a specific section of space-time (Debord). The dérive can be thought of as an exploration of an environment without preconceptions about the contours of its geography, but rather a focus on the reality of inhabiting a place. Détournement involves the re-use of elements from recognised media to create a new work with meaning often opposed to the original. Psycho-geography is taken to be the subjective ambiences of particular spaces and times. The principles of détournement and psycho-geography imply a unitary urbanism, which hints at the potential of achieving in environments what may be achieved in media with détournement. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies carries Situationist praxis forward by attempting to exploit certain properties of information digitalisation to formulate textual representations of unitary urbanism. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies is demonstrative of a certain media tactility that exists more generally across digital-networked media ecologies and channels this to political ends. This tactility of media is best understood through textual properties awarded by the process and logic of digitalisation described in Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media. These properties are: numerical representation in the form of binary code, which allows for the reification of spatial data in a uniform format that can be stored and retrieved in-silico as opposed to in-situ; manipulation of this code by the use of algorithms, which renders the scales and lines of maps open to alteration; modularity that enables incorporation of other textual objects into the map whilst maintaining each incorporated item’s individual identity; the removal to some degree of human interaction in terms of the translation of environmental data into cartographic form (whilst other properties listed here enable human interaction with the cartographic text), and the nature of digital code allows for changes to accumulate incrementally creating infinite potential for refinements (Manovich 49–63). The Subjective Mapping of Bangalore Bangalore is an interesting site for such a project given the recent and rapid evolution of its media infrastructure. As a “media city,” the first television sets appeared in Bangalore at some point in the early 1980s. The first Internet Service Provider (ISP), which served corporate clients only, commenced operating a decade later and then offered dial-up services to domestic clients in the mid-1990s. At present, however, Bangalore has the largest number of broadband Internet connections in India. With the increasing convergence of computing and telecommunications with traditional forms of media such as film and photography, Bangalore demonstrates well what Scott McQuire terms a media-architecture complex, the core infrastructure for “contact zones” (vii). Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies was a workshop initiated by French artists Benjamin Cadon and Ewen Cardonnet. It was conducted with a number of students at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in November and December 2009. Using Metamap.fr (an online cartographic tool that makes it possible to add multimedia content such as texts, video, photos, sounds, links, location points, and paths to digital maps) students were asked to, in groups of two or three, collect and consult data on ‘felt’ life in Bangalore using an ethnographic, transverse geographic, thematic, or temporal approach. The objective of the project was to model a citizen driven effort to subvert dominant cartographic representations of the city. In doing so, the project and this paper posits that there is potential for such methods to be adopted to form new literacies of cartographic media and to render the cartographic imaginary politically potent. The participants’ brief outlined two themes. The first was the visible and symbolic city where participants were asked to investigate the influence of the urban environment on the behaviours and sensations of its inhabitants, and to research and collect signifiers of traditional and modern worlds. The invisible city brief asked participants to consider the latent environment and link it to human behaviour—in this case electromagnetic radiation linked to the cities telecommunications and media infrastructure was to be specifically investigated. The Visible and Symbolic City During British rule many Indian cities functioned as dual entities where flow of people and commodities circulated between localised enclaves and the centralised British-built areas. Mirroring this was the dual mode of administration where power was shared between elected Indian legislators and appointed British officials (Hoselitz 432–33). Reflecting on this diarchy leads naturally to questions about the politics of civic services such as the water supply, modes of public communication and instruction, and the nature of the city’s administration, distribution, and manufacturing functions. Workshop participants approached these issues in a variety of ways. In the subjective maps entitled Microbial Streets and Water Use and Reuse, food and water sources of street vendors are traced with the aim to map water supply sources relative to the movements of street vendors operating in the city. Images of the microorganisms are captured using hacked webcams as makeshift microscopes. The data was then converted to audio using Pure Data—a real-time graphical programming environment for the processing audio, video and graphical data. The intention of Microbial Streets is to demonstrate how mapping technologies could be used to investigate the flows of food and water from source to consumer, and uncover some of the latencies involved in things consumed unhesitatingly everyday. Typographical Lens surveys Russell Market, an older part of the city through an exploration of the aesthetic and informational transformation of the city’s shop and street signage. In Ethni City, Avenue Road is mapped from the perspective of local goldsmiths who inhabit the area. Both these maps attempt to study the convergence of the city’s dual function and how the relationship between merchants and their customers has changed during the transition from localised enclaves, catering to the sale of particular types of goods, to the development of shopping precincts, where a variety of goods and services can be sought. Two of the project’s maps take a spatiotemporal-archivist approach to the city. Bangalore 8mm 1940s uses archival Super 8 footage and places digitised copies on the map at the corresponding locations of where they were originally filmed. The film sequences, when combined with satellite or street-view images, allow for the juxtaposition of present day visions of the city with those of the 1940s pre-partition era. Chronicles of Collection focuses on the relationship between people and their possessions from the point of view of the object and its pathways through the city in space and time. Collectors were chosen for this map as the value they placed on the object goes beyond the functional and the monetary, which allowed the resultant maps to access and express spatially the layers of meaning a particular object may take on in differing contexts of place and time in the city-space. The Invisible City In the expression of power through city-spaces, and by extension city-texts, certain circuits and flows are ossified and others rendered latent. Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters writes: however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project. (252) The artists’ statement puts forward this possible response, an exploration of the latent aesthetics of the city-space: In this sense then, each device that enriches our perception for possible action on the real is worthy of attention. Even if it means the use of subjective methods, that may not be considered ‘evidence’. However, we must admit that any subjective investigation, when used systematically and in parallel with the results of technical measures, could lead to new possibilities of knowledge. Electromagnetic City maps the city’s sources of electromagnetic radiation, primarily from mobile phone towers, but also as a by-product of our everyday use of technologies, televisions, mobile phones, Internet Wi-Fi computer screens, and handheld devices. This map explores issues around how the city’s inhabitants hear, see, feel, and represent things that are a part of our environment but invisible, and asks: are there ways that the intangible can be oriented spatially? The intensity of electromagnetic radiation being emitted from these sources, which are thought to negatively influence the meditation of ancient sadhus (sages) also features in this map. This data was collected by taking electromagnetic flow meters into the suburb of Yelhanka (which is also of interest because it houses the largest milk dairy in the state of Karnataka) in a Situationist-like derive and then incorporated back into Metamap. Signal to Noise looks at the struggle between residents concerned with the placement of mobile phone towers around the city. It does so from the perspectives of people who seek information about their placement concerned about mobile phone signal quality, and others concerned about the proximity of this infrastructure to their homes due to to potential negative health effects. Interview footage was taken (using a mobile phone) and manipulated using Pure Data to distort the visual and audio quality of the footage in proportion to the fidelity of the mobile phone signal in the geographic area where the footage was taken. Conclusion The “contact zone” operating in Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies, and the underlying modes of social enquiry that make it valuable, creates potential for the contestation of new forms of polity that may in turn influence urban administration and result in more representative facilities of, and for, city-spaces and their citizenry. Robert Hassan argues that: This project would mean using tactical media to produce new spaces and temporalities that are explicitly concerned with working against the unsustainable “acceleration of just about everything” that our present neoliberal configuration of the network society has generated, showing that alternatives are possible and workable—in ones job, home life, family life, showing that digital [spaces and] temporality need not mean the unerring or unbending meter of real-time [and real city-space] but that an infinite number of temporalities [and subjectivities of space-time] can exist within the network society to correspond with a diversity of local and contextual cultures, societies and polities. (174) As maps and locative motifs begin to feature more prominently in media, analyses such as the one discussed in this paper may allow for researchers to develop theoretical approaches to studying newer forms of media. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. “Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://bengaluru.labomedia.org/page/2/›. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911. Crampton, Jeremy W., and John Krygier. “An Introduction to Critical Cartography.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geography 4 (2006): 11–13. Chardonnet, Ewen, and Benjamin Cadon. “Semaphore.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://semaphore.blogs.com/semaphore/spectral_investigations_collective/›. Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm›. Foucault, Michel. Remarks on Marx. New York: Semitotext[e], 1991.Hassan, Robert. The Chronoscopic Society: Globalization, Time and Knowledge in the Networked Economy. New York: Lang, 2003. “Historypin.” 4 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.historypin.com/›. Hoselitz, Bert F. “A Survey of the Literature on Urbanization in India.” India’s Urban Future Ed. Roy Turner. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. 425-43. Ibarra, Anna. “Cosmologies of the Self.” Elephant 7 (2011): 66–96. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lovink, Geert. Dark Fibre. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. “Metamap.fr.” 3 Mar. 2011 ‹http://metamap.fr/›. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. London: Penguin, 1967. McQuire, Scott. The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space. London: Sage, 2008. Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004. Pinder, David. “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City.” Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 405–27. “Pure Data.” 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://puredata.info/›. Renzi, Alessandra. “The Space of Tactical Media” Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Ed. Megan Boler. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. 71–100. Situationist International. “A New Theatre of Operations for Culture.” 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/urbanism/reading-the-situationist-city/›. Strom, Timothy Erik. “Space, Cyberspace and the Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps.” M/C Journal 4.3 (2011). 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/370›. Wark, McKenzie. 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left, 1979.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction The term ‘resilience’ is on everyone’s lips - from politicians to community service providers to the seemingly endless supply of self-help gurus. The concept is undergoing a renaissance of sorts in contemporary Western society; but why resilience now? One possible explanation is that individuals and their communities are experiencing increased and intensified levels of adversity and hardship, necessitating the accumulation and deployment of ‘more resilience’. Whilst a strong argument could made that this is in fact the case, it would seem that the capacity to survive and thrive has been a feature of human survival and growth long before we had a name for it. Rather than an inherent characteristic, trait or set of behaviours of particularly ‘resilient’ individuals or groups, resilience has come to be viewed more as a common and everyday capacity, expressed and expressible by all people. Having researched the concept for some time now, we believe that we are only marginally closer to understanding this captivating but ultimately elusive concept. What we are fairly certain of is that resilience is more than basic survival but less than an invulnerability to adversity, resting somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Given the increasing prevalence of populations affected by war and other disasters, we are certain however that efforts to better understand the accumulative dynamics of resilience, are now, more than ever, a vital area of public and academic concern. In our contemporary world, the concept of resilience is coming to represent a vital conceptual tool for responding to the complex challenges emerging from broad scale movements in climate change, rural and urban migration patterns, pollution, economic integration and other consequences of globalisation. In this article, the phenomenon of human resilience is defined as the cumulative build-up of both particular kinds of knowledge, skills and capabilities as well as positive affects such as hope, which sediment over time as transpersonal capacities for self-preservation and ongoing growth (Wilson). Although the accumulation of positive affect is crucial to the formation of resilience, the ability to re-imagine and utilise negative affects, events and environmental limitations, as productive cultural resources, is a reciprocal and under-researched aspect of the phenomenon. In short, we argue that resilience is the protective shield, which capacitates individuals and communities to at least deal with, and at best, overcome potential challenges, while also facilitating the realisation of hoped-for objects and outcomes. Closely tied to the formation of resilience is the lived experience of hope and hoping practices, with an important feature of resilience related to the future-oriented dimensions of hope (Parse). Yet it is important to note that the accumulation of hope, as with resilience, is not headed towards some state of invulnerability to adversity; as presumed to exist in the foundational period of psychological research on the construct (Garmezy; Werner and Smith; Werner). In contrast, we argue that the positive affective experience of hopefulness provides individuals and communities with a means of enduring the present, while the future-oriented dimensions of hope offer them an instrument for imagining a better future to come (Wilson). Given the complex, elusive and non-uniform nature of resilience, it is important to consider the continued relevance of the resilience concept. For example, is resilience too narrow a term to describe and explain the multiple capacities, strategies and resources required to survive and thrive in today’s world? Furthermore, why do some individuals and communities mobilise and respond to a crisis; and why do some collapse? In a related discussion, Ungar (Constructionist) posed the question, “Why keep the term resilience?” Terms like resilience, even strengths, empowerment and health, are a counterpoint to notions of disease and disorder that have made us look at people as glasses half empty rather than half full. Resilience reminds us that children survive and thrive in a myriad of ways, and that understanding the etiology of health is as, or more, important than studying the etiology of disease. (Ungar, Constructionist 91) This productive orientation towards health, creativity and meaning-making demonstrates the continued conceptual and existential relevance of resilience, and why it will remain a critical subject of inquiry now and into the future. Early Psychological Studies of Resilience Definitions of resilience vary considerably across disciplines and time, and according to the theoretical context or group under investigation (Harvey and Delfabro). During the 1970s and early 1980s, the developmental literature on resilience focused primarily on the “personal qualities” of “resilient children” exposed to adverse life circ*mstances (Garmezy Vulnerability; Masten; Rutter; Werner). From this narrow and largely individualistic viewpoint, resilience was defined as an innate “self-righting mechanism” (Werner and Smith 202). Writing from within the psychological tradition, Masten argued that the early research on resilience (Garmezy Vulnerability; Werner and Smith) regularly implied that resilient children were special or remarkable by virtue of their invulnerability to adversity. As research into resilience progressed, researchers began to acknowledge the ordinariness or everydayness of resilience-related phenomena. Furthermore, that “resilience may often derive from factors external to the child” (Luthar; Cicchetti and Becker 544). Besides the personal attributes of children, researchers within the psychological sciences also began to explore the effects of family dynamics and impacts of the broader social environment in the development of resilience. Rather than identifying which child, family or environmental factors were resilient or resilience producing, they turned their attention to how these underlying protective mechanisms facilitated positive resilience outcomes. As research evolved, resilience as an absolute or unchanging attribute made way for more relational and dynamic conceptualisations. As Luthar et al noted, “it became clear that positive adaptation despite exposure to adversity involves a developmental progression, such that new vulnerabilities and/or strengths often emerge with changing life circ*mstances” (543-44). Accordingly, resilience came to be viewed as a dynamic process, involving positive adaptations within contexts of adversity (Luthar et al. 543). Although closer to the operational definition of resilience argued for here, there remain a number of definitional concerns and theoretical limitations of the psychological approach; in particular, the limitation of positive adaptation to the context of significant adversity. In doing so, this definition fails to account for the subjective experience and culturally located understandings of ‘health’, ‘adversity’ and ‘adaptation’ so crucial to the formation of resilience. Our major criticism of the psychodynamic approach to resilience relates to the construction of a false dichotomy between “resilient” and “non-resilient” individuals. This dichotomy is perpetuated by psychological approaches that view resilience as a distinct construct, specific to “resilient” individuals. In combating this assumption, Ungar maintained that this bifurcation could be replaced by an understanding of mental health “as residing in all individuals even when significant impairment is present” (Thicker 352). We tend to agree. In terms of economic resilience, we must also be alert to similar false binaries that place the first and low-income world into simple, apposite positions of coping or not-coping, ‘having’ or ‘not-having’ resilience. There is evidence to indicate, for example, that emerging economies fared somewhat better than high-income nations during the global financial crisis (GFC). According to Frankel and Saravelos, several low-income nations attained better rates of gross domestic product GDP, though the impacts on the respective populations were found to be equally hard (Lane and Milesi-Ferretti). While the reasons for this are broad and complex, a study by Kose and Prasad found that a broad set of policy tools had been developed that allowed for greater flexibility in responding to the crisis. Positive Affect Despite Adversity An emphasis on deficit, suffering and pathology among marginalised populations such as refugees and young people has detracted from culturally located strengths. As Te Riele explained, marginalised young people residing in conditions of adversity are often identified within “at-risk” discourses. These social support frameworks have tended to highlight pathologies and antisocial behaviours rather than cultural competencies. This attitude towards marginalised “at risk” young people has been perpetuated by psychotherapeutic discourse that has tended to focus on the relief of suffering and treatment of individual pathologies (Davidson and Shahar). By focusing on pain avoidance and temporary relief, we may be missing opportunities to better understand the productive role of ‘negative’ affects and bodily sensations in alerting us to underlying conditions, in need of attention or change. A similar deficit approach is undertaken through education – particularly civics – where young people are treated as ‘citizens in waiting’ (Collin). From this perspective, citizenship is something that young people are expected to ‘grow into’, and until that point, are seen as lacking any political agency or ability to respond to adversity (Holdsworth). Although a certain amount of internal discomfort is required to promote change, Davidson and Shahar noted that clinical psychotherapists still “for the most part, envision an eventual state of happiness – both for our patients and for ourselves, described as free of tension, pain, disease, and suffering” (229). In challenging this assumption, they asked, But if desiring-production is essential to what makes us human, would we not expect happiness or health to involve the active, creative process of producing? How can one produce anything while sitting, standing, or lying still? (229) A number of studies exploring the affective experiences of migrants have contested the embedded psychological assumption that happiness or well-being “stands apart” from experiences of suffering (Crocker and Major; Fozdar and Torezani; Ruggireo and Taylor; Tsenkova, Love, Singer and Ryff). A concern for Ahmed is how much the turn to happiness or happiness turn “depends on the very distinction between good and bad feelings that presume bad feelings are backward and conservative and good feelings are forward and progressive” (Happiness 135). Highlighting the productive potential of unhappy affects, Ahmed suggested that the airing of unhappy affects in their various forms provides people with “an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or at least better life” (Happiness 135). An interesting feature of refugee narratives is the paradoxical relationship between negative migration experiences and the reporting of a positive life outlook. In a study involving former Yugoslavian, Middle Eastern and African refugees, Fozdar and Torezani investigated the “apparent paradox between high-levels of discrimination experienced by humanitarian migrants to Australia in the labour market and everyday life” (30), and the reporting of positive wellbeing. The interaction between negative experiences of discrimination and reports of wellbeing suggested a counter-intuitive propensity among refugees to adapt to and make sense of their migration experiences in unique, resourceful and life-affirming ways. In a study of unaccompanied Sudanese youth living in the United States, Goodman reported that, “none of the participants displayed a sense of victimhood at the time of the interviews” (1182). Although individual narratives did reflect a sense of victimisation and helplessness relating to the enormity of past trauma, the young participants viewed themselves primarily as survivors and agents of their own future. Goodman further stated that the tone of the refugee testimonials was not bitter: “Instead, feelings of brotherliness, kindness, and hope prevailed” (1183). Such response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors indicate a similar resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from negative migration experiences and associated emotions. It is important to point out that demonstrations of resilience appear loosely proportional to the amount or intensity of adverse life events experienced. However, resilience is not expressed or employed uniformly among individuals or communities. Some respond in a resilient manner, while others collapse. On this point, an argument could be made that collapse and breakdown is a built-in aspect of resilience, and necessary for renewal and ongoing growth. Cultures of Resilience In a cross continental study of communities living and relying on waterways for their daily subsistence, Arvanitakis is involved in a broader research project aiming to understand why some cultures collapse and why others survive in the face of adversity. The research aims to look beyond systems of resilience, and proposes the term ‘cultures of resilience’ to describe the situated strategies of these communities for coping with a variety of human-induced environmental challenges. More specifically, the concept of ‘cultures of resilience’ assists in explaining the specific ways individuals and communities are responding to the many stresses and struggles associated with living on the ‘front-line’ of major waterways that are being impacted by large-scale, human-environment development and disasters. Among these diverse locations are Botany Bay (Australia), Sankhla Lake (Thailand), rural Bangladesh, the Ganges (India), and Chesapeake Bay (USA). These communities face very different challenges in a range of distinctive contexts. Within these settings, we have identified communities that are prospering despite the emerging challenges while others are in the midst of collapse and dispersion. In recognising the specific contexts of each of these communities, the researchers are working to uncover a common set of narratives of resilience and hope. We are not looking for the ’magic ingredient’ of resilience, but what kinds of strategies these communities have employed and what can they learn from each other. One example that is being pursued is a community of Thai rice farmers who have reinstated ceremonies to celebrate successful harvests by sharing in an indigenous rice species in the hope of promoting a shared sense of community. These were communities on the cusp of collapse brought on by changing economic and environmental climates, but who have reversed this trend by employing a series of culturally located practices. The vulnerability of these communities can be traced back to the 1960s ‘green revolution’ when they where encouraged by local government authorities to move to ‘white rice’ species to meet export markets. In the process they were forced to abandoned their indigenous rice varieties and abandon traditional seed saving practices (Shiva, Sengupta). Since then, the rice monocultures have been found to be vulnerable to the changing climate as well as other environmental influences. The above ceremonies allowed the farmers to re-discover the indigenous rice species and plant them alongside the ‘white rice’ for export creating a more robust harvest. The indigenous species are kept for local consumption and trade, while the ‘white rice’ is exported, giving the farmers access to both the international markets and income and the local informal economies. In addition, the indigenous rice acts as a form of ‘insurance’ against the vagaries of international trade (Shiva). Informants stated that the authorities that once encouraged them to abandon indigenous rice species and practices are now working with the communities to re-instigate these. This has created a partnership between the local government-funded research centres, government institutions and the farmers. A third element that the informants discussed was the everyday practices that prepare a community to face these challenges and allow it recover in partnership with government, including formal and informal communication channels. These everyday practices create a culture of reciprocity where the challenges of the community are seen to be those of the individual. This is not meant to romanticise these communities. In close proximity, there are also communities engulfed in despair. Such communities are overwhelmed with the various challenges described above of changing rural/urban settlement patterns, pollution and climate change, and seem to have lacked the cultural and social capital to respond. By contrasting the communities that have demonstrated resilience and those that have not been overwhelmed, it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is no single 'magic' ingredient of resilience. What exist are various constituted factors that involve a combination of community agency, social capital, government assistance and structures of governance. The example of the rice farmers highlights three of these established practices: working across formal and informal economies; crossing localised and expert knowledge as well as the emergence of everyday practices that promote social capital. As such, while financial transactions occur that link even the smallest of communities to the global economy, there is also the everyday exchange of cultural practices, which is described elsewhere by Arvanitakis as 'the cultural commons': visions of hope, trust, shared intellect, and a sense of safety. Reflecting the refugee narratives citied above, these communities also report a positive life outlook, refusing to see themselves as victims. There is a propensity among members of these communities to adapt an outlook of hope and survival. Like the response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors, initial research is confirming a resilience-related capacity to interpret the various challenges that have been confronted, and see their survival as reason to hope. Future Visions, Hopeful Visions Hope is a crucial aspect of resilience, as it represents a present- and future-oriented mode of situated defence against adversity. The capacity to hope can increase one’s powers of action despite a complex range of adversities experienced in everyday life and during particularly difficult times. The term “hope” is commonly employed in a tokenistic way, as a “nice” rhetorical device in the mind-body-spirit or self-help literature or as a strategic instrument in increasingly empty domestic and international political vocabularies. With a few notable exceptions (Anderson; Bloch; Godfrey; Hage; Marcel; Parse; Zournazi), the concept of hope has received only modest attention from within sociology and cultural studies. Significant increases in the prevalence of war and disaster-affected populations makes qualitative research into the lived experience of hope a vital subject of academic interest. Parse observed among health care professionals a growing attention to “the lived experience of hope”, a phenomenon which has significant consequences for health and the quality of one’s life (vvi). Hope is an integral aspect of resilience as it can act as a mechanism for coping and defense in relation to adversity. Interestingly, it is during times of hardship and adversity that the phenomenological experience of hope seems to “kick in” or “switch on”. With similarities to the “taken-for-grantedness” of resilience in everyday life, Anderson observed that hope and hoping are taken-for-granted aspects of the affective fabric of everyday life in contemporary Western culture. Although the lived experience of hope, namely, hopefulness, is commonly conceptualised as a “future-oriented” state of mind, the affectivity of hope, in the present moment of hoping, has important implications in terms of resilience formation. The phrase, the “lived deferral of hope” is an idea that Wilson has developed elsewhere which hopefully brings together and holds in creative tension the two dominant perspectives on hope as a lived experience in the present and a deferred, future-oriented practice of hoping and hopefulness. Zournazi defined hope as a “basic human condition that involves belief and trust in the world” (12). She argued that the meaning of hope is “located in the act of living, the ordinary elements of everyday life” and not in “some future or ideal sense” (18). Furthermore, she proposed a more “everyday” hope which “is not based on threat or deferral of gratification”, but is related to joy “as another kind of contentment – the affirmation of life as it emerges and in the transitions and movements of our everyday lives and relationships” (150). While qualitative studies focusing on the everyday experience of hope have reinvigorated academic research on the concept of hope, our concept of “the lived deferral of hope” brings together Zournazi’s “everyday hope” and the future-oriented dimensions of hope and hoping practices, so important to the formation of resilience. Along similar lines to Ahmed’s (Happy Objects) suggestion that happiness “involves a specific kind of intentionality” that is “end-orientated”, practices of hope are also intentional and “end-orientated” (33). If objects of hope are a means to happiness, as Ahmed wrote, “in directing ourselves towards this or that [hope] object we are aiming somewhere else: toward a happiness that is presumed to follow” (Happy Objects 34), in other words, to a hope that is “not yet present”. It is the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities in the future that can help individuals and communities endure adverse experiences in the present and inspire confidence in the ongoingness of their existence. Although well-intentioned, Zournazi’s concept of an “everyday hope” seemingly ignores the fact that in contexts of daily threat, loss and death there is often a distinct lack of affirmative or affirmable things. In these contexts, the deferral of joy and gratification, located in the future acquisition of objects, outcomes or ideals, can be the only means of getting through particularly difficult events or circ*mstances. One might argue that hope in hopeless situations can be disabling; however, we contend that hope is always enabling to some degree, as it can facilitate alternative imaginings and temporary affective relief in even in the most hopeless situations. Hope bears similarity to resilience in terms of its facilities for coping and endurance. Likewise the formation and maintenance of hope can help individuals and communities endure and cope with adverse events or circ*mstances. The symbolic dimension of hope capacitates individuals and communities to endure the present without the hoped-for outcomes and to live with the uncertainty of their attainment. In the lives of refugees, for example, the imaginative dimension of hope is directly related to resilience in that it provides them with the ability to respond to adversity in productive and life-affirming ways. For Oliver, hope “provides continuity between the past and the present…giving power to find meaning in the worst adversity” (in Parse 16). In terms of making sense of the migration and resettlement experiences of refugees and other migrants, Lynch proposed a useful definition of hope as “the fundamental knowledge and feeling that there is a way out of difficulty, that things can work out” (32). As it pertains to everyday mobility and life routes, Parse considered hope to be “essential to one’s becoming” (32). She maintained that hope is a lived experience and “a way of propelling self toward envisioned possibilities in everyday encounters with the world” (p. 12). Expanding on her definition of the lived experience of hope, Parse stated, “Hope is anticipating possibilities through envisioning the not-yet in harmoniously living the comfort-discomfort of everydayness while unfolding a different perspective of an expanding view” (15). From Nietzsche’s “classically dark version of hope” (in Hage 11), Parse’s “positive” definition of hope as a propulsion to envisaged possibilities would in all likelihood be defined as “the worst of all evils, for it protracts the torment of man”. Hage correctly pointed out that both the positive and negative perspectives perceive hope “as a force that keeps us going in life” (11). Parse’s more optimistic vision of hope as propulsion to envisaged possibilities links nicely to what Arvanitakis described as an ‘active hope’. According to him, the idea of ‘active hope’ is not only a vision that a better world is possible, but also a sense of agency that our actions can make this happen. Conclusion As we move further into the 21st century, humankind will be faced with a series of traumas, many of which are as yet unimagined. To meet these challenges, we, as a global collective, will need to develop specific capacities and resources for coping, endurance, innovation, and hope, all of which are involved the formation of resilience (Wilson 269). Although the accumulation of resilience at an individual level is important, our continued existence, survival, and prosperity lie in the strength and collective will of many. As Wittgenstein wrote, the strength of a thread “resides not in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres” (xcv). If resilience can be accumulated at the level of the individual, it follows that it can be accumulated as a form of capital at the local, national, and international levels in very real and meaningful ways. References Ahmed, Sara. ed. “Happiness.” A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 65 (2007-8): i-155. ———. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. 29-51. Anderson, Ben. “Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory of Affect.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 733-752. Arvanitakis, James. “On Forgiveness, Hope and Community: Or the Fine Line Step between Authentic and Fractured Communities.” A Journey through Forgiveness, Ed. Malika Rebai Maamri, Nehama Verbin & Everett L. Worthington, Jr. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press. 2010. 149-157 Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope 1-3. Trans. N. Plaice, S. Place, P. Knight. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1986. Collin, Philippa. Young People Imagining a New Democracy: Literature Review. Sydney: Whitlam Institute, 2008. Crocker, Jennifer, and Brenda Major. “Social Stigma and Self-Esteem: The Self-Protective Properties of Stigma.” Psychological Review 96.4 (1989): 608-630. Davidson, Larry, and Golan Shahar. “From Deficit to Desire: A Philosophical Reconsideration of Action Models of Psychopathology.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 14.3 (200): 215-232. Fozdar, Farida, and Silvia Torezani. “Discrimination and Well-Being: Perceptions of Refugees in Western Australia.” The International Migration Review 42.1 (2008): 1-34. Frankel, Jeffrey A., and George Saravelos. “Are Leading Indicators of Financial Crises Useful for Assessing Country Vulnerability? Evidence from the 2008–09 Global Crisis”. NBER Working Paper 16047 (June 2010). Godfrey, Joseph J. A Philosophy of Human Hope. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. Goodman, Janice H. “Coping with Trauma and Hardship among Unaccompanied Refugee Youths from Sudan.” Qualitative Health Research 14.9 (2004): 1177-1196. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking World. Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, 2002. Harvey, John, and Paul H. Delfabbro. “Psychological Resilience in Disadvantaged Youth: A Critical Review.” American Psychologist 39.1 (2004): 3-13. Holdsworth, Roger. Civic Engagement and Young People: A Report Commissioned by the City of Melbourne Youth Research Centre. Melbourne: Melbourne City Council, 2007. Garmezy, Norman. “Vulnerability Research and the Issue of Primary Prevention.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 41.1 (1971): 101-116. ———. "Stressors of Childhood." Stress, Coping and Development in Children. Eds N. Garmezy and M. Rutter. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. 43-84. ———. “Resiliency and Vulnerability to Adverse Developmental Outcomes Associated with Poverty.” American Behavioral Scientist 34.4 (1991): 416-430. Kose, Ayhan M., and Eswar S. Prasad. Emerging Markets: Resilience and Growth amid Global Turmoil. Washington, DC: Brookings, 2010. Lane, Philip., and Gian M. Milesi-Ferretti. “The Cross-Country Incidence of the Global Crisis.” IMF Working Paper 10.171 (2010). Luthar, Suniya S., Dante Cicchetti, and Bronwyn Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543—62. Lynch, William F. Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1995. Marcel, Gabriel. hom*o Viator. Trans E. Craufurd. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1951. Masten, Ann S. “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development.” American Psychologist 56.3 (2001): 227-309. Parse, Rosemarie R., ed. An International Human Becoming Perspective. London, UK: Jones & Bartlett, 1999. Ruggireo, Karen M., and Donald M. Taylor. “Why Minority Group Members Perceive or Do Not Perceive the Discrimination That Confronts Them: The Role of Self-Esteem and Perceived Control.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1997): 373-389. Rutter, Michael. “Psychosocial Resilience and Protective Mechanisms.” Risk and Protective Factors in the Development of Psychopathology. Eds J. Rolf, A. Masten, D. Cicchetti, K. Neuchterlein and S. Weintraub. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990. Sengupta, Somini. Thirsty Giants: India Digs Deeper, But Wells Are Drying Up. The New York Times, 2006. Shiva, Vandana. The Violence of the Green Revolution. New York: Zed Books, 1991. ———. “Apples and Oranges.” The Asian Age 17 Aug. 2013. 17 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.asianage.com/columnists/apples-and-oranges-744>. Te Riele, Kitty. “Youth 'at Risk': Further Marginalising the Marginalised?” Journal of Education Policy 21.2 (2006): 129-145. Tsenkova, Vera K., Gayle D. Love, Burton H. Singer, and Carol D Ryff. “Coping and Positive Affect Predict Longitudinal Change in Glycosylated Hemoglobin.” Health Psychology 27.2 (2008): 163-171. Ungar, Michael. “A Constructionist Discourse on Resilience: Multiple Contexts, Multiple Realities among at-Risk Children and Youth.” Youth Society 35.3 (2004): 341-365. ———. “A Thicker Description of Resilience.” The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work 3 & 4 (2005): 85-96. Werner, Emmy E. “Risk, Resilience, and Recovery. Perspectives from the Kauai Longitudinal Study.” Development and Psychopathology 5.4 (1993): 503-515. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Overcoming the Odds: High-Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Wilson, Michael. Accumulating Resilience: An Investigation of the Migration and Resettlement Experiences of Young Sudanese People in the Western Sydney Area. PHD Thesis. University of Western Sydney, 2012. 1-297. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe., P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009. Zournazi, Mary. Hope: New Philosophies for Change. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

When historian Graeme Davison famously declared that “Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban” (98), he was clearly referring to Melbourne or Sydney, but certainly not Brisbane. Although the Brisbane of 2011 might resemble a contemporary, thriving metropolis, its genealogy is not an urban one. For most of its history, as Gillian Whitlock has noted, Brisbane was “a place where urban industrial society is kept at bay” (80). What distinguishes Brisbane from Australia’s larger southern capital cities is its rapid morphology into a city from a provincial, suburban, town. Indeed it is Brisbane’s distinctive regionalism, with its sub-tropical climate, offering a steamy, fecund backdrop to narratives of the city that has produced a plethora of writing in literary accounts of the city, from author David Malouf through to contemporary writers such as Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham, Venero Armanno, Susan Johnson, and Nick Earls. Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition makes its transformation unique among Australian cities. Its rapid population growth and urban development have changed the way that many people now live in the city. Unlike the larger cities of Sydney or Melbourne, whose inner cities were established on the Victorian model of terrace-row housing on small lots, Brisbane’s early planners eschewed this approach. So, one of the features that gives the city its distinction is the languorous suburban quality of its inner-city areas, where many house blocks are the size of the suburban quarter-acre block, all within coo-ee of the city centre. Other allotments are medium to small in size, and, until recently, housed single dwellings of varying sizes and grandeur. Add to this a sub-tropical climate in which ‘green and growth’ is abundant and the pretty but flimsy timber vernacular housing, and it’s easy to imagine that you might be many kilometres from a major metropolitan centre as you walk around Brisbane’s inner city areas. It is partly this feature that prompted demographer Bernard Salt to declare Brisbane “Australia’s most suburban city” (Salt 5). Prior to urban renewal in the early 1990s, Brisbane was a low-density town with very few apartment blocks; most people lived in standalone houses.From the inception of the first Urban Renewal program in 1992, a joint initiative of the Federal government’s Building Better Cities Program and managed by the Brisbane City Council (BCC), Brisbane’s urban development has undergone significant change. In particular, the city’s Central Business District (CBD) and inner city have experienced intense development and densification with a sharp rise in medium- to high-density apartment dwellings to accommodate the city’s swelling population. Population growth has added to the demand for increased density, and from the period 1995–2006 Brisbane was Australia’s fastest growing city (ABS).Today, parts of Brisbane’s inner city resembles the density of the larger cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Apartment blocks have mushroomed along the riverfront and throughout inner and middle ring suburbs. Brisbane’s population has enthusiastically embraced apartment living, with “empty nesters” leaving their suburban family homes for the city, and apartments have become the affordable option for renters and first home purchasers. A significant increase in urban amenities such as large-scale parklands and river side boardwalks, and a growth in service industries such as cafes, restaurants and bars—a feature of cities the world over—have contributed to the appeal of the city and the changing way that people live in Brisbane.Urbanism demands specific techniques of living—life is different in medium- to high-density dwellings, in populous places, where people live in close proximity to one another. In many ways it’s the antithesis to suburban life, a way of living that, as Davison notes, was established around an ethos of privacy, health, and seclusion and is exemplified in the gated communities seen in the suburbs today. The suburbs are characterised by generosity of space and land, and developed as a refuge and escape from the city, a legacy of the nineteenth-century industrial city’s connection with overcrowding, disease, and disorder. Suburban living flourished in Australia from the eighteenth century and Davison notes how, when Governor Phillip drew up the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, it embodied the aspirations of “decency, good order, health and domestic privacy,” which lie at the heart of suburban ideals (100).The health and moral impetus underpinning the establishment of suburban life—that is, to remove people from overcrowding and the unhygienic conditions of slums—for Davison meant that the suburban ethos was based on a “logic of avoidance” (110). Attempting to banish anything deemed dangerous and offensive, the suburbs were seen to offer a more natural, orderly, and healthy environment. A virtuous and happy life required plenty of room—thus, a garden and the expectation of privacy was paramount.The suburbs as a site of lived experience and cultural meaning is significant for understanding the shift from suburban living to the adoption of medium- to high-density inner-city living in Brisbane. I suggest that the ways in which this shift is captured discursively, particularly in promotional material, are indicative of the suburbs' stronghold on the collective imagination. Reinforcing this perception of Brisbane as a suburban city is a history of literary narratives that have cast Brisbane in ways that set it apart from other Australian cities, and that are to do with its non-urban characteristics. Imaginative and symbolic discourses of place have real and material consequences (Lefebvre), as advertisers are only too well aware. Discursively, city life has been imagined oppositionally from life in the suburbs: the two sites embody different cultural meanings and values. In Australia, the suburbs are frequently a site of derision and satire, characterized as bastions of conformity and materialism (Horne), offering little of value in contrast to the city’s many enchantments and diverse pleasures. In the well-established tradition of satire, “suburban bashing is replete in literature, film and popular culture” (Felton et al xx). From Barry Humphries’s characterisation of Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar, who first appeared in the 1960s, to the recent television comedy series Kath and Kim, suburbia and its inhabitants are represented as dull-witted, obsessed with trivia, and unworldly. This article does not intend to rehearse the tradition of suburban lampooning; rather, it seeks to illustrate how ideas about suburban living are hard held and how the suburban ethos maintains its grip, particularly in relation to notions of privacy and peace, despite the celebratory discourse around the emerging forms of urbanism in Brisbane.As Brisbane morphed rapidly from a provincial, suburban town to a metropolis throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a set of metropolitan discourses developed in the local media that presented new ways of inhabiting and imagining the city and offered new affiliations and identifications with the city. In establishing Brisbane’s distinction as a city, marketing material relied heavily on the opposition between the city and the suburbs, implying that urban vitality and diversity rules triumphant over the suburbs’ apparent dullness and hom*ogeneity. In a billboard advertisem*nt for apartments in the urban renewal area of Newstead (2004), images of architectural renderings of the apartments were anchored by the words—“Urban living NOT suburban”—leaving little room for doubt. It is not the design qualities of the apartments or the building itself being promoted here, but a way of life that alludes to utopian ideas of urban life, of enchantment with the city, and implies, with the heavy emphasis of “NOT suburban,” the inferiority of suburban living.The cultural commodification of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century city has been well documented (Evans; Dear; Zukin; Harvey) and its symbolic value as a commodity is expressed in marketing literature via familiar metropolitan tropes that are frequently amorphous and international. The malleability of such images makes them easily transportable and transposable, and they provided a useful stockpile for promoting a city such as Brisbane that lacked its own urban resources with which to construct a new identity. In the early days of urban renewal, the iconic images and references to powerhouse cities such as New York, London, and even Venice were heavily relied upon. In the latter example, an advertisem*nt promoting Brisbane appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald colour magazine (May 2005). This advertisem*nt represented Brisbane as an antipodean Venice, showing a large reach of the Brisbane river replete with gondolas flanked by the city’s only nineteenth-century riverside building, the Custom’s House. The allusion to traditional European culture is a departure from the usual tropes of “fun and sun” associated with promotions of Queensland, including Brisbane, while the new approach to promoting Brisbane is cognizant of the value of culture in the symbolic and economic hierarchy of the contemporary city. Perhaps equally, the advertisem*nt could be read as ironic, a postmodern self-parodying statement about the city in general. In a nod to the centrality of the spectacle, the advertisem*nt might be a salute to idea of the city as theme park, a pleasure playground and a collective fantasy of escape. Nonetheless, either interpretation presents Brisbane as somewhere else.In other promotional literature for apartment dwellings, suburban living maintains its imaginative grip, evident in a brochure advertising Petrie Point apartments in Brisbane’s urban renewal area of inner-city New Farm (2000). In the brochure, the promise of peace and calm—ideals that have their basis in suburban living—are imposed and promoted as a feature of inner-city living. Paradoxically, while suggesting that a wholesale evacuation and rejection of suburban life is occurring presumably because it is dull, the brochure simultaneously upholds the values of suburbia:Discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers who prefer lounging over latte rather than mowing the quarter acre block, are abandoning suburban living in droves. Instead, hankering after a more cosmopolitan lifestyle without the mind numbing drive to work, they are retreating to the residential mecca, the inner city, for chic shops and a lively dining, arts and theatre culture. (my italics)In the above extract, the rhetoric used to promote and uphold the virtues of a cosmopolitan inner-city life is sabotaged by a language that in many respects capitulates to the ideals of suburban living, and evokes the health and retreat ethos of suburbia. “Lounging” over lattes and “retreating to a residential mecca”[i] allude to precisely the type of suburban living the brochure purports to eschew. Privacy, relaxation, and health is a discourse and, more importantly, a way of living that is in many ways anathema to life in the city. It is a dream-wish that those features most valued about suburban life, can and should somehow be transplanted to the city. In its promotion of urban amenity, the brochure draws upon a somewhat bourgeois collection of cultural amenities and activities such as a (presumably traditional) arts and theatre culture, “lively dining,” and “chic” shops. The appeal to “discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers” has more than a whiff of status and class, an appeal that disavows the contemporary city’s attention to diversity and inclusivity, and frequently the source of promotion of many international cities. In contrast to the suburban sub-text of exclusivity and seclusion in the Petrie Point Apartment’s brochure, is a promotion of Sydney’s inner-city Newtown as a tourist site and spectacle, which makes an appeal to suburban antipathy clear from the outset. The brochure, distributed by NSW Tourism (2000) displays a strong emphasis on Newtown’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and the various forms of cultural consumption on offer. The inner-city suburb’s appeal is based on its re-framing as a site of tourist consumption of diversity and difference in which diversity is central to its performance as a tourist site. It relies on the distinction between “ordinary” suburbs and “cosmopolitan” places:Some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney’s blessed with Newtown — a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of more than 600 stores, 70 restaurants, 42 cafes, theatres, pubs, and entertainment venues, all trading in two streets whose origins lie in the nineteenth century … Newtown is the Catwalk for those with more style than money … a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul, where Milano meets post-punk bohemia, where Max Mara meets Doc Marten, a stage where a petticoat is more likely to be your grandma’s than a Colette Dinnigan designer original (From Sydney Marketing brochure)Its opening oppositional gambit—“some cities are cursed with suburbs”—conveniently elides the fact that like all Australian cities, Sydney is largely suburban and many of Sydney’s suburbs are more ethnically diverse than its inner-city areas. Cabramatta, Fairfield, and most other suburbs have characteristically high numbers of ethnic groups such as Vietnamese, Korean, Lebanese, and so forth. Recent events, however, have helped to reframe these places as problem areas, rather than epicentres of diversity.The mingling of social groups invites the tourist-flâneur to a performance of difference, “a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul (my italics), where Milano meets post-punk bohemia,” and where “the upwardly mobile and down at heel” appear in what is presented as something of a theatrical extravaganza. Newtown is a product, its diversity a commodity. Consumed visually and corporeally via its divergent sights, sounds, smells and tastes (the brochure goes on to state that 70 restaurants offer cuisine from all over the globe), Newtown is a “successful neighbourhood experiment in the new globalism.” The area’s social inequities—which are implicit in the text, referred to as the “down at heel”—are vanquished and celebrated, incorporated into the rhetoric of difference.Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition and culture, as well as its lack of diversity in comparison to Sydney, reveals itself in the first brochure while the Newtown brochure appeals to the idea of a consumer-based cosmopolitanism. As a sociological concept, cosmopolitanism refers to a set of "subjective attitudes, outlooks and practices" broadly characterized as “disposition of openness towards others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non local” (Skrbis and Woodward 1). Clearly cosmopolitan attitudes do not have to be geographically located, but frequently the city is promoted as the site of these values, with the suburbs, apparently, forever looking inward.In the realm of marketing, appeals to the imagination are ubiquitous, but discursive practices can become embedded in everyday life. Despite the growth of urbanism, the increasing take up of metropolitan life and the enduring disdain among some for the suburbs, the hard-held suburban values of peace and privacy have pragmatic implications for the ways in which those values are embedded in people’s expectations of life in the inner city.The exponential growth in apartment living in Brisbane offers different ways of living to the suburban house. For a sub-tropical city where "life on the verandah" is a significant feature of the Queenslander house with its front and exterior verandahs, in the suburbs, a reasonable degree of privacy is assured. Much of Brisbane’s vernacular and contemporary housing is sensitive to this indoor-outdoor style of living, a distinct feature and appeal of everyday life in many suburbs. When "life on the verandah" is adapted to inner-city apartment buildings, expectations that indoor-outdoor living can be maintained in the same way can be problematic. In the inner city, life on the verandah may challenge expectations about privacy, noise and visual elements. While the Brisbane City Plan 2000 attempts to deal with privacy issues by mandating privacy screenings on verandahs, and the side screening of windows to prevent overlooking neighbours, there is ample evidence that attitudinal change is difficult. The exchange of a suburban lifestyle for an urban one, with the exposure to urbanity’s complexity, potential chaos and noise, can be confronting. In the Urban Renewal area and entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley, during the late 1990s, several newly arrived residents mounted a vigorous campaign to the Brisbane City Council (BCC) and State government to have noise levels reduced from local nightclubs and bars. Fortitude Valley—the Valley, as it is known locally—had long been Brisbane’s main area for nightclubs, bars and brothels. A small precinct bounded by two major one-way roads, it was the locus of the infamous ABC 4 Corners “Moonlight State” report, which exposed the lines of corruption between politicians, police, and the judiciary of the former Bjelke-Petersen government (1974–1987) and who met in the Valley’s bars and brothels. The Valley was notorious for Brisbanites as the only place in a provincial, suburban town that resembled the seedy side of life associated with big cities. The BCC’s Urban Renewal Task Force and associated developers initially had a tough task convincing people that the area had been transformed. But as more amenity was established, and old buildings were converted to warehouse-style living in the pattern of gentrification the world over, people started moving in to the area from the suburbs and interstate (Felton). One of the resident campaigners against noise had purchased an apartment in the Sun Building, a former newspaper house and in which one of the apartment walls directly abutted the adjoining and popular nightclub, The Press Club. The Valley’s location as a music venue was supported by the BCC, who initially responded to residents’ noise complaints with its “loud and proud” campaign (Valley Metro). The focus of the campaign was to alert people moving into the newly converted apartments in the Valley to the existing use of the neighbourhood by musicians and music clubs. In another iteration of this campaign, the BCC worked with owners of music venues to ensure the area remains a viable music precinct while implementing restrictions on noise levels. Residents who objected to nightclub noise clearly failed to consider the impact of moving into an area that was already well known, even a decade ago, as the city’s premier precinct for music and entertainment venues. Since that time, the Valley has become Australia’s only regulated and promoted music precinct.The shift from suburban to urban living requires people to live in very different ways. Thrust into close proximity with strangers amongst a diverse population, residents can be confronted with a myriad of sensory inputs—to a cacophony of noise, sights, smells (Allon and Anderson). Expectations of order, retreat, and privacy inevitably come into conflict with urbanism’s inherent messiness. The contested nature of urban space is expressed in neighbour disputes, complaints about noise and visual amenity, and sometimes in eruptions of street violence. There is no shortage of examples in the Brisbane’s Urban Renewal areas such as Fortitude Valley, where acts of hom*ophobia, racism, and other less destructive conflicts continue to be a frequent occurrence. While the refashioned discursive Brisbane is re-presented as cool, cultured, and creative, the tensions of urbanism and tests to civility remain in a process of constant negotiation. This is the way the city’s past disrupts and resists its cool new surface.[i] The use of the word mecca in the brochure occurred prior to 11 September 2001.ReferencesAllon, Fiona, and Kay Anderson. "Sentient Sydney." In Passionate City: An International Symposium. Melbourne: RMIT, School of Media Communication, 2004. 89–97.Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Regional Population Growth, Australia, 1996-2006.Birmingham, John. "The Lost City of Vegas: David Malouf’s Old Brisbane." Hot Iron Corrugated Sky. Ed. R. Sheahan-Bright and S. Glover. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. xx–xx.Davison, Graeme. "The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb." Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities. Ed. L. Johnson. Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1994. xx–xx.Dear, Michael. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Evans, Graeme. “Hard-Branding the Cultural City—From Prado to Prada.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.2 (2003): 417–40.Evans, Raymond, and Carole Ferrier, eds. Radical Brisbane. Melbourne: The Vulgar Press, 2004.Felton, Emma, Christy Collis, and Phil Graham. “Making Connections: Creative Industries Networks in Outer Urban Locations.” Australian Geographer 14.1 (Mar. 2010): 57–70.Felton, Emma. Emerging Urbanism: A Social and Cultural Study of Urban Change in Brisbane. PhD thesis. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.Glover, Stuart, and Stuart Cunningham. "The New Brisbane." Artlink 23.2 (2003): 16–23. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Horne, Donald. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Ringwood: Penguin, 1964.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.Malouf, David. Johnno. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975. ---. 12 Edmondstone Street. London: Penguin, 1986.NSW Tourism. Sydney City 2000. Sydney, 2000.Salt, Bernard. Cinderella City: A Vision of Brisbane’s Rise to Prominence. Sydney: Austcorp, 2005.Skrbis, Zlatko, and Ian Woodward. “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitanism Openness.” Sociological Review (2007): 1-14.Valley Metro. 1 May 2011 < http://www.valleymetro.com.au/the_valley.aspx >.Whitlock, Gillian. “Queensland: The State of the Art on the 'Last Frontier.’" Westerly 29.2 (1984): 85–90.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Landing in the Midwest after a lifetime in Los Angeles, I was shocked to learn how “famous” that great city really is. It used to seem perfectly reasonable that the freeways on CHiPs looked just like the ones I rode to school. When I was five, I remember being secretly bummed that my mom never took us to the disco-classical mural from Xanadu, which I was convinced had to be hidden somewhere in Venice Beach. In high school, it never seemed strange that the Peach Pit on Beverly Hills 90210 was the same as the Rose City Diner. From the L.A. River to the Griffith Park Observatory, from the Hollywood Sign to Venice Beach, the places I had been in, through, and around were inscribed with meanings in ways that I could never fully grasp. Even marginalized localities like Inglewood, Compton, and East L.A., which especially during the 1980s and early 1990s were being ravaged by urban warfare, got to be the stars of movies, songs, and many music videos. And on April 29, 1992, the corner of Florence and Normandie “blew up” into a full blown riot, sparked by the acquittal of the four white officers who beat black motorist, Rodney King. I could watch the city burn on T.V. or from the hill behind my house. All my life, I lived with a foot in each L.A., the one that’s outside my living room and the one that’s inside my living room, oblivious to the fact that I lived in a famous city. It was only after I moved away from L.A. that I realized my homesickness could often be softened by a click of the remote. I could look for a familiar stretch of road, a bit of the skyline, or a clean but otherwise familiar segment of sidewalk, and it didn’t even matter who, what, where, or why was taking place in the story on screen. It was as though fragments of my life had been archived for me in media space. Some memories were real and some just recollections of other representations – like seeing the observatory in Bowfinger and wondering if I was remembering Rebel Without a Cause or a second grade field trip. But when I arrived here, the question that greeted me most often at parties was, “Why are you in Bowling Green!?!” And the second was, “Did you meet any famous people?” And so I tell them about how I went to driver’s education class with Mayim Byalik, the star of Blossom. Or that I met Annette Funicello one New Year’s Eve at my Uncle Phil’s house. Aside from the occasional queer chuckle about my brush with Blossom, this record is unimpressive. People are hoping for something a little bit more like, “I spent the night in jail with Poison,” “I was an extra on Baywatch,” or “I was at the Viper Room the night River Phoenix passed away.” In spite of my lackluster record of interactions with the rich and the famous, I would still get introduced as being “from California.” I had become the recipient of a second-rate, secondhand fame, noted for being from a place where, if I were more ambitious, I could have really rubbed shoulders with famous people. To young people, many of whom were itching to travel to a place like LA or New York, I was a special kind of failure. But if you aren’t famous, if you are a loser like me, life in L.A. isn’t about the a-list at all. It is about living in a city that captures the imagination, even as you walk down the street. So earning notoriety in a city that speaks in spectacle is an exercise in creativity. It seems like everybody, even the most down-to-earth people, are invested in developing a character, an image, a persona that can bubble up and be noticed in spite of the overwhelming glow of Hollywood. Even at my suburban high school, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, I knew upper-middleclass boys who got nose jobs and manicures. I knew girls who would go trolling for rich men to buy them pretty things that their parents couldn’t afford. There were kids whose parents helped them cheat their way into college. There were wannabe junkies who drove their moms’ minivans into the ghetto to score. I saw people panic, pout, and scream over cars and allowances and shoes. I know that consumer culture is growing stronger just about everywhere, but back home it happened a lot sooner and a lot stronger. Because of our proximity to Hollywood, the crest of the cultural tidal wave looks much higher and its force is much stronger. And I guess I was just too fat to be in California, so I left. However, every once in a while, somebody does manage to make a scene in L.A. A little loser, or whatever you want to call one of the peasants who tend to the vast fiefdoms of L.A.’s elites, rises from banality to achieve celebrity, even if it is a minor celebrity, in the City of Angels. One such figure is the notorious Daniel Ramos, who in 1991 became a central figure in the city’s struggle over its own image. Daniel Ramos was not a star, a politician, or a leader of industry – but before he even appeared in the news, he had trafficked illegally in making a name for himself. A teenager from the projects, Ramos was more widely known as “Chaka,” a graffiti writer credited with over 10,000 tags from San Diego to San Francisco. I had seen Chaka’s tags just about everywhere, and had determined that he might be superhuman. His name, taken after a hairy little missing link from the popular fantasy show, The Land of the Lost, made me smirk as it conjured up images of a sub-humanoid with broken dialect creeping out from the darkness with cans of paint, marking the walls with his sign, calling out to the rest of us half-humans stranded in the land of the lost. Meanwhile, L.A.’s rich and famous whizzed by, casting resentful glances at Chaka’s do-it-yourself media blitz. I knew that Chaka was “bad,” but my imagination loved him. And when he allegedly left his mark in the courthouse elevator on the day of his release from a five-month stretch in prison (Costello), I couldn’t help but feel glad to know that Chaka was still alive, that legends don’t die (his name even made it, through the hand of Dave Grohl, into Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit Video” in 1991). For me, and I imagine for many others, it was the beginning of a political awakening. I wondered what was so bad about graffiti, even though I had been taught all my life that it was wrong. More than ten years later, as I sit by the railroad tracks in my small, Midwestern town, eagerly waiting for messages from California painted on the sides of boxcars, I find myself asking a related question – what is good about advertising? I’m not the first to make the welcomed association between graffiti and advertising. In an interview with the vastly capable scholar, Joe Austin, New York graffiti legend IZ THE WIZ explained it thusly: OK, now you’re on a poorer economic level and what do you have? Years ago, and even today, a boxer makes a name for himself in the boxing ring. So when this art form starts developing, why would it be any different? It’s all in the name. When you’re poor, that’s all you got. (40) Austin elaborates on this insight, explaining: The proliferation of posters, advertisem*nts, and signs bearing the images and names of products and proprietors in twentieth-century cities is one obvious place to begin. These are the directly visible extensions of individual/corporate identities into the new shared urban public spaces of the streets, a quantitatively and qualitatively new site in human history where hundreds of thousands of often spectacularly displayed names abound, each catching the eyes of potential consumers and imprinting itself on their memories. (39) So, on one level, the story of Chaka is the story of a poor man who went toe to toe with big media, in a town run by big media, and held his own. It is the story of someone who has managed to say in no insignificant way, “I am here.” Or has Ramos himself yelled as he was being shackled by police, “I am the famous ‘Chaka’” (Walker A4). In spite of everything else, Ramos had a name that was widely recognized, respected by some, reviled by others. Nancy Macdonald, in her important study the culture of writing, shifts the focus away from the more solidly class-based argument employed by Austin in his study of the origins of New York graffiti art to one which lends itself more readily to understanding the culture of writing in the 1990s, after hip hop had become more accessible to middleclass enthusiasts. Macdonald explains, “Writers use the respect and recognition of their peers to validate their masculine identities” (124). While I am reluctant to downplay the class struggle that certainly seems to have implicitly informed Chaka’s quest for recognition, his outlaw appeal lends itself such an interpretation. In a city like Los Angeles, where middle class agency and upward mobility for the service class are not simply functions of wealth, but also of scrupulously maintained images, feelings of powerlessness associated with the lack of a compelling image are to be expected. It is the engine that drives the exuberant extravagance of consumer culture, lifestyle choices, and ultimately biopolitics. In a society where culture and capital are the dual poles which determine one’s social standing, the pursuit of notoriety is not simply a measure of masculinity – hijacking images is a way to assert one’s agency in spite of the diminished value of unskilled labor and the collective fear of underclass masculinities. In her book Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A., Susan A. Philips provides discussion of Chaka’s contribution to L.A. graffiti. Notably, Chaka was seen by those in the graffiti community as an everyman, who was responsible for two significant cultural achievements: he “open[ed] up the style of the New York-based tags and creat[ed] the phenomenon of the individual tagger” (Phillips 320). He also, as Phillips notes, “wrote tags that you could read…in blockish gang-type lettering” (320). Unlike his New York graffiti-writing peers, which are best known for their beautiful “wildstyle,” Chaka did not typically traffic in multicolor murals and displays of painterly virtuosity. His chief accomplishment was his cunning pervasiveness and daring criminality. As such, his body of work should be seen as incompatible with High Art attempts to bring collectible graffiti into gallery spaces through the 1980s and ‘90s. Chaka’s medium, in a sense, has less to do with paint, than it has to do with the city and its rules. For the majority of the public, Chaka was seen as an individual face for the graffiti pandemic that was strategically linked in the public mind with specter of gang violence. However, to those familiar with the writing scene in L.A., Chaka is more than a lone individual: THE OG’Z OF THE LEGION OF DOOM WERE THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR BRINGING THE EARLY LOS ANGELES GRAFFITI SCENE TO IT’S KNEES! AND GAVE US MOST OF THE LEGENDS WE KNOW TODAY! I REMEMBER I TIME WHEN EVERY LOS ANGELES INTERSTATE HEAVEN ROCKED BY EITHER LEST-CAB-STANS-SUB OR THE CHAKA!!! (god i miss those days!) remember the CAB undercover story on the news where he did those loks on dope throwies on the 110 pasadena? I think it was chuck henry channel 7 ??? does anyone still have that on vhs? i had it on vhs along with the CHAKA PUBLIC SERVICE ANOUNCEMENT (that was great!). (Poncho1DEcrew) Instead of being an individual tagger, Chaka is recognized as a member of a crew (LOD), who managed to get up in legendary ways. In reclaiming freeway overpasses (the “Heavens”), walls, trains, road signs, and just about everything else for his crew, vicariously for the many other people who respect his name, and also for himself, Chaka is more than simply selfish, as is often suggested by his detractors. In the heavens is the right place to begin. High up in the sky, over the freeways, for all to see, the writing in the heavens is visible, mysterious, and ultimately risky. The problem of climbing along the girders underneath the bridges, escaping detection, but leaving something bold points to what distinguishes writing from an ad-campaign. Sure, some of what the tagger does is about simply being a recognized image all over the place. But the other part is about finding the place, working within environmental constraints, battling against time, stretching one’s limits, and doing it with style. While the image may be everywhere, the act of writing itself is a singularity, shrouded by secrecy, and defined by the moment of its doing. The aftereffect is a puzzle. And in the case of Chaka, the question is, “How the hell did this guy get up over 10,000 times?” While I can’t see how he did it and I don’t know where, exactly, he got all that paint, I do know one thing: Chaka went everywhere. He mapped the city out as a series of landmarks, he put his name to the space, and he claimed Los Angeles for people other than the ones who claim to own the rights to beam their generalized and monolithic messages into our living rooms. Instead of archiving the city in the banalities of mass media, he has created an archive of an alternative L.A., filled with singularities, and famous in the way that only one’s hometown can be. Instead of being a celebrity, renowned by virtue of a moderately unique character, his ability to generate money, and an elite image, Chaka represents an alternative fame. As a modern day “everyman” and folk hero, he brings a message that the city belongs to all people. Far from the naïve and mean-spirited equations between graffiti writing and canine scent-marking as a primitive drive to mark territorial boundaries with undesirable substances (writers:paint::dogs:piss), Chaka’s all-city message is not so much a practice of creating exclusionary spaces as it is an assertion of one’s identity in a particular space. A postmodern pilgrim, Chaka has marked his progress through the city leaving a perceptible record of his everyday experience, and opening up that possibility for others. This is not to say that it is necessary for all people to paint in order to break loose from the semiotic order of the city, it is only to say that is hopeful to realize that this order is not fixed and that is not even necessarily our own. Reflecting back on my own experience as one who has grown up very much in love in the produced spaces of the scripted and archived fame of Los Angeles, the realization that such an overwhelming place is open even to my own inscriptions is an important one. This realization, which has been many years in the making, was set into place by the curious fame of Chaka. For a writer and scholar disturbed by the “death of the author,” it comes as a relief to see writing resurrected in the anti-authoritarian practice of a teenage boy from the projects. References Austin, Joe. Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Costello, D. “Writing Was on the Wall.” Courier-Mail 9 May 1991. Macdonald, Nancy. The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. Phillips, Susan A. Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Poncho1DEcrew. 50mm Los Angeles Forum. 18 June 2004. 11 July 2004 http://www.50mmlosangeles.com/>. Walker, Jill. “Letter from the Streets; Handwriting on the Wall: 10,000 Chakas.” Washington Post 4 May 1991: A4. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Heckman, Davin. "Being in the Shadow of Hollywood: Celebrity, Banality, and the Infamous Chaka." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/12-heckman.php>. APA Style Heckman, D. (Nov. 2004) "Being in the Shadow of Hollywood: Celebrity, Banality, and the Infamous Chaka," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/12-heckman.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction As social-distancing mandates in response to COVID-19 restricted in-person data collection methods such as participant observation and interviews, researchers turned to socially distant methods such as interviewing via video-conferencing technology (Lobe et al.). These were not new tools nor methods, but the pandemic muted any bias towards face-to-face data collection methods. Exemplified in crowd-sourced documents such as Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic, researchers were encouraged to pivot to digital methods as a means of fulfilling research objectives, “specifically, ideas for avoiding in-person interactions by using mediated forms that will achieve similar ends” (Lupton). The benefits of digital methods for expanding participant cohorts and scope of research have been touted long before 2020 and COVID-19, and, as noted by Murthy, are “compelling” (“Emergent” 172). Research conducted by digital methods can expect to reap benefits such as “global datasets/respondents” and “new modalities for involving respondents” (Murthy, “Emergent” 172). The pivot to digital methods is not in and of itself an issue. What concerns us is that in the dialogues about shifting to digital methods during COVID-19, there does not yet appear to have been a critical consideration of how participant samples and collected data will be impacted upon or skewed towards recording the experiences of advantaged cohorts. Existing literature focusses on the time-saving benefits for the researcher, reduction of travel costs (Fujii), the minimal costs for users of specific platforms – e.g. Skype –, and presumes ubiquity of device access for participants (Cater). We found no discussion on data costs of accessing such services being potential barriers to participation in research, although Deakin and Wakefield did share our concern that: Online interviews may ... mean that some participants are excluded due to the need to have technological competence required to participate, obtain software and to maintain Internet connection for the duration of the discussion. In this sense, access to certain groups may be a problem and may lead to issues of representativeness. (605) We write this as a provocation to our colleagues conducting research at this time to consider the cultural and material capital of their participants and how that capital enables them to participate in digitally-mediated data gathering practices, or not, and to what extent. Despite highlighting the potential benefits of digital methods within a methodological tool kit, Murthy previously cautioned against the implications posed by digital exclusion, noting that “the drawback of these research options is that membership of these communities is inherently restricted to the digital ‘haves’ ... rather than the ‘have nots’” (“Digital” 845). In this article, we argue that while tools such as Zoom have indeed enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID disruptions, this shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In making this argument, we draw on examples from the Connected Students project, a study of digital inclusion that commenced just as COVID-19 restrictions came into effect in the Australian state of Victoria at the start of 2020. We draw on the experiences of these households to illustrate the barriers that such cohorts face when participating in online research. We begin by providing details about the Connected Students project and then contextualising it through a discussion of research on digital inclusion. We then outline three areas in which households would have experienced (or still do experience) difficulties participating in online research: data, devices, and skills. We use these findings to highlight the barriers that disadvantaged groups may face when engaging in data collection activities over Zoom and question how this is impacting on who is and is not being included in research during COVID-19. The Connected Students Program The Connected Students program was conducted in Shepparton, a regional city located 180km north of Melbourne. The town itself has a population of around 30,000, while the Greater Shepparton region comprises around 64,000 residents. Shepparton was chosen as the program’s site because it is characterised by a unique combination of low-income and low levels of digital inclusion. First, Shepparton ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) and the Index of Relative Socioeconomic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD), as reported in 2016 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Census”; Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Index”). Although Shepparton has a strong agricultural and horticultural industry with a number of food-based manufacturing companies in the area, including fruit canneries, dairies, and food processing plants, the town has high levels of long-term and intergenerational unemployment and jobless families. Second, Shepparton is in a regional area that ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (Thomas et al.), which measures digital inclusion across dimensions of access, ability, and affordability. Funded by Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, and delivered in partnership with Greater Shepparton Secondary College (GSSC), the Connected Students program provided low-income households with a laptop and an unlimited broadband Internet connection for up to two years. Households were recruited to the project via GSSC. To be eligible, households needed to hold a health care card and have at least one child attending the school in year 10, 11, or 12. Both the student and a caregiver were required to participate in the project to be eligible. Additional household members were invited to take part in the research, but were not required to. (See Kennedy & Holcombe-James; and Kennedy et al., "Connected Students", for further details regarding household demographics.) The Australian Digital Inclusion Index identifies that affordability is a significant barrier to digital inclusion in Australia (Thomas et al.). The project’s objective was to measure how removing affordability barriers to accessing connectivity for households impacts on digital inclusion. By providing participating households with a free unlimited broadband internet connection for the duration of the research, the project removed the costs associated with digital access. Access alone is not enough to resolve the digital exclusion confronted by these low-income households. Digital exclusion in these instances is not derived simply from the cost of Internet access, but from the cost of digital devices. As a result, these households typically lacked sufficient digital devices. Each household was therefore provided both a high speed Internet connection, and a brand new laptop with built-in camera, microphone, and speakers (a standard tool kit for video conferencing). Data collection for the Connected Students project was intended to be conducted face-to-face. We had planned in-person observations including semi-structured interviews with household members conducted at three intervals throughout the project’s duration (beginning, middle, and end), and technology tours of each home to spatially and socially map device locations and uses (Kennedy et al., Digital Domesticity). As we readied to make our first research trip to commence the study, COVID-19 was wreaking havoc. It quickly became apparent we would not be travelling to work, much less travelling around the state. We thus pivoted to digital methods, with all our data collection shifting online to interviews conducted via digital platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. While the pivot to digital methods saved travel hours, allowing us to scale up the number of households we planned to interview, it also demonstrated unexpected aspects of our participants’ lived experiences of digital exclusion. In this article, we draw on our first round of interviews which were conducted with 35 households over Zoom or Microsoft Teams during lockdown. The practice of conducting these interviews reveals insights into the barriers that households faced to digital research participation. In describing these experiences, we use pseudonyms for individual participants and refer to households using the pseudonym for the student participant from that household. Why Does Digital Inclusion Matter? Digital inclusion is broadly defined as universal access to the technologies necessary to participate in social and civic life (Helsper; Livingstone and Helsper). Although recent years have seen an increase in the number of connected households and devices (Thomas et al., “2020”), digital inclusion remains uneven. As elsewhere, digital disadvantage in the Australian context falls along geographic and socioeconomic lines (Alam and Imran; Atkinson et al.; Blanchard et al.; Rennie et al.). Digitally excluded population groups typically experience some combination of education, employment, income, social, and mental health hardship; their predicament is compounded by a myriad of important services moving online, from utility payments, to social services, to job seeking platforms (Australian Council of Social Service; Chen; Commonwealth Ombudsman). In addition to challenges in using essential services, digitally excluded Australians also miss out on the social and cultural benefits of Internet use (Ragnedda and Ruiu). Digital inclusion – and the affordability of digital access – should thus be a key concern for researchers looking to apply online methods. Households in the lowest income quintile spend 6.2% of their disposable income on telecommunications services, almost three times more than wealthier households (Ogle). Those in the lowest income quintile pay a “poverty premium” for their data, almost five times more per unit of data than those in the highest income quintile (Ogle and Musolino). As evidenced by the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, this is driven in part by a higher reliance on mobile-only access (Thomas et al., “2020”). Low-income households are more likely to access critical education, business, and government services through mobile data rather than fixed broadband data (Thomas et al., “2020”). For low-income households, digital participation is the top expense after housing, food, and transport, and is higher than domestic energy costs (Ogle). In the pursuit of responsible and ethical research, we caution against assuming research participants are able to bear the brunt of access costs in terms of having a suitable device, expending their own data resources, and having adequate skills to be able to complete the activity without undue stress. We draw examples from the Connected Students project to support this argument below. Findings: Barriers to Research Participation for Digitally Excluded Households If the Connected Students program had not provided participating households with a technology kit, their preexisting conditions of digital exclusion would have limited their research participation in three key ways. First, households with limited Internet access (particularly those reliant on mobile-only connectivity, and who have a few gigabytes of data per month) would have struggled to provide the data needed for video conferencing. Second, households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate devices. Third, and critically, although the Connected Students technology kit provided households with the data and devices required to participate in the digital ethnography, this did not necessarily resolve the skills gaps that our households confronted. Data Prior to receiving the Connected Students technology kit, many households in our sample had limited modes of connectivity and access to data. For households with comparatively less or lower quality access to data, digital participation – whether for the research discussed here, or in contemporary life – came with very real costs. This was especially the case for households that did not have a home Internet connection and instead relied solely on mobile data. For these households, who carefully managed their data to avoid running out, participating in research through extended video conferences would have been impossible unless adequate financial reimbursem*nt was offered. Households with very limited Internet access used a range of practices to manage and extend their data access by shifting internet costs away from the household budget. This often involved making use of free public Wi-Fi or library internet services. Ellie’s household, for instance, spent their weekends at the public library so that she and her sister could complete their homework. While laborious, these strategies worked well for the families in everyday life. However, they would have been highly unsuitable for participating in research, particularly during the pandemic. On the most obvious level, the expectations of library use – if not silent, then certainly quiet – would have prohibited a successful interview. Further, during COVID-19 lockdowns, public libraries (and other places that provide public Internet) became inaccessible for significant periods of time. Lastly, for some research designs, the location of participants is important even when participation is occurring online. In the case of our own project, the house itself as the site of the interview was critical as our research sought to understand how the layout and materiality of the home impacts on experiences of digital inclusion. We asked participants to guide us around their home, showing where technologies and social activities are colocated. In using the data provided by the Connected Students technology kit, households with limited Internet were able to conduct interviews within their households. For these families, participating in online research would have been near impossible without the Connected Students Internet. Devices Even with adequate Internet connections, many households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of suitable devices. Laptops, which generally provide the best video conferencing experience, were seen as prohibitively expensive for many families. As a result, many families did not have a laptop or were making do with a laptop that was excessively slow, unreliable, and/or had very limited functions. Desktop computers were rare and generally outdated to the extent that they were not able to support video conferencing. One parent, Melissa, described their barely-functioning desktop as “like part of the furniture more than a computer”. Had the Connected Students program not provided a new laptop with video and audio capabilities, participation in video interviews would have been difficult. This is highlighted by the challenges students in these households faced in completing online schooling prior to receiving the Connected Students kit. A participating student, Mallory, for example, explained she had previously not had a laptop, reliant only on her phone and an old iPad: Interviewer: Were you able to do all your homework on those, or was it sometimes tricky?Mallory: Sometimes it was tricky, especially if they wanted to do a call or something ... . Then it got a bit hard because then I would use up all my data, and then didn’t have much left.Interviewer: Yeah. Right.Julia (Parent): ... But as far as schoolwork, it’s hard to do everything on an iPad. A laptop or a computer is obviously easier to manoeuvre around for different things. This example raises several common issues that would likely present barriers to research participation. First, Mallory’s household did not have a laptop before being provided with one through the Connected Students program. Second, while her household did prioritise purchasing tablets and smartphones, which could be used for video conferencing, these were more difficult to navigate for certain tasks and used up mobile data which, as noted above, was often a limited resource. Lastly, it is worth noting that in households which did already own a functioning laptop, it was often shared between several household members. As one parent, Vanessa, noted, “yeah, until we got the [Connected Students] devices, we had one laptop between the four of us that are here. And Noel had the majority use of that because that was his school work took priority”. This lack of individuated access to a device would make participation in some research designs difficult, particularly those that rely on regular access to a suitable device. Skills Despite the Connected Students program’s provision of data and device access, this did not ensure successful research participation. Many households struggled to engage with video research interviews due to insufficient digital skills. While a household with Internet connectivity might be considered on the “right” side of the digital divide, connectivity alone does not ensure participation. People also need to have the knowledge and skills required to use online resources. Brianna’s household, for example, had downloaded Microsoft Teams to their desktop computer in readiness for the interview, but had neglected to consider whether that device had video or audio capabilities. To work around this restriction, the household decided to complete the interview via the Connected Students laptop, but this too proved difficult. Neither Brianna nor her parents were confident in transferring the link to the interview between devices, whether by email or otherwise, requiring the researchers to talk them through the steps required to log on, find, and send the link via email. While Brianna’s household faced digital skills challenges that affected both parent and student participants, in others such as Ariel’s, these challenges were focussed at the parental level. In these instances, the student participant provided a vital resource, helping adults navigate platforms and participate in the research. As Celeste, Ariel’s parent, explained, it's just new things that I get a bit – like, even on here, because your email had come through to me and I said to Ariel "We're going to use your computer with Teams. How do we do this?" So, yeah, worked it out. I just had to look up my email address, but I [initially thought] oh, my god; what am I supposed to do here? Although helpful in our own research given its focus on school-aged young people, this dynamic of parents being helped by their dependents illustrates that the adults in our sample were often unfamiliar with the digital skills required for video conferencing. Research focussing only on adults, or on households in which students have not developed these skills through extended periods of online education such as occurred during the COVID-19 lockdowns, may find participants lacking the digital skills to participate in video interviews. Participation was also impacted upon by participants' lack of more subtle digital skills around the norms and conventions of video conferencing. Several households, for example, conducted their interviews in less ideal situations, such as from both moving and parked cars. A portion of the household interview with Piper’s household was completed as they drove the 30 minutes from their home into Shepperton. Due to living out of town, this household often experienced poor reception. The interview was thus regularly disrupted as they dropped in and out of range, with the interview transcript peppered with interjections such as “we’re going through a bit of an Internet light spot ... we’re back ... sorry ...” (Karina, parent). Finally, Piper switched the device on which they were taking the interview to gain a better connection: “my iPad that we were meeting on has worse Internet than my phone Internet, so we kind of changed it around” (Karina). Choosing to participate in the research from locations other than the home provides evidence of the limited time available to these families, and the onerousness of research participation. These choices also indicate unfamiliarity with video conferencing norms. As digitally excluded households, these participants were likely not the target of popular discussions throughout the pandemic about optimising video conferences through careful consideration of lighting, background, make-up and positioning (e.g. Lasky; Niven-Phillips). This was often identified by how participants positioned themselves in front of the camera, often choosing not to sit squarely within the camera lens. Sometimes this was because several household members were participating and struggled to all sit within view of the single device, but awkward camera positioning also occurred with only one or two people present. A number of interviews were initially conducted with shoulders, or foreheads, or ceilings rather than “whole” participants until we asked them to reposition the device so that the camera was pointing towards their faces. In noting this unfamiliarity we do not seek to criticise or apportion responsibility for accruing such skills to participating households, but rather to highlight the impact this had on the type of conversation between researcher and participant. Such practices offer valuable insight into how digital exclusion impacts on individual’s everyday lives as well as on their research participation. Conclusion Throughout the pandemic, digital methods such as video conferencing have been invaluable for researchers. However, while these methods have enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID-19 disruptions, the shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In this article, we have drawn on our research with low-income households to demonstrate the barriers that such cohorts experience when participating in online research. Without the technology kits provided as part of our research design, these households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate data and devices. Further, even with the kits provided, households faced additional barriers due to a lack of digital literacy. These experiences raise a number of questions that we encourage researchers to consider when designing methods that avoid in person interactions, and when reviewing studies that use similar approaches: who doesn’t have the technological access needed to participate in digital and online research? What are the implications of this for who and what is most visible in research conducted during the pandemic? Beyond questions of access, to what extent will disadvantaged populations not volunteer to participate in online research because of discomfort or unfamiliarity with digital tools and norms? When low-income participants are included, how can researchers ensure that participation does not unduly burden them by using up precious data resources? And, how can researchers facilitate positive and meaningful participation among those who might be less comfortable interacting through mediums like video conferencing? In raising these questions we acknowledge that not all research will or should be focussed on engaging with disadvantaged cohorts. Rather, our point is that through asking questions such as this, we will be better able to reflect on how data and participant samples are being impacted upon by shifts to digital methods during COVID-19 and beyond. As researchers, we may not always be able to adapt Zoom-based methods to be fully inclusive, but we can acknowledge this as a limitation and keep it in mind when reporting our findings, and later when engaging with the research that was largely conducted online during the pandemic. Lastly, while the Connected Students project focusses on impacts of affordability on digital inclusion, digital disadvantage intersects with many other forms of disadvantage. Thus, while our study focussed specifically on financial disadvantage, our call to be aware of who is and is not able to participate in Zoom-based research applies to digital exclusion more broadly, whatever its cause. Acknowledgements The Connected Students project was funded by Telstra. This research was also supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researchers Award funding scheme (project number DE200100540). References Alam, Khorshed, and Sophia Imran. “The Digital Divide and Social Inclusion among Refugee Migrants: A Case in Regional Australia.” Information Technology & People 28.2 (2015): 344–65. Atkinson, John, Rosemary Black, and Allan Curtis. “Exploring the Digital Divide in an Australian Regional City: A Case Study of Albury”. Australian Geographer 39.4 (2008): 479–493. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Census of Population and Housing: Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), Australia, 2016.” 2016. <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2033.0.55.001~2016~Main%20Features~SOCIO-ECONOMIC%20INDEXES%20FOR%20AREAS%20(SEIFA)%202016~1>. ———. “Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD).” 2016. <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2033.0.55.001~2016~Main%20Features~IRSAD~20>. Australian Council of Social Service. “The Future of Parents Next: Submission to Senate Community Affairs Committee.” 8 Feb. 2019. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612014954/https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ACOSS-submission-into-Parents-Next_FINAL.pdf>. Beer, David. “The Social Power of Algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20.1 (2017): 1–13. Blanchard, Michelle, et al. “Rethinking the Digital Divide: Findings from a Study of Marginalised Young People’s Information Communication Technology (ICT) Use.” Youth Studies Australia 27.4 (2008): 35–42. Cater, Janet. “Skype: A Cost Effective Method for Qualitative Research.” Rehabilitation Counselors and Educators Journal 4.2 (2011): 10-17. Chen, Jesse. “Breaking Down Barriers to Digital Government: How Can We Enable Vulnerable Consumers to Have Equal Participation in Digital Government?” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2017. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612015130/https://accan.org.au/Breaking%20Down%20Barriers%20to%20Digital%20Government.pdf>. Commonwealth Ombudsman. “Centrelink’s Automated Debt Raising and Recovery System: Implementation Report, Report No. 012019.” Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2019. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612015307/https://www.ombudsman.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/98314/April-2019-Centrelinks-Automated-Debt-Raising-and-Recovery-System.pdf>. Deakin Hannah, and Kelly Wakefield. “Skype Interviewing: Reflections of Two PhD Researchers.” Qualitative Research 14.5 (2014): 603-616. Fujii, LeeAnn. Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach. Routledge, 2018. Helsper, Ellen. “Digital Inclusion: An Analysis of Social Disadvantage and the Information Society.” London: Department for Communities and Local Government, 2008. Kennedy, Jenny, and Indigo Holcombe-James. “Connected Students Milestone Report 1: Project Commencement". Melbourne: RMIT, 2021. <https://apo.org.au/node/312817>. Kennedy, Jenny, et al. “Connected Students Milestone Report 2: Findings from First Round of Interviews". Melbourne: RMIT, 2021. <https://apo.org.au/node/312818>. Kennedy, Jenny, et al. Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life. Oxford UP, 2020. Lasky, Julie. “How to Look Your Best on a Webcam.” New York Times, 25 Mar. 2020 <http://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/realestate/coronavirus-webcam-appearance.html>. Livingstone, Sonia, and Ellen Helsper. “Gradations in Digital Inclusion: Children, Young People and the Digital Divide.” New Media & Society 9.4 (2007): 671–696. Lobe, Bojana, David L. Morgan, and Kim A. Hoffman. “Qualitative Data Collection in an Era of Social Distancing.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 19 (2020): 1–8. Lupton, Deborah. “Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic (Crowd-Sourced Document).” 2020. <http://docs.google.com/document/d/1clGjGABB2h2qbduTgfqribHmog9B6P0NvMgVuiHZCl8/edit?ts=5e88ae0a#>. Murthy, Dhiraj. “Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research”. Sociology 42.2 (2008): 837–855. ———. “Emergent Digital Ethnographic Methods for Social Research.” Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research. Ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Oxford UP, 2011. 158–179. Niven-Phillips, Lisa. “‘Virtual Meetings Aren’t Going Anywhere Soon’: How to Put Your Best Zoom Face Forward.” The Guardian, 27 Mar. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2021/mar/27/virtual-meetings-arent-going-anywhere-soon-how-to-put-your-best-zoom-face-forward>. Ogle, Greg. “Telecommunications Expenditure in Australia: Fact Sheet.” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2017. <https://web.archive.org/web/20200612043803/https://accan.org.au/files/Reports/ACCAN_SACOSS%20Telecommunications%20Expenditure_web_v2.pdf>. Ogle, Greg, and Vanessa Musolino. “Connectivity Costs: Telecommunications Affordability for Low Income Australians.” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2016. <https://web.archive.org/web/20200612043944/https://accan.org.au/files/Reports/161011_Connectivity%20Costs_accessible-web.pdf>. Ragnedda, Massimo, and Maria Laura Ruiu. “Social Capital and the Three Levels of Digital Divide.” Theorizing Digital Divides. Eds. Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn Muschert. Routledge, 2017. 21–34. Rennie, Ellie, et al. “At Home on the Outstation: Barriers to Home Internet in Remote Indigenous Communities.” Telecommunications Policy 37.6 (2013): 583–93. Taylor, Linnet. “What Is Data Justice? The Case for Connecting Digital Rights and Freedoms Globally. Big Data & Society 4.2 (2017): 1–14. Thomas, Julian, et al. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2018. Melbourne: RMIT University, for Telstra, 2018. ———. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2019. Melbourne: RMIT University and Swinburne University of Technology, for Telstra, 2019. ———. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2020. Melbourne: RMIT University and Swinburne University of Technology, for Telstra, 2020. Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75–89.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction The academic area known as food studies—incorporating elements from disciplines including anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, gastronomy, and cultural studies as well as a range of multi-disciplinary approaches—asserts that cooking and eating practices are less a matter of nutrition (maintaining life by absorbing nutrients from food) and more a personal or group expression of various social and/or cultural actions, values or positions. The French philosopher, Michel de Certeau agrees, arguing, moreover, that there is an urgency to name and unpick (what he identifies as) the “minor” practices, the “multifarious and silent reserve of procedures” of everyday life. Such practices are of crucial importance to all of us, as although seemingly ordinary, and even banal, they have the ability to “organise” our lives (48). Within such a context, the following aims to consider the influence and significance of an important (although largely unstudied) professional figure in rural and regional economic life: the country food preparer variously known as the local chef or cook. Such an approach is obviously framed by the concept of “cultural economy”. This term recognises the convergence, and interdependence, of the spheres of the cultural and the economic (see Scott 335, for an influential discussion on how “the cultural geography of space and the economic geography of production are intertwined”). Utilising this concept in relation to chefs and cooks seeks to highlight how the ways these figures organise (to use de Certeau’s term) the social and cultural lives of those in their communities are embedded in economic practices and also how, in turn, their economic contributions are dependent upon social and cultural practices. This initial mapping of the influence and significance of the rural and regional chef in one rural and regional area, therefore, although necessarily different in approach and content, continues the application of such converged conceptualisations of the cultural and economic as Teema Tairu’s discussion of the social, recreational and spiritual importance of food preparation and consumption by the unemployed in Finland, Guy Redden’s exploration of how supermarket products reflect shared values, and a series of analyses of the cultural significance of individual food products, such as Richard White’s study of vegemite. While Australians, both urban and rural, currently enjoy access to an internationally renowned food culture, it is remarkable to consider that it has only been during the years following the Second World War that these sophisticated and now much emulated ways of eating and cooking have developed. It is, indeed, only during the last half century that Australian eating habits have shifted from largely Anglo-Saxon influenced foods and meals that were prepared and eaten in the home, to the consumption of a wider range of more international and sophisticated foods and meals that are, increasingly, prepared by others and eaten outside the consumer’s residence. While a range of commonly cited influences has prompted this relatively recent revolution in culinary practice—including post-war migration, increasing levels of prosperity, widespread international travel, and the forces of globalisation—some of this change owes a debt to a series of influential individual figures. These tastemakers have included food writers and celebrity chefs; with early exponents including Margaret Fulton, Graham Kerr and Charmaine Solomon (see Brien). The findings of this study suggests that many restaurant chefs, and other cooks, have similarly played, and continue to take, a key role in the lives of not only the, necessarily, limited numbers of individuals who dine in a particular eatery or the other chefs and/or cooks trained in that establishment (Ruhlman, Reach), but also the communities in which they work on a much broader scale. Considering Chefs In his groundbreaking study, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Australian food historian Michael Symons proposes that those who prepare food are worthy of serious consideration because “if ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our technologies, arts and religions” (xi). Writing that cooks “deserve to have their stories told often and well,” and that, moreover, there is a “need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light” (xi), Symons’s is a clarion call to investigate the role and influence of cooks. Charles-Allen Baker-Clark has explicitly begun to address this lacunae in his Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (2006), positing not only how these figures have shaped our relationships with food and eating, but also how these relationships impact on identities, culture and a range of social issues including those of social justice, spirituality and environmental sustainability. With the growing public interest in celebrities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while such research on chefs and/or cooks is still in its infancy, most of the existing detailed studies on individuals focus on famed international figures such as Marie-Antoine Carême (Bernier; Kelly), Escoffier (James; Rachleff; Sanger), and Alexis Soyer (Brandon; Morris; Ray). Despite an increasing number of tabloid “tell-all” surveys of contemporary celebrity chefs, which are largely based on mass media sources and which display little concern for historical or biographical accuracy (Bowyer; Hildred and Ewbank; Simpson; Smith), there have been to date only a handful of “serious” researched biographies of contemporary international chefs such as Julia Child, Alice Waters (Reardon; Riley), and Bernard Loiseux (Chelminski)—the last perhaps precipitated by an increased interest in this chef following his suicide after his restaurant lost one of its Michelin stars. Despite a handful of collective biographical studies of Australian chefs from the later-1980s on (Jenkins; O’Donnell and Knox; Brien), there are even fewer sustained biographical studies of Australian chefs or cooks (Clifford-Smith’s 2004 study of “the supermarket chef,” Bernard King, is a notable exception). Throughout such investigations, as well as in other popular food writing in magazines and cookbooks, there is some recognition that influential chefs and cooks have worked, and continue to work, outside such renowned urban culinary centres as Paris, London, New York, and Sydney. The Michelin starred restaurants of rural France, the so-called “gastropubs” of rural Britain and the advent of the “star-chef”-led country bed and breakfast establishment in Australia and New Zealand, together with the proliferation of farmer’s markets and a public desire to consume locally sourced, and ecologically sustainable, produce (Nabhan), has focused fresh attention on what could be called “the rural/regional chef”. However, despite the above, little attention has focused on the Australian non-urban chef/cook outside of the pages of a small number of key food writing magazines such as Australian Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel. Setting the Scene with an Australian Country Example: Armidale and Guyra In 2004, the Armidale-Dumaresq Council (of the New England region, New South Wales, Australia) adopted the slogan “Foodies thrive in Armidale” to market its main city for the next three years. With a population of some 20,000, Armidale’s main industry (in economic terms) is actually education and related services, but the latest Tourist Information Centre’s Dining Out in Armidale (c. 2006) brochure lists some 25 restaurants, 9 bistros and brasseries, 19 cafés and 5 fast food outlets featuring Australian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Thai, Indian and “international” cuisines. The local Yellow Pages telephone listings swell the estimation of the total number of food-providing businesses in the city to 60. Alongside the range of cuisines cited above, a large number of these eateries foreground the use of fresh, local foods with such phrases as “local and regional produce,” “fresh locally grown produce,” “the finest New England ingredients” and locally sourced “New England steaks, lamb and fresh seafood” repeatedly utilised in advertising and other promotional material. Some thirty kilometres to the north along the New England highway, the country town of Guyra, proclaimed a town in 1885, is the administrative and retail centre for a shire of some 2,200 people. Situated at 1,325 metres above sea level, the town is one of the highest in Australia with its main industries those of fine wool and lamb, beef cattle, potatoes and tomatoes. Until 1996, Guyra had been home to a large regional abattoir that employed some 400 staff at the height of its productivity, but rationalisation of the meat processing industry closed the facility, together with its associated pet food processor, causing a downturn in employment, local retail business, and real estate values. Since 2004, Guyra’s economy has, however, begun to recover after the town was identified by the Costa Group as the perfect site for glasshouse grown tomatoes. Perfect, due to its rare combination of cool summers (with an average of less than two days per year with temperatures over 30 degrees celsius), high winter light levels and proximity to transport routes. The result: 3.3 million kilograms of truss, vine harvested, hydroponic “Top of the Range” tomatoes currently produced per annum, all year round, in Guyra’s 5-hectare glasshouse: Australia’s largest, opened in December 2005. What residents (of whom I am one) call the “tomato-led recovery” has generated some 60 new local jobs directly related to the business, and significant flow on effects in terms of the demand for local services and retail business. This has led to substantial rates of renovation and building of new residential and retail properties, and a noticeably higher level of trade flowing into the town. Guyra’s main street retail sector is currently burgeoning and stories of its renewal have appeared in the national press. Unlike many similar sized inland towns, there are only a handful of empty shops (and most of these are in the process of being renovated), and new commercial premises have recently been constructed and opened for business. Although a small town, even in Australian country town terms, Guyra now has 10 restaurants, hotel bistros and cafés. A number of these feature local foods, with one pub’s bistro regularly featuring the trout that is farmed just kilometres away. Assessing the Contribution of Local Chefs and Cooks In mid-2007, a pilot survey to begin to explore the contribution of the regional chef in these two close, but quite distinct, rural and regional areas was sent to the chefs/cooks of the 70 food-serving businesses in Armidale and Guyra that I could identify. Taking into account the 6 returns that revealed a business had closed, moved or changed its name, the 42 replies received represented a response rate of 65.5per cent (or two thirds), representatively spread across the two towns. Answers indicated that the businesses comprised 18 restaurants, 13 cafés, 6 bistro/brasseries, 1 roadhouse, 1 takeaway/fast food and 3 bed and breakfast establishments. These businesses employed 394 staff, of whom 102 were chefs and/cooks, or 25.9 per cent of the total number of staff then employed by these establishments. In answer to a series of questions designed to ascertain the roles played by these chefs/cooks in their local communities, as well as more widely, I found a wide range of inputs. These chefs had, for instance, made a considerable contribution to their local economies in the area of fostering local jobs and a work culture: 40 (95 per cent) had worked with/for another local business including but not exclusively food businesses; 30 (71.4 per cent) had provided work experience opportunities for those aspiring to work in the culinary field; and 22 (more than half) had provided at least one apprenticeship position. A large number had brought outside expertise and knowledge with them to these local areas, with 29 (69 per cent) having worked in another food business outside Armidale or Guyra. In terms of community building and sustainability, 10 (or almost a quarter) had assisted or advised the local Council; 20 (or almost half) had worked with local school children in a food-related way; 28 (two thirds) had helped at least one charity or other local fundraising group. An extra 7 (bringing the cumulative total to 83.3 per cent) specifically mentioned that they had worked with/for the local gallery, museum and/or local history group. 23 (more than half) had been involved with and/or contributed to a local festival. The question of whether they had “contributed anything else important, helpful or interesting to the community” elicited the following responses: writing a food or wine column for the local paper (3 respondents), delivering TAFE teacher workshops (2 respondents), holding food demonstrations for Rotary and Lions Clubs and school fetes (5 respondents), informing the public about healthy food (3 respondents), educating the public about environmental issues (2 respondents) and working regularly with Meals on Wheels or a similar organisation (6 respondents, or 14.3 per cent). One respondent added his/her work as a volunteer driver for the local ambulance transport service, the only non-food related response to this question. Interestingly, in line with the activity of well-known celebrity chefs, in addition to the 3 chefs/cooks who had written a food or wine column for the local newspaper, 11 respondents (more than a quarter of the sample) had written or contributed to a cookbook or recipe collection. One of these chefs/cooks, moreover, reported that he/she produced a weblog that was “widely read”, and also contributed to international food-related weblogs and websites. In turn, the responses indicated that the (local) communities—including their governing bodies—also offer some support of these chefs and cooks. Many respondents reported they had been featured in, or interviewed and/or photographed for, a range of media. This media comprised the following: the local newspapers (22 respondents, 52.4 per cent), local radio stations (19 respondents, 45.2 per cent), regional television stations (11 respondents, 26.2 per cent) and local websites (8 respondents, 19 per cent). A number had also attracted other media exposure. This was in the local, regional area, especially through local Council publications (31 respondents, 75 per cent), as well as state-wide (2 respondents, 4.8 per cent) and nationally (6 respondents, 14.3 per cent). Two of these local chefs/cooks (or 4.8 per cent) had attracted international media coverage of their activities. It is clear from the above that, in the small area surveyed, rural and regional chefs/cooks make a considerable contribution to their local communities, with all the chefs/cooks who replied making some, and a number a major, contribution to those communities, well beyond the requirements of their paid positions in the field of food preparation and service. The responses tendered indicate that these chefs and cooks contributed regularly to local public events, institutions and charities (with a high rate of contribution to local festivals, school programs and local charitable activities), and were also making an input into public education programs, local cultural institutions, political and social debates of local importance, as well as the profitability of other local businesses. They were also actively supporting not only the future of the food industry as a whole, but also the viability of their local communities, by providing work experience opportunities and taking on local apprentices for training and mentorship. Much more than merely food providers, as a group, these chefs and cooks were, it appears, also operating as food historians, public intellectuals, teachers, activists and environmentalists. They were, moreover, operating as content producers for local media while, at the same time, acting as media producers and publishers. Conclusion The terms “chef” and “cook” can be diversely defined. All definitions, however, commonly involve a sense of professionalism in food preparation reflecting some specialist knowledge and skill in the culinary arts, as well as various levels of creativity, experience and responsibility. In terms of the specific duties that chefs and professional cooks undertake every day, almost all publications on the subject deal specifically with workplace related activities such as food and other supply ordering, staff management, menu planning and food preparation and serving. This is constant across culinary textbooks (see, for instance, Culinary Institute of America 2002) and more discursive narratives about the professional chef such as the bestselling autobiographical musings of Anthony Bourdain, and Michael Ruhlman’s journalistic/biographical investigations of US chefs (Soul; Reach). An alternative preliminary examination, and categorisation, of the roles these professionals play outside their kitchens reveals, however, a much wider range of community based activities and inputs than such texts suggest. It is without doubt that the chefs and cooks who responded to the survey discussed above have made, and are making, a considerable contribution to their local New England communities. It is also without doubt that these contributions are of considerable value, and valued by, those country communities. Further research will have to consider to what extent these contributions, and the significance and influence of these chefs and cooks in those communities are mirrored, or not, by other country (as well as urban) chefs and cooks, and their communities. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engaging Histories: Australian Historical Association Regional Conference, at the University of New England, September 2007. I would like to thank the session’s participants for their insightful comments on that presentation. A sincere thank you, too, to the reviewers of this article, whose suggestions assisted my thinking on this piece. Research to complete this article was carried out whilst a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. References Armidale Tourist Information Centre. Dining Out in Armidale [brochure]. Armidale: Armidale-Dumaresq Council, c. 2006. Baker-Clark, C. A. Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks have Taught us about Ourselves and our Food. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006. Bernier, G. Antoine Carême 1783-1833: La Sensualité Gourmande en Europe. Paris: Grasset, 1989. Bourdain, A. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Bowyer, A. Delia Smith: The Biography. London: André Deutsch, 1999. Brandon, R. The People’s Chef: Alexis Soyer, A Life in Seven Courses. Chichester: Wiley, 2005. Brien, D. L. “Australian Celebrity Chefs 1950-1980: A Preliminary Study.” Australian Folklore 21 (2006): 201–18. Chelminski, R. The Perfectionist: Life and Death In Haute Cuisine. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. Clifford-Smith, S. A Marvellous Party: The Life of Bernard King. Milson’s Point: Random House Australia, 2004. Culinary Institute of America. The Professional Chef. 7th ed. New York: Wiley, 2002. de Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Hildred, S., and T. Ewbank. Jamie Oliver: The Biography. London: Blake, 2001. Jenkins, S. 21 Great Chefs of Australia: The Coming of Age of Australian Cuisine. East Roseville: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Kelly, I. Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antoine Carême, The First Celebrity Chef. New York: Walker and Company, 2003. James, K. Escoffier: The King of Chefs. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002. Morris, H. Portrait of a Chef: The Life of Alexis Soyer, Sometime Chef to the Reform Club. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1938. Nabhan, G. P. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. O’Donnell, M., and T. Knox. Great Australian Chefs. Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1999. Rachleff, O. S. Escoffier: King of Chefs. New York: Broadway Play Pub., 1983. Ray, E. Alexis Soyer: Cook Extraordinary. Lewes: Southover, 1991. Reardon, J. M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table. New York: Harmony Books, 1994. Redden, G. “Packaging the Gifts of Nation.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php. Riley, N. Appetite For Life: The Biography of Julia Child. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Ruhlman, M. The Soul of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2001. Ruhlman, M. The Reach of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2006. Sanger, M. B. Escoffier: Master Chef. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976. Scott, A. J. “The Cultural Economy of Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 212 (1997) 323–39. Simpson, N. Gordon Ramsay: The Biography. London: John Blake, 2006. Smith, G. Nigella Lawson: A Biography. London: Andre Deutsch, 2005. Symons, M. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004. Tairu, T. “Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php. White, R. S. “Popular Culture as the Everyday: A Brief Cultural History of Vegemite.” Australian Popular Culture. Ed. I. Craven. Cambridge UP, 1994. 15–21.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967.Berry, Wendell. “A Secular Pilgrimage.” The Hudson Review 23.3 (1970): 401-424.Bright, Derek. “The Pilgrims’ Way Revisited: The Use of the North Downs Main Trackway and the Medway Crossings by Medieval Travelers.” Kent Archaeological Society eArticle (2010): 4-32.Craps, Stef, Rick Crownshaw, Jennifer Wenzel, Rosanne Kennedy, Claire Colebrook, and Vin Nardizzi. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 11.4 (2017) 1-18.Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.———. “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation.” Introduction to Cognitive Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 257-274.Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-65.James, Erin, and Eric Morel. “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 355-365.Marcussen, Marlene. Reading for Space: An Encounter between Narratology and New Materialism in the Works of Virgina Woolf and Georges Perec. PhD diss. University of Southern Denmark, 2016.Oppermann, Serpil. “Introducing Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World.” ISLE 24.2 (2017): 243–256.Oram, Richard. “Trackless, Impenetrable, and Underdeveloped? Roads, Colonization and Environmental Transformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Zone, c. 1100 to c. 1300.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Rodriquez, David. “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 366-382.Savory, Elaine. “Toward a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott’s Language of Plants.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 80-96.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998.Serres, Michel. Malfeasance: Appropriating through Pollution? Trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011.Walcott, Derek. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 3-16.Yates, Julian. “Sheep Tracks—A Multi-Species Impression.” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Books, 2012.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction Special occasion cookery has been a staple of the cookbook writing in the English speaking Western world for decades. This includes providing catering for personal milestones as well as religious and secular festivals. Yet, in an era when the culinary publishing sector is undergoing considerable expansion and market segmentation, narratives of foods marking of one of life’s central and inescapable rites—death—are extremely rare. This discussion investigates examples of food writing related to death and funeral rites in contemporary cookbooks. Funeral feasts held in honour of the dead date back beyond recorded history (Luby and Gruber), and religious, ceremonial and community group meals as a component of funeral rites are now ubiquitous around the world. In earlier times, the dead were believed to derive both pleasure and advantage from these offerings (LeClercq), and contemporary practice still reflects this to some extent, with foods favoured by the deceased sometimes included in such meals (see, for instance, Varidel). In the past, offering some sustenance as a component of a funeral was often necessary, as mourners might have travelled considerable distances to attend the ceremony, and eateries outside the home were not as commonplace or convenient to access as they are today. The abundance and/or lavishness of the foods provided may also have reflected the high esteem in which the dead was held, and offered as a mark of community respect (Smith and Bird). Following longstanding tradition, it is still common for Western funeral attendees to gather after the formal parts of the event—the funeral service and burial or cremation —in a more informal atmosphere to share memories of the deceased and refreshments (Simplicity Funerals 31). Thursby notes that these events, which are ostensibly about the dead, often develop into a celebration of the ties between living family members and friends, “times of reunions and renewed relationships” (94). Sharing food is central to this celebration as “foods affirm identity, strengthen kinship bonds, provide comfortable and familiar emotional support during periods of stress” (79), while familiar dishes evoke both memories and promising signals of the continued celebration of life” (94). While in the southern states and some other parts of the USA, it is customary to gather at the church premises after the funeral for a meal made up of items contributed by members of the congregation, and with leftovers sent home with the bereaved family (Siegfried), it is more common in Australasia and the UK to gather either in the home of the principal mourners, someone else’s home or a local hotel, club or restaurant (Jalland). Church halls are a less common option in Australasia, and an increasing trend is the utilisation of facilities attached to the funeral home and supplied as a component of a funeral package (Australian Heritage Funerals). The provision of this catering largely depends on the venue chosen, with the cookery either done by family and/or friends, the hotel, club, restaurant or professional catering companies, although this does not usually affect the style of the food, which in Australia and New Zealand is often based on a morning or afternoon tea style meal (Jalland). Despite widespread culinary innovation in other contexts, funeral catering bears little evidence of experimentation. Ash likens this to as being “fed by grandmothers”, and describes “scones, pastries, sandwiches, biscuits, lamingtons—food from a fifties afternoon party with the taste of Country Women’s Association about it”, noting that funerals “require humble food. A sandwich is not an affront to the dead” (online). Numerous other memoirists note this reliance on familiar foods. In “S is for Sad” in her An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949), food writer M.F.K. Fisher writes of mourners’s deep need for sustenance at this time as a “mysterious appetite that often surges in us when our hearts seem breaking and our lives too bleakly empty” (135). In line with Probyn’s argument that food foregrounds the viscerality of life (7), Fisher notes that “most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak. […] It is as if our bodies, wiser than we who wear them, call out for encouragement and strength and […] compel us […] to eat” (135, 136). Yet, while funerals are a recurring theme in food memoirs (see, for example, West, Consuming), only a small number of Western cookbooks address this form of special occasion food provision. Feast by Nigella Lawson Nigella Lawson’s Feast: Food that Celebrates Life (2004) is one of the very few popular contemporary cookbooks in English that includes an entire named section on cookery for funerals. Following twenty-one chapters that range from the expected (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and wedding) to more original (children’s and midnight) feasts, Lawson frames her discussion with an anthropological understanding of the meaning of special occasion eating. She notes that we use food “to mark occasions that are important to us in life” (vii) and how eating together “is the vital way we celebrate anything that matters […] how we mark the connections between us, how we celebrate life” (vii). Such meals embody both personal and group identities because both how and what is eaten “lies at the heart of who we are-as individuals, families, communities” (vii). This is consistent with her overall aims as a food writer—to explore foods’ meanings—as she states in the book’s introduction “the recipes matter […] but it is what the food says that really counts” (vii). She reiterates this near the end of the book, adding, almost as an afterthought, “and, of course, what it tastes like” (318). Lawson’s food writing also reveals considerable detail about herself. In common with many other celebrity chefs and food writers, Lawson continuously draws on, elaborates upon, and ultimately constructs her own life as a major theme of her works (Brien, Rutherford, and Williamson). In doing so, she, like these other chefs and food writers, draws upon revelations of her private life to lend authenticity to her cooking, to the point where her cookbooks could be described as “memoir-illustrated-with-recipes” (Brien and Williamson). The privileging of autobiographical information in Lawson’s work extends beyond the use of her own home and children in her television programs and books, to the revelation of personal details about her life, with the result that these have become well known. Her readers thus know that her mother, sister and first and much-loved husband all died of cancer in a relatively brief space of time, and how these tragedies affected her life. Her first book, How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food (1998), opened with the following dedication: “In memory of my mother, Vanessa (1936–1985) and my sister Thomasina (1961–1993)” (dedication page). Her husband, BBC broadcaster and The Times (London) journalist John Diamond, who died of throat cancer in 2001, furthered this public knowledge, writing about both his illness and at length about Lawson in his column and his book C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too (1999). In Feast, Lawson discusses her personal tragedies in the introduction of the ‘Funeral Foods’ chapter, writing about a friend's kind act of leaving bags of shopping from the supermarket for her when she was grieving (451). Her first recipe in this section, for a potato topped fish pie, is highly personalised in that it is described as “what I made on the evening following my mother’s funeral” (451). Following this, she again uses her own personal experience when she notes that “I don’t think anyone wants to cook in the immediate shock of bereavement […] but a few days on cooking can be a calming act, and since the mind knows no rest and has no focus, the body may as well be busy” (451). Similarly, her recipe for the slowly hard-boiled, dark-stained Hamine Eggs are described as “sans bouche”, which she explains means “without mouths to express sorrow and anguish.” She adds, drawing on her own memories of feelings at such times, “I find that appropriate: there is nothing to be said, or nothing that helps” (455). Despite these examples of raw emotion, Lawson’s chapter is not all about grief. She also comments on both the aesthetics of dishes suitable for such times and their meanings, as well as the assistance that can be offered to others through the preparation and sharing of food. In her recipe for a lamb tagine that includes prunes, she notes, for example, that the dried plums are “traditionally part of the funeral fare of many cultures […] since their black colour is thought to be appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion” (452). Lawson then suggests this as a suitable dish to offer to someone in mourning, someone who needs to “be taken care of by you” (452). This is followed by a lentil soup, the lentils again “because of their dark colour … considered fitting food for funerals” (453), but also practical, as the dish is “both comforting and sustaining and, importantly, easy to transport and reheat” (453). Her next recipe for a meatloaf containing a line of hard-boiled eggs continues this rhetorical framing—as it is “always comfort food […] perfect for having sliced on a plate at a funeral tea or for sending round to someone’s house” (453). She adds the observation that there is “something hopeful and cheering about the golden yolk showing through in each slice” (453), noting that the egg “is a recurring feature in funeral food, symbolising as it does, the cycle of life, the end and the beginning in one” (453). The next recipe, Heavenly Potatoes, is Lawson’s version of the dish known as Mormon or Utah Funeral potatoes (Jensen), which are so iconic in Utah that they were featured on one of the Salt Lake City Olympic Games souvenir pins (Spackman). This tray of potatoes baked in milk and sour cream and then topped with crushed cornflakes are, she notes, although they sound exotic, quite familiar, and “perfect alongside the British traditional baked ham” (454), and reference given to an earlier ham recipe. These savoury recipes are followed by those for three substantial cakes: an orange cake marbled with chocolate-coffee swirls, a fruit tea loaf, and a rosemary flavoured butter cake, each to be served sliced to mourners. She suggests making the marble cake (which Lawson advises she includes in memory of the deceased mother of one of her friends) in a ring mould, “as the circle is always significant. There is a cycle that continues but—after all, the cake is sliced and the circle broken—another that has ended” (456). Of the fruitcake, she writes “I think you need a fruit cake for a funeral: there’s something both comforting and bolstering (and traditional) about it” (457). This tripartite concern—with comfort, sustenance and tradition—is common to much writing about funeral foods. Cookbooks from the American South Despite this English example, a large proportion of cookbook writing about funeral foods is in American publications, and especially those by southern American authors, reflecting the bountiful spreads regularly offered to mourners in these states. This is chronicled in novels, short stories, folk songs and food memoirs as well as some cookery books (Purvis). West’s memoir Consuming Passions: A Food Obsessed Life (2000) has a chapter devoted to funeral food, complete with recipes (132–44). West notes that it is traditional in southern small towns to bring covered dishes of food to the bereaved, and that these foods have a powerful, and singular, expressive mode: “Sometimes we say all the wrong things, but food […] says, ‘I know you are inconsolable. I know you are fragile right now. And I am so sorry for your loss’” (139). Suggesting that these foods are “concern and sympathy in a Pyrex bowl” (139), West includes recipes for Chess pie (a lemon tart), with the information that this is known in the South as “funeral pie” (135) and a lemon-flavoured slice that, with a cup of tea, will “revive the spirit” (136). Like Lawson, West finds significance in the colours of funeral foods, continuing that the sunny lemon in this slice “reminds us that life continues, that we must sustain and nourish it” (139). Gaydon Metcalf and Charlotte Hays’s Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral (2005), is one of the few volumes available dedicated to funeral planning and also offers a significant cookery-focused section on food to offer at, and take to, funeral events. Jessica Bemis Ward’s To Die For: A Book of Funeral Food, Tips, and Tales from the Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia (2004) not only contains more than 100 recipes, but also information about funeral customs, practical advice in writing obituaries and condolence notes, and a series of very atmospheric photographs of this historic cemetery. The recipes in the book are explicitly noted to be traditional comfort foods from Central Virginia, as Ward agrees with the other writers identified that “simplicity is the by-word when talking about funeral food” (20). Unlike the other examples cited here, however, Ward also promotes purchasing commercially-prepared local specialties to supplement home-cooked items. There is certainly significantly more general recognition of the specialist nature of catering for funerals in the USA than in Australasia. American food is notable in stressing how different ethnic groups and regions have specific dishes that are associated with post-funeral meals. From this, readers learn that the Amish commonly prepare a funeral pie with raisins, and Chinese-American funerals include symbolic foods taken to the graveside as an offering—including piles of oranges for good luck and entire roast pigs. Jewish, Italian and Greek culinary customs in America also receive attention in both scholarly studies and popular American food writing (see, for example, Rogak, Purvis). This is beginning to be acknowledged in Australia with some recent investigation into the cultural importance of food in contemporary Chinese, Jewish, Greek, and Anglo-Australian funerals (Keys), but is yet to be translated into local mainstream cookery publication. Possible Publishing Futures As home funerals are a growing trend in the USA (Wilson 2009), green funerals increase in popularity in the UK (West, Natural Burial), and the multi-million dollar funeral industry is beginning to be questioned in Australia (FCDC), a more family or community-centered “response to death and after-death care” (NHFA) is beginning to re-emerge. This is a process whereby family and community members play a key role in various parts of the funeral, including in planning and carrying out after-death rituals or ceremonies, preparing the body, transporting it to the place of burial or cremation, and facilitating its final disposition in such activities as digging the grave (Gonzalez and Hereira, NHFA). Westrate, director of the documentary A Family Undertaking (2004), believes this challenges us to “re-examine our attitudes toward death […] it’s one of life’s most defining moments, yet it’s the one we typically prepare for least […] [and an indication of our] culture of denial” (PBS). With an emphasis on holding meaningful re-personalised after-disposal events as well as minimal, non-invasive and environmentally friendly treatment of the body (Harris), such developments would also seem to indicate that the catering involved in funeral occasions, and the cookbooks that focus on the provision of such food, may well become more prominent in the future. References [AHF] Australian Heritage Funerals. “After the Funeral.” Australian Heritage Funerals, 2013. 10 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.ahfunerals.com.au/services.php?arid=31›. Ash, Romy. “The Taste of Sad: Funeral Feasts, Loss and Mourning.” Voracious: Best New Australian Food Writing. Ed. Paul McNally. Richmond, Vic.: Hardie Grant, 2011. 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.romyash.com/non-fiction/the-taste-of-sad-funeral-feasts-loss-and-mourning›. Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. "Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 28 Apr. 2013 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php›. Brien, Donna Lee, and Rosemary Williamson. “‘Angels of the Home’ in Cyberspace: New Technologies and Biographies of Domestic Production”. Biography and New Technologies. Australian National University. Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, ACT. 12-14 Sep. 2006. Conference Presentation. Diamond, John. C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too… . London: Vermilion, 1998. Fisher, M.F.K. “S is for Sad.” An Alphabet for Gourmets. New York, North Point P, 1989. 1st. pub. New York, Viking: 1949. Gonzalez, Faustino, and Mildreys Hereira. “Home-Based Viewing (El Velorio) After Death: A Cost-Effective Alternative for Some Families.” American Journal of Hospice & Pallative Medicine 25.5 (2008): 419–20. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. New York: Scribner, 2007. Jalland, Patricia. Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2002. Jensen, Julie Badger. The Essential Mormon Cookbook: Green Jell-O, Funeral Potatoes, and Other Secret Combinations. Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2004. Keys, Laura. “Undertaking a Jelly Feast in Williamstown.” Hobsons Bay Leader 28 Mar. 2011. 2 Apr. 2013 ‹http://hobsons-bay-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/undertaking-a-jelly-feast-in-williamstown›. Lawson, Nigella. How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. ---. Feast: Food that Celebrates Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2004. LeClercq, H. “The Agape Feast.” The Catholic Encyclopedia I, New York: Robert Appleton, 1907. 3 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.piney.com/AgapeCE.html›. Luby, Edward M., and Mark F. Gruber. “The Dead Must Be Fed: Symbolic Meanings of the Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 9.1 (1999): 95–108. Metcalf, Gaydon, and Charlotte Hays. Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. New York: Miramax, 2005. [NHFA] National Home Funeral Alliance. “What is a Home Funeral?” National Home Funeral Alliance, 2012. 3 Apr. 2013. ‹http://homefuneralalliance.org›. PBS. “A Family Undertaking.” POV: Documentaries with a Point of View. PBS, 2004. 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.pbs.org/pov/afamilyundertaking/film_description.php#.UYHI2PFquRY›. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food/Sex/Identities. London: Routledge, 2000. Purvis, Kathleen. “Funeral Food.” The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. Ed. Andrew F. Smith. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 247–48. Rogak, Lisa. Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World. Berkeley: Ten Speed P, 2004. Siegfried, Susie. Church Potluck Carry-Ins and Casseroles: Homestyle Recipes for Church Suppers, Gatherings, and Community Celebrations. Avon, MA.: Adams Media, 2006. Simplicity Funerals. Things You Need To Know About Funerals. Sydney: Simplicity Funerals, 1990. Smith, Eric Alden, and Rebecca L. Bliege Bird. “Turtle Hunting and Tombstone Opening: Public Generosity as Costly Signaling.” Evolution and Human Behavior 21.4 (2000): 245–61.Spackman, Christy. “Mormonism’s Jell-O Mold: Why Do We Associate the Religion With the Gelatin Dessert?” Slate Magazine 17 Aug. (2012). 3 Apr. 2013.Thursby, Jacqueline S. Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006. Varidel, Rebecca. “Bompas and Parr: Funerals and Food at Nelson Bros.” Inside Cuisine 12 Mar. (2011). 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://insidecuisine.com/2011/03/12/bompas-and-parr-funerals-and-food-at-nelson-bros›. Ward, Jessica Bemis. Food To Die for: A Book of Funeral Food, Tips, and Tales from the Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia. Lynchburg: Southern Memorial Association, 2004. West, Ken. A Guide to Natural Burial. Andover UK: Sweet & Maxwell, 2010. West, Michael Lee. Consuming Passions: A Food Obsessed Life. New York: Perennial, 2000. Wilson, M.T. “The Home Funeral as the Final Act of Caring: A Qualitative Study.” Master in Nursing thesis. Livonia, Michigan: Madonna University, 2009.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

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›.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Our thesis is that the city’s ambience is now an unstable dialectic in which we are watchers and watched, mirrored and refracted in a landscape of iPhone auteurs, eTags, CCTV and sousveillance. Embrace ambience! Invoking Benjamin’s spirit, this article does not seek to limit understanding through restriction to a particular theme or theoretical construct (Buck-Morss 253). Instead, it offers snapshots of interactions at the dawn of the postmodern city. That bricolage also engages how people appropriate, manipulate, disrupt and divert urban spaces and strategies of power in their everyday life. Ambient information can both liberate and disenfranchise the individual. This article asks whether our era’s dialectics result in a new personhood or merely restate the traditional spectacle of ‘bright lights, big city’. Does the virtualized city result in ambient anomie and satiation or in surprise, autonomy and serendipity? (Gumpert 36) Since the steam age, ambience has been characterised in terms of urban sound, particularly the alienation attributable to the individual’s experience as a passive receptor of a cacophony of sounds – now soft, now loud, random and recurrent–from the hubbub of crowds, the crash and grind of traffic, the noise of industrial processes and domestic activity, factory whistles, fire alarms, radio, television and gramophones (Merchant 111; Thompson 6). In the age of the internet, personal devices such as digital cameras and iPhones, and urban informatics such as CCTV networks and e-Tags, ambience is interactivity, monitoring and signalling across multiple media, rather than just sound. It is an interactivity in which watchers observe the watched observing them and the watched reshape the fabric of virtualized cities merely by traversing urban precincts (Hillier 295; De Certeau 163). It is also about pervasive although unevenly distributed monitoring of individuals, using sensors that are remote to the individual (for example cameras or tag-readers mounted above highways) or are borne by the individual (for example mobile phones or badges that systematically report the location to a parent, employer or sex offender register) (Holmes 176; Savitch 130). That monitoring reflects what Doel and Clark characterized as a pervasive sense of ambient fear in the postmodern city, albeit fear that like much contemporary anxiety is misplaced–you are more at risk from intimates than from strangers, from car accidents than terrorists or stalkers–and that is ahistorical (Doel 13; Scheingold 33). Finally, it is about cooption, with individuals signalling their identity through ambient advertising: wearing tshirts, sweatshirts, caps and other apparel that display iconic faces such as Obama and Monroe or that embody corporate imagery such as the Nike ‘Swoosh’, Coca-Cola ‘Ribbon’, Linux Penguin and Hello Kitty feline (Sayre 82; Maynard 97). In the postmodern global village much advertising is ambient, rather than merely delivered to a device or fixed on a billboard. Australian cities are now seas of information, phantasmagoric environments in which the ambient noise encountered by residents and visitors comprises corporate signage, intelligent traffic signs, displays at public transport nodes, shop-window video screens displaying us watching them, and a plethora of personal devices showing everything from the weather to snaps of people in the street or neighborhood satellite maps. They are environments through which people traverse both as persons and abstractions, virtual presences on volatile digital maps and in online social networks. Spectacle, Anomie or Personhood The spectacular city of modernity is a meme of communication, cultural and urban development theory. It is spectacular in the sense that of large, artificial, even sublime. It is also spectacular because it is built around the gaze, whether the vistas of Hausmann’s boulevards, the towers of Manhattan and Chicago, the shopfront ‘sea of light’ and advertising pillars noted by visitors to Weimar Berlin or the neon ‘neo-baroque’ of Las Vegas (Schivelbusch 114; Fritzsche 164; Ndalianis 535). In the year 2010 it aspires to 2020 vision, a panoptic and panspectric gaze on the part of governors and governed alike (Kullenberg 38). In contrast to the timelessness of Heidegger’s hut and the ‘fixity’ of rural backwaters, spectacular cities are volatile domains where all that is solid continues to melt into air with the aid of jackhammers and the latest ‘new media’ potentially result in a hypereality that make it difficult to determine what is real and what is not (Wark 22; Berman 19). The spectacular city embodies a dialectic. It is anomic because it induces an alienation in the spectator, a fatigue attributable to media satiation and to a sense of being a mere cog in a wheel, a disempowered and readily-replaceable entity that is denied personhood–recognition as an autonomous individual–through subjection to a Fordist and post-Fordist industrial discipline or the more insidious imprisonment of being ‘a housewife’, one ant in a very large ant hill (Dyer-Witheford 58). People, however, are not automatons: they experience media, modernity and urbanism in different ways. The same attributes that erode the selfhood of some people enhance the autonomy and personhood of others. The spectacular city, now a matrix of digits, information flows and opportunities, is a realm in which people can subvert expectations and find scope for self-fulfillment, whether by wearing a hoodie that defeats CCTV or by using digital technologies to find and associate with other members of stigmatized affinity groups. One person’s anomie is another’s opportunity. Ambience and Virtualisation Eighty years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis forecast a cyber-sociality, digital technologies are resulting in a ‘virtualisation’ of social interactions and cities. In post-modern cityscapes, the space of flows comprises an increasing number of electronic exchanges through physically disjointed places (Castells 2002). Virtualisation involves supplementation or replacement of face-to-face contact with hypersocial communication via new media, including SMS, email, blogging and Facebook. In 2010 your friends (or your boss or a bully) may always be just a few keystrokes away, irrespective of whether it is raining outside, there is a public transport strike or the car is in for repairs (Hassan 69; Baron 215). Virtualisation also involves an abstraction of bodies and physical movements, with the information that represents individual identities or vehicles traversing the virtual spaces comprised of CCTV networks (where viewers never encounter the person or crowd face to face), rail ticketing systems and road management systems (x e-Tag passed by this tag reader, y camera logged a specific vehicle onto a database using automated number-plate recognition software) (Wood 93; Lyon 253). Surveillant Cities Pervasive anxiety is a permanent and recurrent feature of urban experience. Often navigated by an urgency to control perceived disorder, both physically and through cultivated dominant theory (early twentieth century gendered discourses to push women back into the private sphere; ethno-racial closure and control in the Black Metropolis of 1940s Chicago), history is punctuated by attempts to dissolve public debate and infringe minority freedoms (Wilson 1991). In the Post-modern city unprecedented technological capacity generates a totalizing media vector whose plausible by-product is the perception of an ambient menace (Wark 3). Concurrent faith in technology as a cost-effective mechanism for public management (policing, traffic, planning, revenue generation) has resulted in emergence of the surveillant city. It is both a social and architectural fabric whose infrastructure is dotted with sensors and whose people assume that they will be monitored by private/public sector entities and directed by interactive traffic management systems – from electronic speed signs and congestion indicators through to rail schedule displays –leveraging data collected through those sensors. The fabric embodies tensions between governance (at its crudest, enforcement of law by police and their surrogates in private security services) and the soft cage of digital governmentality, with people being disciplined through knowledge that they are being watched and that the observation may be shared with others in an official or non-official shaming (Parenti 51; Staples 41). Encounters with a railway station CCTV might thus result in exhibition of the individual in court or on broadcast television, whether in nightly news or in a ‘reality tv’ crime expose built around ‘most wanted’ footage (Jermyn 109). Misbehaviour by a partner might merely result in scrutiny of mobile phone bills or web browser histories (which illicit content has the partner consumed, which parts of cyberspace has been visited), followed by a visit to the family court. It might instead result in digital viligilantism, with private offences being named and shamed on electronic walls across the global village, such as Facebook. iPhone Auteurism Activists have responded to pervasive surveillance by turning the cameras on ‘the watchers’ in an exercise of ‘sousveillance’ (Bennett 13; Huey 158). That mirroring might involve the meticulous documentation, often using the same geospatial tools deployed by public/private security agents, of the location of closed circuit television cameras and other surveillance devices. One outcome is the production of maps identifying who is watching and where that watching is taking place. As a corollary, people with anxieties about being surveilled, with a taste for street theatre or a receptiveness to a new form of urban adventure have used those maps to traverse cities via routes along which they cannot be identified by cameras, tags and other tools of the panoptic sort, or to simply adopt masks at particular locations. In 2020 can anyone aspire to be a protagonist in V for Vendetta? (iSee) Mirroring might take more visceral forms, with protestors for example increasingly making a practice of capturing images of police and private security services dealing with marches, riots and pickets. The advent of 3G mobile phones with a still/video image capability and ongoing ‘dematerialisation’ of traditional video cameras (ie progressively cheaper, lighter, more robust, less visible) means that those engaged in political action can document interaction with authority. So can passers-by. That ambient imaging, turning the public gaze on power and thereby potentially redefining the ‘public’ (given that in Australia the community has been embodied by the state and discourse has been mediated by state-sanctioned media), poses challenges for media scholars and exponents of an invigorated civil society in which we are looking together – and looking at each other – rather than bowling alone. One challenge for consumers in construing ambient media is trust. Can we believe what we see, particularly when few audiences have forensic skills and intermediaries such as commercial broadcasters may privilege immediacy (the ‘breaking news’ snippet from participants) over context and verification. Social critics such as Baudelaire and Benjamin exalt the flaneur, the free spirit who gazed on the street, a street that was as much a spectacle as the theatre and as vibrant as the circus. In 2010 the same technologies that empower citizen journalism and foster a succession of velvet revolutions feed flaneurs whose streetwalking doesn’t extend beyond a keyboard and a modem. The US and UK have thus seen emergence of gawker services, with new media entrepreneurs attempting to build sustainable businesses by encouraging fans to report the location of celebrities (and ideally provide images of those encounters) for the delectation of people who are web surfing or receiving a tweet (Burns 24). In the age of ambient cameras, where the media are everywhere and nowhere (and micro-stock photoservices challenge agencies such as Magnum), everyone can join the paparazzi. Anyone can deploy that ambient surveillance to become a stalker. The enthusiasm with which fans publish sightings of celebrities will presumably facilitate attacks on bodies rather than images. Information may want to be free but so, inconveniently, do iconoclasts and practitioners of participatory panopticism (Dodge 431; Dennis 348). Rhetoric about ‘citizen journalism’ has been co-opted by ‘old media’, with national broadcasters and commercial enterprises soliciting still images and video from non-professionals, whether for free or on a commercial basis. It is a world where ‘journalists’ are everywhere and where responsibility resides uncertainly at the editorial desk, able to reject or accept offerings from people with cameras but without the industrial discipline formerly exercised through professional training and adherence to formal codes of practice. It is thus unsurprising that South Australia’s Government, echoed by some peers, has mooted anti-gawker legislation aimed at would-be auteurs who impede emergency services by stopping their cars to take photos of bushfires, road accidents or other disasters. The flipside of that iPhone auteurism is anxiety about the public gaze, expressed through moral panics regarding street photography and sexting. Apart from a handful of exceptions (notably photography in the Sydney Opera House precinct, in the immediate vicinity of defence facilities and in some national parks), Australian law does not prohibit ‘street photography’ which includes photographs or videos of streetscapes or public places. Despite periodic assertions that it is a criminal offence to take photographs of people–particularly minors–without permission from an official, parent/guardian or individual there is no general restriction on ambient photography in public spaces. Moral panics about photographs of children (or adults) on beaches or in the street reflect an ambient anxiety in which danger is associated with strangers and strangers are everywhere (Marr 7; Bauman 93). That conceptualisation is one that would delight people who are wholly innocent of Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin, in which the gaze (ever pervasive, ever powerful) is tantamount to a violation. The reality is more prosaic: most child sex offences involve intimates, rather than the ‘monstrous other’ with the telephoto lens or collection of nastiness on his iPod (Cossins 435; Ingebretsen 190). Recognition of that reality is important in considering moves that would egregiously restrict legitimate photography in public spaces or happy snaps made by doting relatives. An ambient image–unposed, unpremeditated, uncoerced–of an intimate may empower both authors and subjects when little is solid and memory is fleeting. The same caution might usefully be applied in considering alarms about sexting, ie creation using mobile phones (and access by phone or computer monitor) of intimate images of teenagers by teenagers. Australian governments have moved to emulate their US peers, treating such photography as a criminal offence that can be conceptualized as child p*rnography and addressed through permanent inclusion in sex offender registers. Lifelong stigmatisation is inappropriate in dealing with naïve or brash 12 and 16 year olds who have been exchanging intimate images without an awareness of legal frameworks or an understanding of consequences (Shafron-Perez 432). Cameras may be everywhere among the e-generation but legal knowledge, like the future, is unevenly distributed. Digital Handcuffs Generations prior to 2008 lost themselves in the streets, gaining individuality or personhood by escaping the surveillance inherent in living at home, being observed by neighbours or simply surrounded by colleagues. Streets offered anonymity and autonomy (Simmel 1903), one reason why heterodox sexuality has traditionally been negotiated in parks and other beats and on kerbs where sex workers ply their trade (Dalton 375). Recent decades have seen a privatisation of those public spaces, with urban planning and digital technologies imposing a new governmentality on hitherto ambient ‘deviance’ and on voyeuristic-exhibitionist practice such as heterosexual ‘dogging’ (Bell 387). That governmentality has been enforced through mechanisms such as replacement of traditional public toilets with ‘pods’ that are conveniently maintained by global service providers such as Veolia (the unromantic but profitable rump of former media & sewers conglomerate Vivendi) and function as billboards for advertising groups such as JC Decaux. Faces encountered in the vicinity of the twenty-first century pissoir are thus likely to be those of supermodels selling yoghurt, low interest loans or sportsgear – the same faces sighted at other venues across the nation and across the globe. Visiting ‘the mens’ gives new meaning to the word ambience when you are more likely to encounter Louis Vuitton and a CCTV camera than George Michael. George’s face, or that of Madonna, Barack Obama, Kevin 07 or Homer Simpson, might instead be sighted on the tshirts or hoodies mentioned above. George’s music might also be borne on the bodies of people you see in the park, on the street, or in the bus. This is the age of ambient performance, taken out of concert halls and virtualised on iPods, Walkmen and other personal devices, music at the demand of the consumer rather than as rationed by concert managers (Bull 85). The cost of that ambience, liberation of performance from time and space constraints, may be a Weberian disenchantment (Steiner 434). Technology has also removed anonymity by offering digital handcuffs to employees, partners, friends and children. The same mobile phones used in the past to offer excuses or otherwise disguise the bearer’s movement may now be tied to an observer through location services that plot the person’s movement across Google Maps or the geospatial information of similar services. That tracking is an extension into the private realm of the identification we now take for granted when using taxis or logistics services, with corporate Australia for example investing in systems that allow accurate determination of where a shipment is located (on Sydney Harbour Bridge? the loading dock? accompanying the truck driver on unauthorized visits to the pub?) and a forecast of when it will arrive (Monmonier 76). Such technologies are being used on a smaller scale to enforce digital Fordism among the binary proletariat in corporate buildings and campuses, with ‘smart badges’ and biometric gateways logging an individual’s movement across institutional terrain (so many minutes in the conference room, so many minutes in the bathroom or lingering among the faux rainforest near the Vice Chancellery) (Bolt). Bright Lights, Blog City It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by right-thinking Foucauldians, that modernity is a matter of coercion and anomie as all that is solid melts into air. If we are living in an age of hypersocialisation and hypercapitalism – movies and friends on tap, along with the panoptic sorting by marketers and pervasive scrutiny by both the ‘information state’ and public audiences (the million people or one person reading your blog) that is an inevitable accompaniment of the digital cornucopia–we might ask whether everyone is or should be unhappy. This article began by highlighting traditional responses to the bright lights, brashness and excitement of the big city. One conclusion might be that in 2010 not much has changed. Some people experience ambient information as liberating; others as threatening, productive of physical danger or of a more insidious anomie in which personal identity is blurred by an ineluctable electro-smog. There is disagreement about the professionalism (for which read ethics and inhibitions) of ‘citizen media’ and about a culture in which, as in the 1920s, audiences believe that they ‘own the image’ embodying the celebrity or public malefactor. Digital technologies allow you to navigate through the urban maze and allow officials, marketers or the hostile to track you. Those same technologies allow you to subvert both the governmentality and governance. You are free: Be ambient! References Baron, Naomi. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press, 2000. Bell, David. “Bodies, Technologies, Spaces: On ‘Dogging’.” Sexualities 9.4 (2006): 387-408. Bennett, Colin. The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 2001. Bolt, Nate. “The Binary Proletariat.” First Monday 5.5 (2000). 25 Feb 2010 ‹http://131.193.153.231/www/issues/issue5_5/bolt/index.html›. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Bull, Michael. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and the Urban Experience. London: Routledge, 2008 Burns, Kelli. Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster Our Fascination with Popular Culture. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Castells, Manuel. “The Urban Ideology.” The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Ed. Ida Susser. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. 34-70. Cossins, Anne, Jane Goodman-Delahunty, and Kate O’Brien. “Uncertainty and Misconceptions about Child Sexual Abuse: Implications for the Criminal Justice System.” Psychiatry, Psychology and the Law 16.4 (2009): 435-452. Dalton, David. “Policing Outlawed Desire: ‘hom*ocriminality’ in Beat Spaces in Australia.” Law & Critique 18.3 (2007): 375-405. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California P, 1984. Dennis, Kingsley. “Keeping a Close Watch: The Rise of Self-Surveillance and the Threat of Digital Exposure.” The Sociological Review 56.3 (2008): 347-357. Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. “Outlines of a World Coming into Existence: Pervasive Computing and the Ethics of Forgetting.” Environment & Planning B: Planning & Design 34.3 (2007): 431-445. Doel, Marcus, and David Clarke. “Transpolitical Urbanism: Suburban Anomaly and Ambient Fear.” Space & Culture 1.2 (1998): 13-36. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1999. Fritzsche, Peter. Reading Berlin 1900. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Gumpert, Gary, and Susan Drucker. “Privacy, Predictability or Serendipity and Digital Cities.” Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches. Berlin: Springer, 2002. 26-40. Hassan, Robert. The Information Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Hillier, Bill. “Cities as Movement Economies.” Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution. Ed. Peter Drioege. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1997. 295-342. Holmes, David. “Cybercommuting on an Information Superhighway: The Case of Melbourne’s CityLink.” The Cybercities Reader. Ed. Stephen Graham. London: Routledge, 2004. 173-178. Huey, Laura, Kevin Walby, and Aaron Doyle. “Cop Watching in the Downtown Eastside: Exploring the Use of CounterSurveillance as a Tool of Resistance.” Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. Ed. Torin Monahan. London: Routledge, 2006. 149-166. Ingebretsen, Edward. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. iSee. “Now More Than Ever”. 20 Feb 2010 ‹http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee/info.html›. Jackson, Margaret, and Julian Ligertwood. "Identity Management: Is an Identity Card the Solution for Australia?” Prometheus 24.4 (2006): 379-387. Jermyn, Deborah. Crime Watching: Investigating Real Crime TV. London: IB Tauris, 2007. Kullenberg, Christopher. “The Social Impact of IT: Surveillance and Resistance in Present-Day Conflicts.” FlfF-Kommunikation 1 (2009): 37-40. Lyon, David. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. London: Routledge, 2003. Marr, David. The Henson Case. Melbourne: Text, 2008. Maynard, Margaret. Dress and Globalisation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Merchant, Carolyn. The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Monmonier, Mark. “Geolocation and Locational Privacy: The ‘Inside’ Story on Geospatial Tracking’.” Privacy and Technologies of Identity: A Cross-disciplinary Conversation. Ed. Katherine Strandburg and Daniela Raicu. Berlin: Springer, 2006. 75-92. Ndalianis, Angela. “Architecture of the Senses: Neo-Baroque Entertainment Spectacles.” Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Tradition. Ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 355-374. Parenti, Christian. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Sayre, Shay. “T-shirt Messages: Fortune or Folly for Advertisers.” Advertising and Popular Culture: Studies in Variety and Versatility. Ed. Sammy Danna. New York: Popular Press, 1992. 73-82. Savitch, Henry. Cities in a Time of Terror: Space, Territory and Local Resilience. Armonk: Sharpe, 2008. Scheingold, Stuart. The Politics of Street Crime: Criminal Process and Cultural Obsession. Philadephia: Temple UP, 1992. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1995. Shafron-Perez, Sharon. “Average Teenager or Sex Offender: Solutions to the Legal Dilemma Caused by Sexting.” John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law 26.3 (2009): 431-487. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Individuality and Social Forms. Ed. Donald Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1971. Staples, William. Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Steiner, George. George Steiner: A Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. Wark, Mackenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women. Berkeley: University of California P, 1991. Wood, David. “Towards Spatial Protocol: The Topologies of the Pervasive Surveillance Society.” Augmenting Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. Eds. Allesandro Aurigi and Fiorella de Cindio. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 93-106.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

With the emergence and expansion of post-manufacturing knowledge economies, formerly industrial inner cities in the West have become intensified staging grounds for a range of spatial claims. Among these are processes of residential gentrification, the cultural politics of heritage preservation, the struggles for community development, and the growth of creative industries, such as art, design, architecture, publishing and film, which I focus on here.1 Throughout the last two decades in the UK, inner cities and central city fringe districts have been subject to an assortment of strategies that have endeavored to revitalize them economically and socially. Prominent among these attempts has been the encouragement of new, and the incubation of existing, small-scale creative enterprises. Regeneration executives choose these enterprises for a range of reasons. Creative activities are associated with popular culture that disaffected, unemployed youth find appealing; they are able to occupy and rehabilitate underused existing building stock and to sensitively recycle historic buildings, thereby preserving urban scales; and, as a number of scholars have pointed out, they exhibit transaction-rich, network-intensive organization (Castells 1992; Lash and Urry 1994; Scott 2000). As a result, concerted efforts to design creative industry quarters have sprung up across the UK, including Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham. In London, a whole band of formerly industrial, inner-city districts from King's Cross, down through Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Shoreditch and Spitalfields, and along the wharves of the Thames's South Bank, are being or have been revitalized in part through the strategic deployment of creative industries. Certainly, how creative industries and economies develop varies. At King's Cross, nonprofit and commercial creative companies have emerged quietly in a context of protracted struggle over the future of the Railway Lands, which will be reshaped by the coming terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. At Spitalfields, high-profile conversions of Truman Brewery and the Spitalfields Market site into artisanal stalls, creative businesses, and leisure (café, restaurant, and sport) facilities are generating a new local creative economy, bringing in visitors and creating new customer bases for Spitalfields' Bangladeshi restaurant keepers and garment entrepreneurs.2 Whatever the conditions for growth, creative industries have been aided by the rhetoric of Cool Britannia and New Labour's cultural -- or more accurately --creative industrial policy. I would even put forth that, in the form of the creative quarter, the creative industries represent the urbanist logic of Cool Britannia, threatening to elaborate, following the other logics of BritArt and BritPop, a BritSpace. Now, according to some of Britain's foremost cultural critics, Cool Britannia was born sometime in 1996 in the Sunday Times, and died two years later, soon after a piece in the New Musical Express that showcased young musician discontent with New Labour creative industrial policy (Hewison 1996; McRobbie 1999, 4). Yet, before we close the casket, I want to suggest that Cool Britannia be understood as a symptom of a range of 'causes' that have been transforming the idioms of politics, governance, culture, citizenship, social organization; and, as the creative quarter evokes, the city. An itinerary of these causes would include: the expansion of a consumer-driven service/knowledge economy; the growth and globalization of communication and information technologies; the 'flexibilization' of regimes of production; the mutation of the function of the welfare state and corresponding meaning of citizenship; and, the dominance of intellectual property notions of culture. While these shifts are transforming societies around the world, in the UK, they became closely identified with New Labour and its attempts to institutionalize the rhetoric of the Third Way during the late 1990s (e.g., Blair 1998; Giddens 1998). In imagining itself as a force of change, New Labour capitalized on two events that gave birth to Cool Britannia: (1) the glamorization of British art and young British artists in the mid-1990s; and (2) the emergence of a discourse of 'rebranding' Britain, disseminating from reports from brand specialists Wolff Olins and think tank Demos (Bobby 1999).3 The first, producing the nBA (new British Art) and the yBAs (young British Artists) are media events with their own genealogies that have received copious critical attention (e.g., Ford 1996; McRobbie 1999; Roberts 1996, 1998; Stallabrass 1999; Suchin 1998). This glamorization involved the discovery of the artists by the mainstream media and a focus on artistic entrepreneurship in creating, shaping and responding to an enlarged market for cultural products. In the process, some of these artists effectively became brands, authoring, legitimating and licensing a certain kind of ironic, post-political art that was palatable to the international art market.4 The second cause stems from responses to anxiety over post-imperial Britain's future in a post-manufacturing, globalized, knowledge economy. For both the Demos thinkers and Wolff Olins consultants, these were centered on the need to re-imagine British national subjectivity as if it were a commercial brand. The discourse of branding is tangential to that of intellectual property, in which brands are value codings managed through networks of trademarks, patents, copyrights and royalties. Rosemary Coombe (1998) has written, albeit in a different political context, on the increasing dominance of notions of culture defined through intellectual property, and adjudicated by international trade experts. Indeed, New Labour creative industrial policies, as demonstrated in former Culture Secretary, Chris Smith's, essays that linked creativity, entrepreneurship and economic growth (Smith 1998) and initiatives under the Creative Industries Mapping Document (DCMS 2001) reveal how the relationship between the state and national culture is being renegotiated. Less meaningful is the state that served as sponsor or patron of cultural activities for its citizens. Rather, under New Labour, as Nikolas Rose argues (1999), and critics of New Labour cultural policy interrogate (Greenhalgh 1998; Littler 2000), the state is an enabler, partnering with entrepreneurs, small-scale firms, and multinational enterprises to promote the traffic in cultural property. How such a shift affects the production of urban space, and the future meanings attached to the British city remain to be explored. In the context of the American city, M. Christine Boyer (1995), elaborates how an iterative regime of architectural styles and planning ethics functions as a late capitalist cultural logic of urbanism that discards elements, often in decaying and abandoned sections, that cannot be easily incorporated. Borrowing on Kevin Lynch's (1960) notion of the imageable city, she writes: physically, these spaces are linked imaginatively to each other, to other cities, and to a common history of cultural interpretations (82). Within this scenario, the elements of the creative quarter copy, print, art supply and film developing stores, hip cafes and restaurants, galleries, studios, loft conversions and street furniture are gradually linked together to form a recognizable and potentially iterative matrix, overlaid on the disused former industrial district. Moreover, as a prominent, coordinated technique in the revitalization strategies of British cities, and given the aftermath of Cool Britannia, the creative quarter must be seen also as a symptom of a symptom. For, if Cool Britannia is itself produced through the application of branding discourse to the level of national subjectivity, and to the glamorization of the artist, then it is only a short step to contemplate the urbanist logic of the creative quarter as BritSpaceâ„¢. Notes 1. A creative industry is one that has its origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which [has] a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. I am following the definition of creative industries used by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It was first used in the Creative Industries Mapping Document, released in November 1998 and was maintained in the second, more extensive mapping exercise in February 2001. The list of activities designated as creative are: advertising, architecture, art and antiques, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio. 2. I discuss the emergence of creative enterprises at King's Cross and Spitalfields at length in my doctoral dissertation (Deckha 2000). 3. As Bobby (1999) reports, the Wolff Olins consultants commented that looking at business attitudes towards national identity and UK industry found that 72% of the world's leading companies believe a national image is important when making purchase decisions. In light of this, and worryingly for British business, only 36% of our respondents felt that a 'made in the UK' label would influence their decision positively. 4. Lash and Urry describe this process of branding in the creative or cultural industries: What (all) the culture industries produce becomes increasingly, not like commodities but advertisem*nts. As with advertising firms, the culture industries sell not themselves but something else and they achieve this through 'packaging'. Also like advertising firms, they sell 'brands' of something else. And they do this through the transfer of value through images (1994, 138). References Blair T. (1998) The Third Way: New Politics for a New Century. The Fabian Society, London. Bobby D. (1999) Original Britain' could succeed where 'Cool Britannia' failed Brand Strategy November 22: 6. Boyer M C. (1995) The Great Frame-Up: Fantastic appearances in contemporary spatial politics, Liggett H., Perry D. C., eds. Spatial Practices. Sage, New York. 81-109. Castells M. (1992) The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Coombe R. (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Deckha N. (2000) Repackaging the Inner City: Historic Preservation, Community Development, and the Emergent Cultural Quarter in London. Unpublished MS, Rice University. Department of Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS]. (2001) Creative industries mapping document [http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/p...] Ford S. (1996) Myth Making Art Monthly March: 194. Giddens A. (1998) The Third Way. Polity, Cambridge. Greenhalgh L. (1998) From Arts Policy to Creative Economy Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 87, May: 84-94. Hewison R. (1996) Cool Britannia Sunday Times, 19 May. Lash S. and Urry J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. Sage, London. Littler J. (2000) Creative Accounting: Consumer Culture, The 'Creative Economy' and the Cultural Policies of New Labour in Bewes T. and Gilbert J. eds. Cultural Capitalism. Lawrence & Wishart, London. 203-222. Lynch K. (1960) The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. McRobbie A. (1999) In the Culture Society. Routledge, London. Roberts J. (1996) Mad for it!: Philistinism, the everyday and new British art Third Text, 35 (Summer): 29-42. Roberts J. (1998) Pop Art, the Popular and British Art of the 1990s in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 53-78. Rose N. (1999) Inventiveness in politics: review of Anthony Giddens, The Third Way Economy and Society, 28.3: 467-493. Scott A.J. (2000) The Cultural Economy of Cities. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Smith C. (1998) Creative Britain. Faber and Faber, London. Stallabrass J. (1999) High Art Lite. Verso, London. Suchin P. (1998) After a Fashion: Regress as Progress in Contemporary British Art in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 95-110. Links http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/part1.pdf Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deckha, Nityanand. "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php>. Chicago Style Deckha, Nityanand, "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deckha, Nityanand. (2002) Britspaceâ„¢?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]).