Journal articles: 'New Jersey. State Board of Mediation' – Grafiati (2024)

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This past June, Governor Phil Murphy helped take a great stride in making sure that every day counts for the students within New Jersey’s Public Schools when he signed a new bill into law. This new policy will work to ensure that schools and districts understand the level to which chronic absenteeism occurs and guarantee that schools disproportionately afflicted have plans to help fight absenteeism. Specifically, the policy identifies schools who have a greater than 10% absentee rate and requires them to establish a plan for improving attendance. It also requires schools to report the percent of students who are absent more than ten percent of the time on their School Report Card. Attendance is one of the most important aspects in ensuring a successful education for students of all ages. The Governor and state legislature, alongside advocacy groups like Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ), have taken the first steps in fighting one of the largest issues within New Jersey schools. With that being said, it is still extremely important to consider how the state board of education, along with individual districts and schools, will interpret and comply with the law.

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<p><em>This review inaugurates a new section in New Jersey Studies: Exhibit Reviews. The intent of this section is to provide readers with timely information about new exhibits relating to New Jersey history and related fields, and to assess the scholarship behind and potential impact of those exhibits. </em></p><p><em>Raritan Landing: A Permanent Exhibit at East Jersey Old Town Village</em>, 1050 River Road, Piscataway, N.J. Open M-F 8:30 to 4; Sunday 1-4. The exhibit is provided by the Middlesex County Cultural &amp; Heritage Commission and Middlesex County Board of Chosen Freeholders, with funding from the New Jersey Historical Commission/Division of the Department of State, the New Jersey Department of Transportation, and the Federal Highway Administration. Curated by Mark Nonesteid, then Director of Exhibits and Programs with Guest Curator, Rebecca Yamin.</p>

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British, Dutch, French, and American oil companies set up a multinational consortium in 1928 with a view to dominating petroleum production in the Middle East. Development of the consortium's first oilfield in northern Iraq depended on the construction of a pipeline to the Mediterranean sea-board, but rival great-power ambitions in the region blocked selection of a suitable route. Walter Teagle, president of Standard Oil of New Jersey, devised a compromise that he successfully pressed on both the French government and the chairman of the consortium, Sir John Cadman. Using company records and state papers now available in France, this article explains how Teagle's intervention arose and why it was crucial to the resolution of the Anglo-French pipeline conflict.

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This study analyzed administrative data from the New Jersey State Parole Board to determine the extent to which victim and nonvictim input impacted parole release decisions. Positive and negative input, in both verbal and written forms, was studied for a representative sample of 820 parole-eligible adult inmates. Victim input was not found to be a significant predictor of parole release; measures of institutional behavior, crime severity, and criminal history were significant. Though insignificant, verbal input had a greater effect than written input. Results suggest that the impact of victim input is not generalizable across different types of offenders or across different paroling jurisdictions. It can no longer be assumed that victim rights laws and public participation at parole guarantee victim-desired outcomes.

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In Barbara Ferman’s collection, The Fight for America’s Schools, grassroots resistance to neoliberal education reform holds the spotlight. Her geographic lens is the Pennsylvania/New Jersey region. In this article, the geographic focus shifts to Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. Experiences in these two cities show how the neoliberal agenda is protected in the face of disappointing results. The Memphis case centers on a state takeover driven by a market ideology. Its experience underscores that reducing local representation to an inconsequential advisory role also diminishes what education policy leaders believe they need to consider. D.C. offers a more complex narrative, one haunted by the corrupted metrics of Campbell’s Law. In both cities, the neoliberal toolbox proved unable to deliver in practice what the drawing board had promised.

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 6, Number 3a Carmen Pérez-Sabater, Universitat Poltècnica de València, SpainErica D. Shifflet-Chila, Michigan State University, USAGunkut Mesci, Giresun University, TurkeyJohn Bosco Azigwe, Bolgatanga Polytechnic, GhanaLaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALisa Marie Portugal, Grand Canyon University, USAMehmet Inan, Marmara University, TurkeyNicole Celestine, The University of Western Australia, Australia Robert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 6, Number 4a Carmen Pérez-Sabater, Universitat Poltècnica de València, SpainErica D. Shifflet-Chila, Michigan State University, USAGunkut Mesci, Giresun University, TurkeyJohn Bosco Azigwe, Bolgatanga Polytechnic, GhanaJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKLaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALisa Marie Portugal, Grand Canyon University, USALorna T. Enerva, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, PhilippinesMehmet Inan, Marmara University, TurkeyNicole Celestine, The University of Western Australia, Australia Robert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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The first coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patient in the state of New Jersey (NJ) was admitted on March 2, 2020. With the number of hospitalized patients increasing exponentially in the following days and no established treatment approaches, research was to play a significant role in this fight. To facilitate review of all COVID-19 research proposals in a large health care network in NJ, we established the COVID-19 Research Review Committee (RRC) and implemented a peer-review process prior to the Institutional Review Board submission. The RRC was tasked with processing, soliciting, reviewing, and prioritizing research proposals and was comprised of a multidisciplinary group of reviewers. Within a 9-week period, three network-wide requests for proposals were released with 238 proposals submitted and 93 approved, an approval rate of 39%. The establishment of the RRC helped ensure scientific merit, better utilization of resources, collaborations across disciplines and network hospitals, and compliance with applicable regulatory and ethical standard.

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Background The COVID-19 pandemic has been declared an international public health emergency, and it may have long-lasting effects on people’s mental health. There is a need to identify effective health behaviors to mitigate the negative mental health impact of COVID-19. Objective The objectives of this study were to (1) examine the regional differences in mental health and COVID-19–related worry, attention to news, and stress, in light of the state-level prevalence of COVID-19 cases; (2) estimate the associations between mental health and COVID-19–related worry, attention to news, and stress and health behavior engagement (ie, physical activity, mindfulness meditation); and (3) explore the mediating effect of health behavior engagement on the associations between mental health and COVID-19–related worry, attention to news, and stress. Methods A cross-sectional survey was distributed to a sample of US adult paying subscribers to the Calm app (data were collected from April 22 to June 3, 2020). The survey assessed COVID-19–related worry, attention to news, and stress; health behavior engagement; and mental health (ie, perceived stress, posttraumatic stress disorder, and anxiety and depression). Statistical analyses were performed using R software. Differences in COVID-19–related worry, attention to news, and stress and mental health by location were assessed using t tests and chi-square tests. Logistic and ordinary least squares models were used to regress mental health and health behavior on COVID-19–related worry, attention to news, and stress; moreover, causal mediation analysis was used to estimate the significance of the mediation effects. Results The median age of the respondents (N=8392) was 47 years (SD 13.8). Participants in the Mid-Atlantic region (New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania) reported higher levels of stress, more severe depression symptoms, greater worry about COVID-19, paying more attention to COVID-19–related news, and more stress related to social distancing recommendations than participants living in other regions. The association between worry about COVID-19 and perceived stress was significantly mediated by changes in physical activity (P<.001), strength of meditation habit (P<.001), and stopping meditation (P=.046). The association between worry about COVID-19 and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms was significantly mediated by changes in physical activity (P<.001) and strength of meditation habit (P<.001). Conclusions Our findings describe the mental health impact of COVID-19 and outline how continued participation in health behaviors such as physical activity and mindfulness meditation reduce worsening of mental health due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These data have important implications for public health agencies and health organizations to promote the maintenance of health habits to reduce the residual mental health burden of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 8, Number 11 Alphonce John Amuli, ADEM, TanzaniaDonna Smith, The Open University, UKIntakhab Khan, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKJonathan Chitiyo, University of Pittsburgh Bradford, USAKeyla Ferrari Lopes, UNICAMP, BrazilLaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALucy Lugo Mawang, Kenyatta University, KenyaMary Sciaraffa, Eastern Kentucky University, USAMaurizio Sajeva, Pellervo Economic Research PTT, FinlandMeral Seker, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, TurkeyMinh Duc Duong, Thai Nguyen University, VietnamMustafa Çakır, Marmara University, TurkeyNiveen M. Zayed, MENA College of Management, JordanRachel Geesa, Ball State University, USARichard Penny, University of Washington Bothell, USASaadet Korucu Kis, Necmettin Erbakan University, TurkeySelloane Pitikoe, University of Eswatini, EswatiniThada Jantakoon, Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University, ThailandVjacheslav Ivanovich Babich, Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University, UkraineYuChun Chen, Louisiana Tech University, USA Robert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAE-mail 1: jets@redfame.comE-mail 2: jets@redfame.orgURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 6, Number 12Benmarrakchi Fatimaezzahra, Chouaib Doukkali University, MoroccoCagla Atmaca, Pamukkale University, TurkeyDeniz Melanlioğlu, Kırıkkale University, TurkeyEbru Uzunkol, Sakarya University, TurkeyEnisa Mede, Bahcesehir University, TurkeyFatih Kaya, Erzincan University, TurkeyFroilan D. Mobo, Philippine Merchant Marine Academy, PhilippineGözde Ersöz, Namık Kemal University, TurkeyHakan Acar, Zonguldak Bulent Ecevit University, TurkeyHalil Tanir, Adnan Menderes University, TurkeyHayriye Gül Kuruyer, Ordu Universty, TurkeyHsiu-Fen Lin, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Taiwanİbrahim Erdemir, Balikesir University, TurkeyIntakhab Khan, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKLawrence R. Burns, Grand Valley State University, USALinda J. Rappel, Yorkville University/University of Calgary, CanadaLorna T. Enerva, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, PhilippinesMahmoud Radwan, Tanta University, EgyptMaria Pavlis Korres, Hellenic Open University, GreeceMary Sciaraffa, Eastern Kentucky University, USAMassimiliano Barattucci, Ecampus University, ItalyMehmet Fatih Karahüseyinoğlu, Firat University, TurkeyMehmet Inan, Marmara University, TurkeyMeral Seker, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, TurkeyMichael Baron, University of Melbourne, AustraliaNiveen M. Zayed, MENA College of Management, JordanSamad Mirza Suzani, Islamic Azad University, IranSelloane Pitikoe, University of Kwazulu-Natal, South AfricaShu-wen Lin, Sojo University, JapanStamatis Papadakis, University of Crete, GreeceVeronica Rosa, University Rome, ItalyRobert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 6, Number 3 Arlene Kent-Wilkinson, University of Saskatchewan, CanadaCarole Fern Todhunter, The University of Nottingham, UKChosang Tendhar, Long Island University (LIU), USAEnisa Mede, Bahcesehir University, TurkeyJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKJon S. Turner, Missouri State University, USAKun-Hsi Liao, Taiwan Shoufu University, TaiwanLaima Kyburiene, Kaunas University of Applied Sciences, LithuaniaLaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALorna T. Enerva, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, PhilippinesMan-fung Lo, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong KongMaria Pavlis Korres, Hellenic Open University, GreeceMassimiliano Barattucci, Ecampus University, ItalyMatthews Tiwaone Mkandawire, Central China Normal University, MalawiMeral Seker, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, TurkeyRichard H. Martin, Mercer University, USASelloane Pitikoe, University of Kwazulu-Natal, South AfricaSenem Seda Şahenk Erkan, Marmara University, TurkeySimona Savelli, Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi, ItalyStamatis Papadakis, University of Crete, GreeceYalçın Dilekli, Aksaray University, TurkeyYavuz Değirmenci, Bayburt University, Turkey Robert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 6, Number 8Alkan Uğurlu, TurkeyAngel H. Y. Lai, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong KongBegüm Yalçınkaya, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, TurkeyCagla Atmaca, Pamukkale University, TurkeyCarmen Pérez-Sabater, Universitat Poltècnica de València, SpainCynthia M. Compton, Wingate University, USADamodar Khanal, The University of Manchester, UKEnisa Mede, Bahcesehir University, TurkeyErica D. Shifflet-Chila, Michigan State University, USAGüner Çiçek, University Of Hitit, TurkeyGunkut Mesci, Giresun University, TurkeyHasan Şahan, TurkeyHülya Uğur Tanriöver, Giresun University, Turkeyİbrahim Yaşar Kazu, Firat University, TurkeyIntakhab Khan, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaIoannis Syrmpas, University of Thessaly, GreeceJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKJon S. Turner, Missouri State University, USALaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALeila Youssef, Arab Open University, LebanonLorna T. Enerva, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, PhilippinesMahmut Gulle, Sirnak University, TurkeyMarcie Zaharee, The MITRE Corporation, USAMaurizio Sajeva, Pellervo Economic Research PTT, FinlandMehmet Inan, Marmara University, TurkeyMeral Seker, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, TurkeyMichail Kalogiannakis, University of Crete, GreeceMustafa Çakır, Marmara Üniversity, TurkeyMustafa Güçlü, Erciyes University, TurkeyNurullah Şahin, Sinop University, TurkeyOktay Çoban, TurkeyOzgur Demirtas, Inonu University, TurkeyOzkan Guler, TurkeyPirkko Siklander, University of Lapland, FinlandSadia Batool, Preston University Islamabad, PakistanSandro Sehic, Oneida BOCES, USASayim Aktay, Mugla Sitki Kocman University, TurkeySelloane Pitikoe, University of Kwazulu-Natal, South AfricaStamatis Papadakis, University of Crete, GreeceYalçın Dilekli, Aksaray University, TurkeyZait Burak Aktuğ, Turkey Robert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 5, Number 4Anne M. Hornak, Central Michigan University, USACarmen Pérez-Sabater, Universitat Poltècnica de València, SpainChosang Tendhar, Baylor College of Medicine, USACynthia M. Compton, Wingate University, USADamodar Khanal, The University of Manchester, UKErica D. Shifflet-Chila, Michigan State University, USAErkal Arslanoğlu, Sinop University, TurkeyFethi Arslan, Mersin University, TurkeyGobinder Gill, Birmingham Metropolitan College, UKHalis Sakiz, Mardin Artuklu University, TurkeyHyesoo Yoo, Virginia Tech., USAIbrahim Can, Gumushane University, TurkeyIntakhab Khan, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaJosé D Badia, University of Valencia, SpainLeila Youssef, Arab Open University, LebanonLisa Marie Portugal, Grand Canyon University, USALorna T. Enerva, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, PhilippinesMahmoud Radwan, Tanta University, EgyptMarcie Zaharee, The MITRE Corporation, USAMarieke van der Schaaf, Utrecht University, The NetherlandsMehmet Inan, Marmara University, TurkeyMin Gui, Wuhan University, ChinaMukadder Baran, Hakkari University, TurkeyMürşet Çakmak, Mardin Artuklu University, TurkeyMustafa Çakır, Marmara Üniversity, TurkeyNele Kampa, Leibniz-Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN), GermanyNiveen M. Zayed, MENA College of Management, JordanOnder Daglioglu, Gaziantep University, TurkeyÖzgür Bostanci, Ondokuz Mayis University, TurkeyRecep Aslaner, Inonu University, TurkeyRichard Penny, University of Washington Bothell, USASandra Kaplan, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USAŞenay Koparan, Uludağ University, TurkeyShengnan Liu, Ocean University of China, ChinaSimona Savelli, Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi, ItalyThomas K. F. Chiu, The University of Hong Kong, Hong KongTurhan Toros, Mersin Üniversitesi, TurkeyYalçın Dilekli, Aksaray University, TurkeyYerlan Seisenbekov, Kazakh National Pedagogical University, KazakhstanZachary Wahl-Alexander, Northern Illinois University, USAZeki Coşkuner, Fırat University, Turkey Robert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 7, Number 4Angela Lee, UNC Pembroke, USACagla Atmaca, Pamukkale University, TurkeyCarmen Pérez-Sabater, Universitat Poltècnica de València, SpainFatma Ozudogru, Usak University, TurkeyFroilan D. Mobo, Philippine Merchant Marine Academy, PhilippineGianpiero Greco, University of Study of Bari, ItalyGuilherme Tucher, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazilİbrahim Yaşar Kazu, Firat University, TurkeyIntakhab Khan, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaIoannis Syrmpas, University of Thessaly, GreeceJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKJon S. Turner, Missouri State University, USAKun-Hsi Liao, Taiwan Shoufu University, TaiwanLaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALorna T. Enerva, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, PhilippinesMatt Varacallo, University of Kentucky, USAMehmet Inan, Marmara University, TurkeyMeral Seker, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, TurkeyMichael Wall, Independent Researcher in Music and Music Education, USANiveen M. Zayed, MENA College of Management, JordanRichard Penny, University of Washington Bothell, USASadia Batool, Preston University Islamabad, PakistanSandro Sehic, Oneida BOCES, USASayim Aktay, Mugla Sitki Kocman University, TurkeySemiyu Adejare Aderibigbe, American University in the Emirates, United Arab Emirates (UAE)Senem Seda Şahenk Erkan, Marmara University, TurkeyShu-wen Lin, Sojo University, JapanVjacheslav Ivanovich Babich, Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University, UkraineRobert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 7, Number 5Angela Lee, UNC Pembroke, USACagla Atmaca, Pamukkale University, TurkeyCarmen Pérez-Sabater, Universitat Poltècnica de València, SpainFatma Ozudogru, Usak University, TurkeyFroilan D. Mobo, Philippine Merchant Marine Academy, PhilippineGianpiero Greco, University of Study of Bari, ItalyGuilherme Tucher, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazilİbrahim Yaşar Kazu, Firat University, TurkeyIntakhab Khan, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaIoannis Syrmpas, University of Thessaly, GreeceJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKJon S. Turner, Missouri State University, USAKun-Hsi Liao, Taiwan Shoufu University, TaiwanLaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALorna T. Enerva, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, PhilippinesMatt Varacallo, University of Kentucky, USAMehmet Inan, Marmara University, TurkeyMeral Seker, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, TurkeyMichael Wall, Independent Researcher in Music and Music Education, USANiveen M. Zayed, MENA College of Management, JordanRichard Penny, University of Washington Bothell, USASadia Batool, Preston University Islamabad, PakistanSandro Sehic, Oneida BOCES, USASayim Aktay, Mugla Sitki Kocman University, TurkeySemiyu Adejare Aderibigbe, American University in the Emirates, United Arab Emirates (UAE)Senem Seda Şahenk Erkan, Marmara University, TurkeyShu-wen Lin, Sojo University, JapanVjacheslav Ivanovich Babich, Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University, UkraineRobert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 8, Number 1Achara Jivacate, RATCH Group Public Company Limited, ThailandDaniel Shorkend, University of the People Wizo School of Design, IsraelFathia Lahwal, Elmergib University, LibyaFatma Ozudogru, Usak University, TurkeyFroilan D. Mobo, Philippine Merchant Marine Academy, PhilippineGianpiero Greco, University of Study of Bari, ItalyGuilherme Tucher, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), BrazilIntakhab Khan, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaJane Liang, California Department of Education, USAJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKJon S. Turner, Missouri State University, USAJonathan Chitiyo, University of Pittsburgh Bradford, USALaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALucy Lugo Mawang, Kenyatta University, KenyaMarlécio Maknamara, Federal University of Alagoas, BrazilMaurizio Sajeva, Pellervo Economic Research PTT, FinlandMehmet Galip Zorba, Akdeniz University, TurkeyMelike Özüdoğru, Manisa Celal Bayar University, TurkeyMu-hsuan Chou, Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, TaiwanNiveen M. Zayed, MENA College of Management, JordanRichard H. Martin, Mercer University, USARichard Penny, University of Washington Bothell, USASamah El-Sakka, Suez University, EgyptSandro Sehic, Oneida BOCES, USASelloane Pitikoe, University of Eswatini, EswatiniSenem Seda Şahenk Erkan, Marmara University, TurkeyShu-wen Lin, Sojo University, JapanStamatis Papadakis, University of Crete, GreeceThada Jantakoon, Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University, ThailandVeronica Rosa, University Rome, ItalyVjacheslav Ivanovich Babich, Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University, UkraineYong Ki Yi, International Civil Aviation Organization, KoreaRobert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue. Reviewers for Volume 6, Number 10Ahmet Hakan Hancer, TurkeyAhmet Turan Orhan, TurkeyAngelina Sánchez, Martí, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, SpainBerfin Serdil Örs, Adnan Menderes University, TurkeyBurcu GÜVENDİ, TurkeyCagla Atmaca, Pamukkale University, TurkeyCarmen Pérez-Sabater, Universitat Poltècnica de València, SpainEbru Çetin,Gazi University, TurkeyEbru Kilic Cakmak, TurkeyEnisa Mede, Bahcesehir University, TurkeyFroilan D. Mobo, Philippine Merchant Marine Academy, PhilippineHanifi Üzüm, Abant İzzet Baysal Universty, TurkeyHulya Yumru, Istanbul Aydın University, Turkeyİbrahim Yaşar Kazu, Firat University, Turkeyİlknur Özal Göncü, Gazi University, TurkeyIntakhab Khan, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaJohn Bosco Azigwe, Bolgatanga Polytechnic, GhanaJohn Cowan, Edinburgh Napier University, UKJohn Jongho Park, University of Michigan, USAJon S. Turner, Missouri State University, USAJulide Inozu, Adana Cukurova University, TurkeyKadir Yıldız, Manisa Celal Bayar Universty, TurkeyKadir Yıldız, TurkeyKatya De Giovanni, University of Malta, MaltaLaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALinda J. Rappel, Yorkville University/University of Calgary, CanadaMarcie Zaharee, The MITRE Corporation, USAMehmet Inan, Marmara University, TurkeyMeral Seker, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, TurkeyMert Aydoğmuş, Karabuk University, TurkeyMutar Taş, TurkeyNevzat Demirci, Mersin University, TurkeyÖzkan Işık, Sakarya University, TurkeyPhil Sirinides, University of Pennsylvania, USASandro Sehic, Oneida BOCES, USAŞengül Atasoy, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Universty, TurkeySimona Savelli, Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi, ItalySüleyman Gönülateş, Pamukkale University, TurkeyVeronica Rosa, University Rome, ItalyYalçın Dilekli, Aksaray University, Turkey Robert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Education and Training Studies (JETS) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether JETS publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.Reviewers for Volume 6, Number 5Ali Kızılet, Marmara University, TurkeyAntónio Calha, Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, PortugalCagla Atmaca, Pamukkale University, TurkeyCarmen Pérez-Sabater, Universitat Poltècnica de València, SpainElena Jerves, University of Cuenca, EcuadorErcan Polat, TurkeyErickzon Astorga, The Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences, ChileFatih Karahüseyinoğlu, Fırat University, TurkeyFatih Yazici, Gaziosmanpaşa University, Turkeyİbrahim Yaşar Kazu, Firat University, TurkeyJon S. Turner, Missouri State University, USAKatya De Giovanni, University of Malta, MaltaLaima Kyburiene, Kaunas University of Applied Sciences, LithuaniaLaura Bruno, The College of New Jersey, USALinda J. Rappel, Yorkville University/University of Calgary, CanadaLisa Marie Portugal, Grand Canyon University, USALorna T. Enerva, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, PhilippinesMassimiliano Barattucci, Ecampus University, ItalyMeral Seker, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, TurkeyMin Gui, Wuhan University, ChinaMurat Kul, TurkeyMustafa Çakır, Marmara Üniversity, TurkeyNicole Celestine, The University of Western Australia, AustraliaOzgur Demirtas, Inonu University, TurkeyPuneet S. Gill, Texas A&M International University, USARichard H. Martin, Mercer University, USASadia Batool, Preston University Islamabad, PakistanSamad Mirza Suzani, Islamic Azad University, IranSandro Sehic, Oneida BOCES, USASelloane Pitikoe, University of Kwazulu-Natal, South AfricaSenem Seda Şahenk Erkan, Marmara University, TurkeySisi Chen, American University of Health Sciences, USAStamatis Papadakis, University of Crete, GreeceTercan Yildirim, Ahi Evran University, TurkeyYalçın Dilekli, Aksaray University, Turkey Robert SmithEditorial AssistantOn behalf of,The Editorial Board of Journal of Education and Training StudiesRedfame Publishing9450 SW Gemini Dr. #99416Beaverton, OR 97008, USAURL: http://jets.redfame.com

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Journal of Mathematics Research wishes to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Their help and contributions in maintaining the quality of the journal is greatly appreciated. Many authors, regardless of whether Journal of Mathematics Research publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Reviewers for Volume 11, Number 1 &nbsp; Chung-Chuan Chen, National Taichung University of Education, Taiwan Cibele Cristina Trinca Watanabe, Federal University of Tocantins (UFT), Brazil Cinzia Bisi, Ferrara University, Italy Enrico Jabara, Universita di Ca Foscari, Italy Gener Santiago Subia, NUeva Ecija University of Science and Technology, Philippines Guy Biyogmam, Georgia College &amp; State University, USA Hayat REZGUI, Ecole normale Sup&eacute;rieure de Kouba, Algeria Kuldeep Narain Mathur, University Utara Malaysia, Malaysia Liwei Shi, China University of Political Science and Law, China Luca Di Persio, University of Verona, Italy Mohammad A. AlQudah, German Jordanian University, Jordan N. V. Ramana Murty, Andhra Loyola College, India Neha Hooda, New Jersey City University, United States Omur Deveci, Kafkas University, Turkey Rami Ahmad El-Nabulsi, Athens Institute for Education and Research, Greece Rosalio G. Artes, Jr., Mindanao State University, Philippines Rovshan Bandaliyev, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Sanjib Kumar Datta, University of Kalyani, India Sergiy Koshkin, University of Houston Downtown, USA Sreedhara Rao Gunakala, The University of The West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago Xiaofei Zhao, Texas A&amp;M University, United States Xingbo WANG, Foshan University, China Yaqin Feng, Ohio University, USA Youssef El-Khatib, United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates &nbsp; Sophia Wang On behalf of, The Editorial Board of Journal of Mathematics Research Canadian Center of Science and Education

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Journal of Mathematics Research wishes to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Their help and contributions in maintaining the quality of the journal is greatly appreciated. Many authors, regardless of whether Journal of Mathematics Research publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Reviewers for Volume 11, Number 1 &nbsp; Chung-Chuan Chen, National Taichung University of Education, Taiwan Cibele Cristina Trinca Watanabe, Federal University of Tocantins (UFT), Brazil Cinzia Bisi, Ferrara University, Italy Enrico Jabara, Universita di Ca Foscari, Italy Gener Santiago Subia, NUeva Ecija University of Science and Technology, Philippines Guy Biyogmam, Georgia College &amp; State University, USA Hayat REZGUI, Ecole normale Sup&eacute;rieure de Kouba, Algeria Kuldeep Narain Mathur, University Utara Malaysia, Malaysia Liwei Shi, China University of Political Science and Law, China Luca Di Persio, University of Verona, Italy Mohammad A. AlQudah, German Jordanian University, Jordan N. V. Ramana Murty, Andhra Loyola College, India Neha Hooda, New Jersey City University, United States Omur Deveci, Kafkas University, Turkey Rami Ahmad El-Nabulsi, Athens Institute for Education and Research, Greece Rosalio G. Artes, Jr., Mindanao State University, Philippines Rovshan Bandaliyev, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Sanjib Kumar Datta, University of Kalyani, India Sergiy Koshkin, University of Houston Downtown, USA Sreedhara Rao Gunakala, The University of The West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago Xiaofei Zhao, Texas A&amp;M University, United States Xingbo WANG, Foshan University, China Yaqin Feng, Ohio University, USA Youssef El-Khatib, United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates &nbsp; Sophia Wang On behalf of, The Editorial Board of Journal of Mathematics Research Canadian Center of Science and Education

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OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Examining the impact of the Building Capacity for Research and Action (BCRA) Award created by the Community Engagement (CE) Program at the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR)--a Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) site at the University of Michigan--in partnership with Community Based Organization Partners (CBOP). METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The BCRA is a funding mechanism that supports new community-engaged research (CEnR) partnerships and projects that address community-identified health needs in Flint, Michigan. BCRA projects are required to be Flint-based and inclusive of both community and academic partners. A study section consisting of 10 MICHR-affiliated faculty and community partners reviewed proposals and made funding decisions. Funded teams were trained on Institutional Review Board (IRB) and reporting requirements by CE staff. MICHR provides support to BCRA-funded teams through monthly email correspondence with the CE Flint connector, budget review, mediation, regulatory assurance of IRB and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) requirements, coordinating six-month and final reporting, and hosting an annual stakeholder meet and greet. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: In 2017, the BCRA Award submitted its first request for proposals. It received 20 applications in 2018, and selected eight awardees, providing them with a total of $60,000 in funding. Four received $5,000 for partnership development and another four received $10,000 for their research projects. The BCRA Award received 16 applications in 2019, expanding its academic pool to include the University of Chicago, U-M Flint, Michigan State University, and Michigan State University-Flint in addition to the University of Michigan. Five recipients were selected and received a total of $45,000 in funding. One was awarded $5,000 for partnership development and another four were awarded $10,000 for their research projects. MICHR has invested over $100,000 in Flint through this mechanism, which was renewed in 2019. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Each awardee presented at the annual stakeholder meet and greet. They showcased their projects with a brief overview and spoke about their expectations, lessons learned, partnership strengths and challenges, translational issues, and proposed next steps for subsequent grants, publications.

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AbstractThe Enron scandal, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the 2008 financial crisis have resulted in new laws and regulations regarding auditor liability and an evolution of some of the old ones. One of the older laws is the in pari delicto defense: in a lawsuit brought by a corporation alleging that its auditor was negligent in failing to detect a manager’s fraud, the auditor may be able to use that defense if the manager’s fraud is imputable to the company. Since a bankruptcy trustee or a receiver steps into the shoes of the bankrupt company it represents, a similar defense (the Wagoner Rule) may also be applicable if a trustee or a receiver files a negligence lawsuit against the company’s auditor. However, in pari delicto is inapplicable when: (1) the wrongful acts of the manager are so adverse to the corporate client that the manager is deemed to have totally abandoned the corporation for its, or a third party’s, sole benefit (unless the manager is also the sole shareholder, or the company has incurred a short-term benefit because of the fraud); (2) the corporate client had at least one innocent manager or shareholder who could have prevented or stopped the fraud if he had known about it; (3) the auditor does not deal with the corporate client in good faith and engages in unlawful conduct; or (4) the plaintiffs are totally innocent shareholders (but in this case, the in pari delicto defense is still applicable with respect to culpable shareholders). The State of New York has been on the cutting edge in the evolution of the in pari delicto defense, and this defense is strongest there. Other states recognizing the defense include New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and (in dicta) Delaware (only if the company has engaged in actual wrongdoing). Finally, these are examples of recent evolution of in pari delicto: (a) the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s prohibition of management from interfering with or deceiving the auditor; such statutory violations of management could be used by the auditor at trial in proving the applicability of the in pari delicto defense and (b) the new constraints on off-balance sheet leases, expected to be released shortly by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, may decrease management’s ability to deceive the auditor in the first place.

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Background: In the modern digital age, patients are increasingly consulting online physician reviews prior to making healthcare decisions. Physician review websites are being used in many medical fields including orthopaedic surgery. The purpose of this study is to investigate trends in online physician reviews and determine which factors are most strongly correlated with the likelihood that an orthopaedic surgeon is to be recommended by patients. Methods: Healthgrades.com, the most comprehensive physician rating and comparison database, was queried for “orthopaedic surgery” in the state of New Jersey. Demographic information, fellowship training status, years of experience, malpractice/disciplinary actions, physician ratings and the likelihood to recommend score (LTRS) was collected for all physicians. Quantitative analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics, student t-test, and one-way ANOVA. Qualitative analysis of randomly selected positive comments and all negative comments was conducted. Common themes were identified using frequency-based word cloud generator. Results: 834 board certified orthopaedic surgeons (800 Males, 34 Females), with a mean age of 55.7±12.5 years and an average LTRS of 4.1±0.84 were included for analysis. Compared with non-fellowship trained orthopaedic surgeons, fellowship trained surgeons were more likely to be recommend by patients [3.8 vs. 4.3; P< 0.0001]. Physicians with waiting time <10min were more likely to be recommended compared with their counterparts with waiting time >10min (P< 0.0001). No differences were observed in LTRS between male and female orthopaedic surgeons (P= 0.79) or based on malpractice status (P= 0.61). Qualitative analysis of a randomly selected sample of 4,151 out of a total of 12,168 positive comments and 1,113 total negative comments revealed that positive comments centered on surgeon competence and professionalism, while negative comments centered on surgeon personality and waiting time. Conclusion: Orthopaedic surgeons have generally favorable ratings and mostly positive comments. Fellowship status and waiting time are important factors that impact LTRS. Patients were more likely to write positive comments about surgeon competence and professionalism, and negative comments pertaining to surgeon personality and waiting time. Knowledge of surgeon specific attributes that are important to patients may help educate orthopaedic surgeons to improve patient care, patient satisfaction and online ratings. Tables and Figures [Table: see text][Table: see text][Figure: see text]

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Background: Blasts and leukemic stem cells of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) as well as several other hematologic malignancies express CD123, potentially providing a target for novel therapies. Vibecotamab (XmAb14045, SQZ622) is a potent bispecific antibody targeting both CD123 and CD3 that stimulates targeted T cell-mediated killing of CD123-expressing cells, regardless of T cell antigen specificity. It is a full-length immunoglobulin molecule designed to be dosed intermittently. Methods: Patients with relapsed or refractory AML, B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), blast phase chronic myelogenous leukemia, or blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm were eligible to enroll on this first-in-human, multicenter, open-label phase 1 dose-escalation study (XmAb14045-01) with standard 3+3 design. The primary objective was to estimate the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) or recommended dose and schedule of vibecotamab. Secondary objectives included safety, preliminary antileukemic activity, and pharmaco*kinetics/pharmacodynamics of vibecotamab. Treatment was administered weekly in 28-day cycles, using a weight-based dose with 3 escalating doses in the first week followed by escalating weekly doses. Therapy was continued for as long as tolerated and there was continuing evidence of therapeutic benefit in the opinion of the investigator. Treatment response was assessed by the 2017 European LeukemiaNet (ELN) criteria after Cycle 1 and after each odd-numbered cycle. CRS was graded using the CRS revised grading system (Lee et al., Blood, 2014). Results: At data cut-off, 104 patients with AML, 1 with B-cell ALL, and 1 with CML as their primary diagnosis have been treated at dosages from 0.003 to 12.0 µg/kg vibecotamab. Patients had a median age of 63 years and were heavily pretreated (median of 3 prior therapies [range 1-8], including 32 (30%) who had undergone prior allogeneic stem cell transplantation). The recommended initial priming dose is 0.75 µg/kg; no MTD has been identified. CRS or its component symptoms was the most common treatment-emergent adverse event (TEAE). CRS occurred in 62 of 106 patients (85% grade 1-2, 15% grade ≥3), the majority on the first dose. Additional events consistent with CRS or infusion related reaction were seen in 24% of subjects (chills, fever, tachycardia, hypotension, etc.), and they were mostly mild or moderate severity. No myelosuppression requiring dose modification or evidence of tumor lysis syndrome was seen. Response of CR (2), CRi (3) or MLFS (2) was observed in 7/51 patients (ORR=14%) treated at higher dose levels (0.75 µg/kg). Stable Disease was observed in an additional 36 patients (71%). No CR, CRi, or morphologic leukemia-free state (MLFS) responses were observed at lower doses. Antileukemic activity occurred quickly; 6 out of 7 responders achieved at least a MLFS response after first cycle. A characterization of responders versus non-responders revealed responding patients harbor a lower burden of disease and specific T-cell subtypes. No association was found between response status and CD123 target expression on AML blasts. Conclusions: Vibecotamab demonstrated evidence of antileukemic activity in heavily pretreated patients with relapsed/refractory AML treated at the ≥0.75 µg/kg doses cohorts, with a 14% response rate. CRS was the most common toxicity but was generally manageable with premedications. The study is ongoing with further optimization of dose and schedule. Biomarker data suggest a population of AML patients that are more likely to respond. Additional information will be provided at the time of the meeting. Disclosures Ravandi: Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Orsenix: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Abbvie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Astellas: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Xencor: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Consultancy, Honoraria; Macrogenics: Research Funding. Stock:Adaptive Biotechnologies: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Research to Practice: Honoraria; American Society of Hematology: Honoraria; Leukemia and Lymphoma Society: Research Funding; Novartis: Research Funding; Abbvie: Honoraria, Research Funding; Agios: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Morphosys: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Kite: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Amgen: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Servier: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; UpToDate: Honoraria. Foran:Xencor: Research Funding; H3Biosciences: Research Funding; Agios: Honoraria, Research Funding; Trillium: Research Funding; Takeda: Research Funding; Kura Oncology: Research Funding; Aptose: Research Funding; Aprea: Research Funding; Actinium: Research Funding; Boehringer Ingelheim: Research Funding; Abbvie: Research Funding; BMS: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Pfizer: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Servier: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Revolution Medicine: Consultancy. Mawad:Adaptive Biotechnologies: Speakers Bureau; Abbvie: Speakers Bureau. Blum:Celyad: Research Funding; Amerisource Bergen: Honoraria; Syndax: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Leukemia and Lymphoma Society: Research Funding; Xencor: Research Funding. Yang:Xencor: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Ended employment in the past 24 months. Pastore:Novartis NIBR East Hanover New Jersey: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: Ended employment in the past 24 months. Johnson:Xencor: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Zheng:Xencor: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; Tocagen: Ended employment in the past 24 months. Yilmaz:Pint Pharma: Honoraria; Pfizer: Research Funding; Daicho Sankyo: Research Funding. Mims:Syndax Pharmaceuticals: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Abbvie: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Kura Oncology: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Leukemia and Lymphoma Society: Other: Senior Medical Director for Beat AML Study; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Other: Data Safety Monitoring Board; Agios: Consultancy; Novartis: Speakers Bureau.

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Reviewer Acknowledgements Journal of Mathematics Research wishes to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Their help and contributions in maintaining the quality of the journal is greatly appreciated. Many authors, regardless of whether Journal of Mathematics Research publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Reviewers for Volume 11, Number 2 &nbsp; Ahmed Saad Rashed, Zagazig University, Egypt Alan Jalal Abdulqader, Al-Mustansiriyah University, Iraq Amjad Salari, Razi University, Iran Arman Aghili, University of Guilan, Iran Denis Khleborodov, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia Gane Sam Lo, Universite Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis, Senegal Gener Santiago Subia, NUeva Ecija University of Science and Technology, Philippines Ivan Drazic, University of Rijeka, Croatia Maria Alessandra Ragusa, University of Catania, Italy Maria Cec&iacute;lia Santos Rosa, Instituto Politecnico da Guarda, Portugal Martin Anokye, University of Cape Coast, Ghana Mohammad A. AlQudah, German Jordanian University, Jordan N. V. Ramana Murty, Andhra Loyola College, India Neha Hooda, New Jersey City University, United States Paul J. Udoh, University of Uyo., Nigeria Rovshan Bandaliyev, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Sanjib Kumar Datta, University of Kalyani, India Sergiy Koshkin, University of Houston Downtown, USA Suzana Blesic, Italy Vishnu Narayan Mishra, Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, India Zhongming Wang, Florida International University, USA &nbsp; Sophia Wang On behalf of, The Editorial Board of Journal of Mathematics Research Canadian Center of Science and Education &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

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ISCPES stands for International Society for Comparative Physical Education and Sports and it is going to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2018. Since the beginning (Israel 1978) the main goals of the Society were established under a worldwide mind set considering five continents and no discrimination of any kind. The founders wanted to compare Physical Education and Sports across the world, searching for the best practices deserving consideration and applied on the purpose of improving citizen quality of life. The mission still stands for “Compare to learn and improve”.As all the organizations lasting for 39 years, ISCPES experienced several vicissitudes, usually correlated with world economic cycles, social and sports changes, which are in ISS journal articles - International Sport Studies.ISS journal is Scopus indexed, aiming to improve its quality (under evaluation) to reach more qualified students, experts, professionals and researchers; doing so it will raise its indexation, which we know it is nowadays a more difficult task. First, because there are more journals trying to compete on this academic fierce competitive market; secondly, because the basic requirements are getting more and more hard to gather in the publishing environment around Physical Education and Sports issues. However, we can promise this will be one of our main strategic goals.Another goal I would like to address on this Editorial is the language issue. We have this second strategic goal, which is to reach most of languages spoken in different continents; besides the English language, we will reach Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. For that reason, we already defined that all the abstracts in English will be translated into Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese words so people can find them on any search browser. That will expand the demand for our journal and articles, increasing the number of potential readers. Of course this opportunity, given by Motricidade, can be considered as a good example to multiply our scope.In June 2017 we organized a joint Conference in Borovets, Bulgaria, with our colleagues from the BCES – Bulgarian Society for Comparative Educational Studies. During those days, there was an election to appoint a new (Portuguese) president. This constitutes an important step for the Portuguese speaker countries, which, for a 4th year term, will have the opportunity to expand the influence of ISCPES Society diffusing the research results we have been achieving into a vast extended new public and inviting new research experts to innovative debates. This new president will be working with a wide geographical diverse team: the Vice President coming from a South American country (Venezuela), and the other several Executive Board members are coming from Brazil, China, Africa and North America. This constitutes a very favorable situation once, adding to this, we kept the previous editorial team from Australia and Europe. We are definitely committed to improve our influence through new incentives to organize several regional (continental) workshops, seminars and Conferences in the next future.The international research is crossing troubled times with exponential number of new indexed journals trying to get new influence and visibility. In order to do that, readers face new challenges because several studies present contradictory conclusions and outcome comparisons still lacking robust methodologies. Uncovering these issues is the focus of our Society.In the past, ISCPES started its activity collecting answers to the same questions asked to several experts in different countries and continents across the world. The starting studies developed some important insights on several issues concerning the way Physical Education professionals approached their challenges. In the very starting documents ISCPES activity focused in identifying certain games and indigenous activities that were not understood by people in other parts of the world, improving this international understanding and communication. This first attempt considered six groups of countries roughly comprehending 26 countries from all the continents.ISCPES has on its archives several seminal works, PhD proposals and program proposals, which constitutes the main theoretical framework considered in some textbooks printed at the end of the sixties in the XXth century.The methods used mostly sources’ country comparisons, historic development of comparative education systems, list of factors affecting those systems and a systematic analysis of case studies; additionally, international organizations for sports and physical education were also required to identify basic problems and unique features considered for the implementation of each own system. At the time, Lynn C. Vendien & John E. Nixon book “The World Today in Health, Physical Education and Recreation”, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1968, together with two monographies from William Johnson “Physical Education around the World”, 1966, 1968, Indianapolis, Phi Epsilon Kappa editions, were the main textbook references.The main landscapes of interest were to study sports compared or the sport role in Nationalisms, Political subsidization, Religion, Race and volunteering versus professionalism. The goal was to state the true place of sports in societies.In March 1970, Ben W. Miller from the University of California compiled an interesting Exhibit n.1 about the main conclusions of a breakfast meeting occurred during the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation. There, they identified thirty-one individuals, which had separate courses in “Comparative and/or International Physical Education, Recreation and Sports”; one month later, they collected eighteen responses with the bibliographic references they used. On this same Exhibit n.1 there is detailed information on the title, catalogue description, date of initial course (1948, the first), credit units, eligibility, number of year offer, type of graduation (from major to doctorate and professional). Concluding, the end of the sixties can be the mark of a well-established body of literature in comparative education and sports studies published in several scientific journals.What about the XXIst century? Is it still important to compare sports and education throughout the world? Only with qualitative methods? Mixed methods?We think so. That is why, after a certain decline and fuzzy goal definition in research motivations within ISCPES we decided to innovate and reorganize people from physical education and sports around this important theme of comparative studies. Important because we observe an increasing concern on the contradictions across different results in publications under the same subject. How can we infer? What about good research questions which get no statistically significant results? New times are coming, and we want to be on that frontline of this move as said by Elsevier “With RMR (results masked review) articles, you don’t need to worry about what editors or reviewers might think about your results. As long as you have asked an important question and performed a rigorous study, your paper will be treated the same as any other. You do not need to have null results to submit an RMR article; there are many reasons why it can be helpful to have the results blinded at initial review”.https://www.elsevier.com/connect/reviewers-update/results-masked-review-peer-review-without-publication-bias.This is a very different and challenging time. Our future strategy will comprehend more cooperation between researchers, institutions and scientific societies as an instrument to leverage our understanding of physical activity and sports through different continents and countries and be useful for policy designs.Next 2018, on the occasion of the UE initiative Sofia – European Capital of Sport 2018 we - Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES) & the International Society for Comparative Physical Education and Sport (ISCPES) - will jointly organize an International Conference on Sport Governance around the World.Sports and Physical Education are facing complex problems worldwide, which need to be solved. For health reasons, a vast number of organizations are popularizing the belief that physical education and sports are ‘a must’ in order to promote human activity and movement. However, several studies show that modern lifestyles are the main cause for people's inactivity and sedentary lifestyles.Extensive funded programs used to promote healthy lifestyles; sports media advertising several athletes, turning them into global heroes, influencers in a new emerging industry around sports organizations. Therefore, there is a rise in the number of unethical cases and corruption that influence the image of physical education and sports roles.We, the people emotional and physically involved with sports and physical activity must be aware of this, studying, discussing and comparing global facts and events around the world.This Conference aims to offer an incentive to colleagues from all continents to participate and present their latest results on four specific topics: 1. Sport Governance Systems; 2. Ethics and Corruption in Physical Education and Sports Policies; 3. Physical Education and Sport Development; 4. Training Physical Educators and Coaches. Please consider your selves invited to attend. Details in http://bcesconvention.com/

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04–117Al-Jarf, Reima S. (King Saud U., Saudi Arabia). The effects of web-based learning on struggling EFL college writers. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 37, 1 (2004), 49–57.04–118Basturkmen, Helen (University of Auckland, New Zealand; Email: h.basturkmen@auckland.ac.nz). Specificity and ESP course design. RELC Journal (Singapore), 34, 1 (2003), 48–63.04–119Basturkmen, H., Loewen, S. and Ellis, R. (U. of Auckland, New Zealand Email: h.basturkmen@auckland.ac.nz). Teachers' stated beliefs about incidental focus on form and their classroom practices. Applied Linguistics (Oxford, UK), 25, 2 (2004), 243–72.04–120Benson, Barbara E. (Piedmont College, Georgia, USA). Framing culture within classroom practice: culturally relevant teaching. Action in Teacher Education (Alexandria, Virginia, USA), 25, 2 (2003), 16–22.04–121Blanche, Patrick (U. of California, Davis, USA; Email: blanche@kumagaku.ac.jp). Using dictations to teach pronunciation. Modern English Teacher (London, UK), 13, 1 (2004), 30–36.04–122Budimlic, Melisa (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany). Zur Konzeption und Entwicklung interdisziplinärer Lernprogramme am Beispiel eines Lernmodules zur Psycholinguistik. [The concept and development of an interdisciplinary learning programme. An example of a module in psycholinguistics] Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), Online Journal, 9, 1 (2004), 12 pp.04–123Cajkler, Wasyl (U. of Leicester, UK; Email: wc4@le.ac.uk). How a dead butler was killed: the way English national strategies maim grammatical parts. Language and Education (Clevedon, UK), 18, 1 (2004), 1–16.04–124Calvin, Lisa M. & Rider, N. Ann (Indiana State U., USA). Not your parents' language class: curriculum revision to support university language requirements. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 37, 1 (2004), 11–25.04–125Carrier, Karen A. (Northern Illinois University, USA). Improving high school English language learners' second language listening through strategy instruction. Bilingual Research Journal (Arizona, USA), 27, 3 (2003), 383–408.04–126Christie, Frances (Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, Australia; Email: fhchri@unimelb.edu.au). English in Australia. RELC Journal (Singapore) 34, 1 (2003), 100–19.04–127Drobná, Martina (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany). Konzeption von Online-Lerneinheiten für den Unterricht Deutsch als Fremdsprache am Beispiel des Themas ‘Auslandsstudium in Deutschland’. [The concept of an online learning unit ‘Studying in Germany’ for German as a foreign language]. Zeitschrift für Iinterkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht (Edmonton, Canada) Online Journal, 9, 1 (2004), 17 pp.04–128Ellis, Rod (University of Auckland, New Zealand; Email: r.ellis@auckland.ac.nz). Designing a task-based syllabus. RELC Journal (Singapore) 34, 1 (2003), 64–81.04–129Giambo, D. & McKinney, J. (University of Miami, USA) The effects of a phonological awareness intervention on the oral English proficiency of Spanish-speaking kindergarten children. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, Virginia, USA), 38, 1 (2004), 95–117.04–130Goodwyn, Andrew (Reading University, UK). The professional identity of English teachers. English in Australia (Norwood, Australia), 139 (2004), 122–30.04–131Hu, Guangwei (Nanyang Technological U., Singapore; Email: gwhu@nie.edu.sg). English language teaching in China: regional differences and contributing factors. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Clevedon, UK), 24, 4 (2003), 290–318.04–132Jacobs, George M. (JF New Paradigm Education, Singapore; Email: gmjacobs@pacific.net.sg) and Farrell, Thomas S. C. Understanding and implementing the communicative language teaching paradigm. RELC Journal (Singapore) 34, 1 (2003), 5–30.04–133Janks, Hilary (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa). The access paradox. English in Australia (Norwood, Australia), 139 (2004), 33–42.04–134Kim, Jeong-ryeol (Korea National U. of Education, South Korea; Email: jrkim@knue.ac.kr). Using mail talk to improve English speaking skills. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 349–69.04–135Kim, Nahk-Bohk (Chungnam National University, South Korea). An investigation into the collocational competence of Korean high school EFL learners. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 225–48.04–136Kormos, Judit & Dénes, Mariann (Eötvös Loránd U., Hungary; Email: kormos.j@chello.hu). Exploring measures and perceptions of fluency in the speech of second language learners. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 2 (2004), 145–64.04–137Lee, Jin Kyong (Seoul National U., South Korea). The acquisition process of yes/no questions by ESL learners and its pedagogical implications. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 205–24.04–138Levine, Glenn S. (U. of California, Irvine, USA). Global simulation: a student-centered, task-based format for intermediate foreign language courses. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 37, 1 (2004), 26–36.04–139Littlemore, Jeannette (U. of Birmingham, UK; Email: j.m.littlemore@bham.ac.uk). Using clipart and concordancing to teach idiomatic expressions. Modern English Teacher (London, UK), 13, 1 (2004), 17–44.04–140Llurda, Enric (Email: ellurda@dal.udl.es) and Huguet, Ángel (Universitat de Lleida, Spain). Self-awareness in NNS EFL Primary and Secondary school teachers. Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 12, 3&4 (2003), 220–33.04–141Lochtman, Katja (Vrije U., Belgium; Email: katja.lochtman@vub.ac.be). Oral corrective feedback in the foreign language classroom: how it affects interaction in analytic foreign language teaching. International Journal of Educational Research (Abingdon, UK), 37 (2002), 271–83.04–142Mackey, Alison (Georgetown U., USA; Email: mackeya@georgetown.edu). Beyond production: learners' perceptions about interactional processes. International Journal of Educational Research (Abingdon, UK), 37 (2002), 379–94.04–143Maiwald, Cordula (Passau, Germany). Zeitverstehen und Tempusformen im Deutschen – eine Herausforderung im Fremdsprachenunterricht. [The concept of time and German tenses – a challenge for a foreign language classroom] Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Munich, Germany), 29 (2003), 287–302.04–144McKay, Sandra Lee (San Francisco State U., USA; Email: 2slmckay@attbi.com). EIL curriculum development. RELC Journal (Singapore), 34, 1 (2003), 31–47.04–145Na, Yoon-Hee and Kim, Sun-Joo (U. of Texas at Austin, USA; Email: yhena@mail.utexas.edu). Critical literacy in the EFL classroom. English Teaching (Anseonggun, Korea), 58, 3 (2003), 143–63.04–146Nettelbeck, David (Whitefriars College, Australia). ICT and the re-shaping of literacy. A secondary classroom perspective. English in Australia (Norwood, Australia), 139 (2004), 68–77.04–147Park, Mae-Ran (Pukyong National U., South Korea; Email: mrpark@pknu.ac.kr) and Suh, Kang-Oak. An analysis of Korean high school English textbooks under the 7th curriculum. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 319–47.04–148Peters, George F. (Michigan State U., USA). Kulturexkurse: a model for teaching deeper German culture in a proficiency-based curriculum. Die Unterrichtspraxis (Cherry Hill, New Jersey, USA) 36, 2 (2003), 121–34.04–149Plewnia, Albrecht (Mannheim, Germany). Vom Nutzen kontrastiven grammatischen Wissens am Beispiel von Deutsch und Französisch. [The benefits of contrastive grammar knowledge; an example of German and French] Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Munich, Germany), 29 (2003), 251–86.04–150Prodromou, Luke (Email: luke@spark.net.gr). In search of the successful user of English: how a corpus of non-native speaker language could impact on EFL teaching. Modern English Teacher (London, UK), 12, 2 (2003), 5–14.04–151Rieger, Caroline L. (U. of British Columbia, Canada). Some conversational strategies and suggestions for teaching them. Die Unterrichtspraxis (Cherry Hill, New Jersey, USA), 36, 2 (2003), 164–75.04–152Sakui, K. (U. of Auckland, New Zealand). Wearing two pairs of shoes: language teaching in Japan. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK), 58, 2 (2004), 155–63.04–153Schleppegrell, M., Achugar, M., & Oteíza, T. (University of California, USA). The grammar of history: enhancing content-based instruction through a functional focus on language. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, Virginia, USA), 38, 1 (2004), 67–93.04–154Sercu, Lies (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Email: lies.sercu@arts.kuleuven.ac.be). Implementing intercultural foreign language education: Belgian, Danish and British teachers' professional self-concepts and teaching practices compared. Evaluation and Research in Education (Clevedon, UK), 16, 3 (2002), 150–65.04–155Shinwoong, Lee (Hanyang U., South Korea). Korean ESL learners' experiences in computer assisted classroom discussions. English Teaching (Anseonggun, Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 371–95.04–156Sifakis, Nicos C. (Hellenic Open U., Greece; Email: nicossif@hol.gr). TeachingEIL– TeachingInternationalorInterculturalEnglish? What Teachers Should Know. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 2 (2004), 237–50.04–157Simard, Daphnée (Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada; Email: simard.daphnee@uqam.ca). Using diaries to promote metalinguistic reflection among elementary school students. Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 13, 1 (2004), 34–48.04–158Song, Jeong-Weon (Hanyang U., South Korea). Effects of task-processing conditions on the oral output of post beginners in a narrative task. English Teaching (Anseonggun, Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 249–71.04–159Storch, Neomy (U. of Melbourne, Australia; Email: neomys@unimelb.edu.au). Relationships formed in dyadic interaction and opportunity for learning. International Journal of Educational Research (Abingdon, UK), 37 (2002), 305–22.04–160Tomlinson, Brian and Masuhara, Hitomi (Leeds Metropolitan U., UK; Email: B.Tomlinson@lmu.ac.uk). Developing cultural awareness. Modern English Teacher (London, UK), 13, 1 (2004), 5–12.04–161Towndrow, P. (Nangyang Technological U., Singapore). Reflections of an on-line tutor. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK), 58, 2 (2004), 174–82.04–162Vilches, Ma. Luz C. (Ateneo do Manila U., Philippines; Email: mvilches@ateneo.edu). Task-based language teaching: the case of EN 10. RELC Journal (Singapore), 34, 1 (2003), 82–99.04–163Willkop, Eva-Maria (Mainz, Germany). Texte im Mitteilungsprozess – Wege durch ein vereinigtes Babylon [Texts in the mediation process – ways through united Babylon] Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Munich, Germany), 29 (2003), 221–50.

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Abstract:

This paper seeks to situate 'chat' in the context of an evolving media-scape. I will argue that for at least a century and half new media have been expanding the spatial scale of communications, and in so doing altering the local contexts in which individuals communicate. This development is closely aligned with the genesis and evolution of an urban form that is itself significantly reliant on these new types of mediated communication. Individuals pursuing their everyday life in this environment must, as a matter of course, negotiate a complex array of media and communications. In doing so, they must also move through a range of media spaces on a continuum from the local to the global. Chat -- defined here as informal face-to-face conversation conducted in the familiarity of a shared context1 -- is a form of communication that seems to have persisted despite the changes noted above. Chat, then, provides a point of comparison from which to assess the effect of mediated communication. It also provides a link to a local communications space. I will argue that this local communications space is where individuals 'make sense' of a communications environment that operates primarily on a scale well beyond the local and well beyond that which most of us can hope to affect. The Rise of the Global, the Decline of the Local Carey (1981) argues that in the United States during the 19th century, as local communications were supplanted by a centralised national communications grid, local cultures and local politics were also supplanted. For Carey, the example of the telegraph is particularly relevant. He notes that the telegraph enabled communication to move faster than transportation for the first time (Communications as Culture 204-5). Giving the example of the trading of commodities, Carey argues that this property made the telegraph a powerful agent of decentralisation. The speed with which the telegraph could deliver business information allowed it to eliminate spatial differences by connecting all places within its network on an equal basis. In his words, "the telegraph puts everyone in the same place for the purposes of trade; it made geography irrelevant" (Communications as Culture 217). Yet despite this property of the medium of telegraphy, the establishment of a telegraph system in the United States only served to reinforce the dominance of New York as the central hub in the national network of transport and communications. The predominance of New York was established as early as the 1840s with the development of significant canal and railroad systems and although: this pattern of information movement has been importantly altered since the 1840s, its persistence, at least in outline, is even more striking ... despite the enormous size of the United States, a particular pattern of geographic concentration developed that gave inordinate power to certain urban centres. This development undercut local and regional culture. (Carey, "Culture, Geography, and Communications" 82)2 Thus the new medium of telegraphy expanded the scale of communication, bringing with it both the capacity to extend the individual beyond his or her own locality and the ability to make a particular locality and the individuals in it irrelevant. Carey concludes that the way electronic communications were initially deployed in the United States intensified the strength of the central communications hub. This increased the spatial extension and power of some at the hub, but with powerful and negative consequences for many local communities. McLuhan similarly emphasised the transformative power particularly of electronic communications, as illustrated in his now famous statement: In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. (McLuhan 15) The Rise of the Urban and a More Mediated Local Context Baldastry's study The Commercialisation of News in the Nineteenth Century shows a similar triumph of a medium able to command an expanded spatial reach over a more localised medium. It also demonstrates the changing role of media in the social relations of an increasingly urbanised population. Baldastry contrasts an earlier and more local partisan press with what was, then, an emergent large scale, fully commercial press (Baldastry 139). While the partisan newspapers of the earlier part of the 19th century needed to raise money to publish, their primary motivation was politics. The partisan press expressed strong views and assumed an already existing stock of knowledge embedded in the small community which formed its readership: The prototypical partisan newspaper of the Jacksonian era had a small circulation (a few hundred), appeared weekly, and circulated within its own region. Its readers were the inhabitants of small villages and towns, and local farmers. Word of mouth supplied the everyday news. (Baldastry 49) Increased urbanisation during the 19th century created a large, more easily accessible and more literate mass market for newspapers and their advertisers. By the 1850s, virtually every family in New York City was buying a newspaper. By 1880, six cities consumed 50% of the country's daily sheets (Baldastry 49). At the same time urban dwellers had a greater need for the news of events in their cities because the greater complexity of social organisation and weakened face-to-face ties meant it could not be provided in the traditional way. It could be said that urbanisation created new roles for the newspaper as the surveyor and synthesiser of large and dispersed urban populations (Baldastry 142). Following Berland, it can also be argued that the mass circulation commercial newspaper was also a constituent element in this urban form.3 The new media space provided by the mass circulation newspaper can be seen as an enabling element in the new form of social and spatial organisation present in the city. From this perspective, the evolution of the mass circulation press was both a response to and an agent in the rapid expansion of large metropolitan centres. Local News Mediating the Global in Local Terms There is little doubt that the complexity, scale and amount of mediation has increased significantly since these times. It is, then, interesting to reflect on the role that chat, particularly face-to-face chat, continues to play in a more intensely mediated society. In a world where so much social interaction occurs through communications media, chat may be a subversive element to a certain extent. Its happenstance form is 'other' to mediated communications. It produces its own communicative space in a random and ad-hoc manner. It lies outside the market and the state. However, mediated communications form an important context for chat. In particular, I believe that the role that chat may play in empowering individuals as they traverse this increasingly complex media scape will be reinforced by the availability of local media, with news media being a critical example of local media. The local news, weather, sport and advertising carried by local newspapers and the local windows of radio and television are all important contexts for chat. One of the reasons for this is that we can assume some level of shared knowledge or interest about these topics. At one level, a globalised media may bring us all together; for example, United States produced film and television programming might provide something to chat about for people of many nations and across most localities within Australia. However, for most of us, the realm of our personal effectivity -- what we can hope to influence and what affects us -- is highly local in character. As the preceding discussion points out, and as supported by analysis of Australian media4, the economics of media mean that continued viability of local news can not be guaranteed. In contemplating the absence of local news media it is instructive to think of the gap this creates between the places where the big decisions are made -- the State, national and global metropoles -- and the reporting of the effects of these decisions in our various locales. While it is easy enough to criticise local media for being parochial (what media isn't?) such a gap is profoundly dis-empowering. Also absent is any active construction of the local; that is, the binding together which comes from near universal access to media with a local context. One example of how local news media can work to both construct a local identity and to act as an intermediary between the local and the global is provided by Richardson in her analysis of Tamworth's local newspaper. She argues that by constructing a local 'world view' the local newspaper exerts a strong influence on how people make sense of global phenomena. While not necessarily cohering with the reality of life in Tamworth, this local 'world view' significantly influences the way local people deal with a world beyond the town which is in many ways threatening. Thus, through the pages of the local news "the country has actually appropriated even assimilated many of the notions that are most often associated with change [globalisation] in today's society, it also seems that this assimilation is on the country's terms" (Richardson 4). Unmediated chat may then be viewed as a sort of micro-local communication5. It operates on a much smaller scale than even local news media. However, local media may well be a significant resource used by people chatting about, trying to make sense of and seeking to act in a world in which communications media are becoming increasingly global. Chat is then one aspect of a complex communications environment where individuals routinely navigate through a range of media spaces -- from the most local through to the most global -- in the course of a day. It can also be seen as a potential site for subversion, appropriation and assimilation of communications and media operating on larger scales. The notion of 'transition discourse', introduced by Wills, may be a productive way of beginning to think about this issue. Transition discourses are the processes of temporary cultures that are essential to explain change. Thus, transition discourses are also temporary mannerisms and body techniques of 'habitus'. "Habitus refers to specialised techniques and ingrained knowledges which enable people to negotiate the different departments of existence" (Wills 3, qtd. in Craik). Both chat and local media may then serve as transition discourses, helping us to assimilate a constantly changing media-scape. Footnotes Communications media such as the telephone and e-mail support types of chat that do not fit this definition. These contexts are worthy of separate investigation. It is relevant to note that Carey's (1981) work is in turn influenced by the Canadian communications theorist, Harold Innis. Innis was not only a seminal communications theorist in his own right but also a major influence on the more famous Marshall McLuhan. In particular, Carey's argument that technological innovation in the medium of communications is central to social change draws on Innis's binary opposition between space binding and time binding media. Here any given medium is biased in terms of control of time or of space. Importantly for this discussion, time-binding media are associated very closely with oral culture, while space-binding media such as the telegraph are associated with demise of oral culture. For example, stone tablets are difficult to transport but durable and thus time-biased; while paper is easy to transport, but far less durable and thus space-biased. This bias will affect the type of social organisation possible and promote the growth of some types of institutions at the expense of others. Space-binding media facilitate the growth of empire because they "encourage a concern with expansion and the present ... the growth of the state, the military, and decentralised and expansionist institutions" (Carey, "Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan" 275). On the other hand, time-binding media are said to encourage a concern with cultural maintenance, the past, religion, hierarchical organisation and contractionist institutions (Carey, "Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan" 275). Berland's argument is based on the example of the spatial impact of television on the suburban form of cities in the post World War Two era. See O'Regan and Frankland for discussions of the impact of changes within broadcast television on locality specific content in regional Australia and in the capital cities. It is, in part, dependent upon the way we move through the physical space of our towns and suburbs. References Baldastry, Gerald. The Commercialization of the News in the 19th Century. Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1992. Berland, Jody. "Angels Dancing: Cultural Technologies and the Production of Space." Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg. New York: Routledge, 1992. 38-55. Carey, James. Communications as Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. ---. "Culture, Geography, and Communications: The Work of Harold Innis in an American Context." Culture, Communication and Dependency. W. Melody, L. Salter, and P. Heyer, eds. New Jersey: Ablex, 1981. 73-91. ---. "Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan." McLuhan Pro and Con. Ed. R. Rosenthal. Baltimore: Pelican, 1969. 270-308. Craik, J. The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. London: Routledge, 1994. Frankland, Mark. "Australian Television as Communications Space, Programming Space and Public Space." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 1999. Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. London: Oxford UP, 1950. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding the Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Sage, 1967. Warwick Mules. "Virtual Culture, Time and Images: Beyond Representation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). 19 Aug. 2000 <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/images.php>. O'Regan, Tom."Towards a High Communication Policy: Assessing Recent Changes within Australian Broadcasting." Continuum 2.1 (1988): 135-58. Catherine Richardson. "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). 19 Aug. 2000 <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php>. Nadine Wills. "Clothing Borders: Transition Discourses, National Costumes and the Boundaries of Culture." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). 19 Aug. 2000 <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/clothing.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Mark Frankland. "Chatting in the Neighbourhood -- Does It Have a Place in the World of Globalised Media?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/media.php>. Chicago style: Mark Frankland, "Chatting in the Neighbourhood -- Does It Have a Place in the World of Globalised Media?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/media.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Mark Frankland. (2000) Chatting in the neighbourhood -- does it have a place in the world of globalised media?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/media.php> ([your date of access]).

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Innovation in family firms is still a controversial issue within the academic community and poses some unique challenges for family business owners and managers. This special issue on innovation in family firms results from the cooperation of both academic and business guest editors, in a pioneering initiative that is not usual in academic journals. Indeed, a key feature of this Special Issue has been the collaboration with two family business leaders, who have been involved in the editorial process together with the academics. The two business editors that we involved are Antonio Gallardo, Vicepresident of Almiralland former director of FBN-Family Business Network,andIgnacio Osborne, CEO of the Osborne Groupand Chairman of the Spanish Family Firm Institute. In order to introduce the six papers that make up this special issue on innovation in family firms, we as academic editors are pleased to include some comments from the business editors that emerged during our interactions with the aim to make a step forward toward bridging the gap between research and practice on family business innovation, acknowledging the different perspectives and approaches adopted by academics and practitioners. As the business editor Mr. Osborne points: “Innovation issues in family firms are nowadays more important than ever, due to the rapid developments that are occurring in the business world and its corresponding technologies”. Despite being a topic analyzed by a number of authors over time (Feranita, Kotlar and De Massis, 2017; Aparicio, Iturralde and Sánchez-Famoso, 2020 in this issue; Chrisman, Chua, De Massis, Frattini and Wright, 2015), the study of innovation in family business still requires a greater volume of research to provide answers to the needs of family businesses. The distinctive nature of family firms results in a complex influence on the innovation process (De Massis, Frattini and Lichtenthaler, 2013), which is reflected in mixed research findings. For instance, the conclusions of the published research offer sometimes contradictory results, since family businesses can be considered innovative (Aronoff, 1998; Craig and Moores, 2006) or conservative (Sharma, Chrisman, y Chua, 1997; Zahra, Hayton y Salvato, 2004; Gómez-Mejía et al., 2007), with several studies that can support whatever of the two options. Family businesses present a number of characteristics that, a priori, seem to favor innovation, such as long-term orientation (Tagiuri and Davis, 1996; Ward and Aronoff, 1994), the desire for continuity through the following generations (Miroshnychenko et al., 2020; Gallo, 1995), patient capital (De Massis, Audretsch, Uhlaner and Kammerlander, 2018; Sirmon and Hitt, 2003), and the long tenure of their main leaders (Lorenzo, 2020). The replacement of the prior generation by the next generation implies the access of younger people to the leadership of the company, who also often present a greater level of qualification (De Massis et al., 2008; Cabrera-Suárez, 2011). Young and qualified leaders would provide a new momentum to the firm, by means of the renewal of the firm (Núñez-Cacho and Lorenzo, 2020). Likewise, the successors receive an important legacy by means of the values of the family business (Erdogan et al., 2020), such as effort, perseverance, austerity, excellence, long-term orientation and entrepreneurial spirit, as basic foundations of their way of understanding business activity (Bermejo, 2008). Accordingly, the new generation managers could be in the best conditions to reinvent the company, since they know the business from within and they also provide the new vision of a person with a working life ahead. Another factor that favors the renewal impulse of the next generation is the familial support to carry out a prolonged tenure over time, which will not be as conditioned by short-term results as in other types of companies, by the so-called patient capital (Sirmon and Hitt, 2003) of the family business (Lorenzo, 2020). But, even if these ideal conditions are met in a specific family firm, it is not guaranteed that the company realizes the innovation it needs. Therefore, it is needed to shed more light about the determinants and conditions for innovation. The editors of this special issue selected a number of papers to reflect the state-of-the-art on this topic, indicating some of the most promising research lines on innovation. According to the business editor Mr. Gallardo, “A very important aspect emerging from this special issue is that the papers published in it reveal that external contributions to the internal know-how of the family and the business are often vital to help produce the changes needed by a family firm for innovation to take place”. Innovation in the family business has been a phenomenon of great interest to researchers, especially in the last decade. This is highlighted in the article that opens this special issue by presenting a complete bibliometric review of the literature on innovation in family businesses. Generally, researchers have noted that the influence of the family is the factor that makes this type of businesses different from the other ones (Habbershon and Williams, 1999; Lorenzo and Núñez-Cacho, 2012). However, in order to conclude that this is really true, it is necessary to identify the nature of these differences and determine how and why they affect the innovative behavior of the family business. The paper Innovation on family businesses: A holistic bibliometric(Aparicio, Iturralde and Sánchez-Famoso, 2020) offers an overview of the research field through an analysis of 207 articles that were published between 1994 and 2017. The authors complement other recent reviews such as those by Feranita, Kotlar and De Massis (2017) and Calabrò, Vecchiarini, Gast, Campopiano, De Massis and Kraus (2019), and reflect about the take-off of research on innovation that takes place since 2009. In the study two differentiated periods are highlighted: An initial one that covers the years 1994 to 2009, and one of expansion from 2010 to 2017. In addition, they identify the most influential journals, the most referenced articles, the most productive scholars -namely, De Massis, Frattini, Craig, Chrisman, Fang, Kotlar and Nordqvist appear as the most productive and referenced ones- and the main lines of research developed, providing a clear and synthetic map of innovation research in family businesses today. This paper approaches innovation from a more theoretical perspective, and also presents the lines of research that are currently being developed. These lines include the internal factors of the family business and its influence on innovation, as well as external factors, among others advances in research in the subject. The paper An Analysis of Open Innovation Determinants: The Case Study of Singapore based Family owned Enterprises, by Koh, Kong and Timperio (2020, this issue) analyzes the drivers of open innovation by studying cases of family businesses in Singapore. The authors highlight the external determinants and catalysts of innovation projects, such as family and business culture, access to external funds, government support for initiatives, market dynamics and partnership between companies. In addition to these six external determinants, there are two other factors that have a great influence on open innovation. First, family capital, which is the main source of financing for innovative initiatives. Second, a strong external network, supported by Singapore's legal and regulatory framework that fosters innovation, promotes the development of an enabling business environment so that the spirit of innovation can truly thrive. Most of the surveyed companies’ managers mentioned process innovation as the most critical aspect, and also organizational innovation. Process innovation is considered superior by the companies included in the sample due to their capabilities to drive product innovation, marketing and organizational structure (and people). Organizational innovation is also considered of utmost importance, due to the need to adopt technologies such as digitalization, robotics or automation, which require an adequate organizational structure. Some ideas from the surveyed managers highlight these statements, like: "The correct processes create the necessary conditions to shape the products, as well as the marketing and organization structures," as well as "Having cutting-edge processes underway is a key differentiator." This study also reflects the need to establish new financing mechanisms adapted to the peculiarities of innovation processes. External capital injection and stimulus policies are necessary, although not sufficient, since they must be combined with the determinants of the internal functioning of family businesses. The relevance of the external network is also highlighted in the paper Collaborative innovation in the family SME: conceptualization, goals, and success factors, by Arzubiaga, Maseda, Uribarri and Palma Ruiz (2020, this issue), which analyzes the strategy of collaborative innovation that seeks the creation of knowledge, new product designs and Improving the efficiency of the production process. Among the conditions of collaborative innovation, four groups stand out: The composition of the management team (in terms of family members percentage and number of generations involved in management), abilities (cognitive factors, absorption capacity and trajectory in innovation), attitudes, and legacy preservation, (referring to socio-emotional wealth and internal behavior). These factors of small and medium family businesses play a crucial role in the successful design and implementation of collaborative innovation. The main contributions of this paper can be summarized in the need for establish solid bases to deepen in the future the study of collaborative innovation. Moreover, a second contribution refers to the identification of the distinguishing characteristics of family SMEs. Arzubiaga, Maseda, Uribarri and Palma Ruiz (2020, this issue) also propose the analysis of the possible moderating effects of firm size and the sector to refine the impact of the variables in this model, looking to achieve excellence in collaborative innovation. As business reviewer, Mr. Osbornehave highlighted collaborative innovation as one of the relevant issues in order to reinforce the role of innovation in their companies. Absorptive capacity is another aspect of great interest to researchers. There are numerous factors that condition it, some of them are features of the family character that make the behavior of family businesses paradoxical (Kotlar et al. 2020). The paper titled A mediating model of innovative capacity between absorptive capacity and family business performanceby Hernández-Perlines, Ariza-Montes and Araya-Castillo (2020, this issue) addresses the issue about absorptive capacity. Absorptive capacity is related to the identification, assimilation and exploitation of new knowledge by the company. Those family businesses that have these capabilities improve their performance. In addition, this effect is enhanced by the innovative capacity of the company, which acts as a mediator between absorption capacity and the company's performance, reinforcing this relationship. Thus, family business managers should focus their efforts on providing their organizations with the necessary skills to absorb and exploit knowledge. This will be easier if the company has developed innovative capabilities. In this sense, the business editor Mr. Gallardo points that: “There is also the possibility of establishing an advisory council with external collaborators that serves as a contrast to the company's board, in which oftentimes the weight of the family is too decisive.” The last two papers in this special issue address the role of family involvement in relation to innovation. Does too much love hinder innovation? Family involvement and firms' innovativeness in family-owned Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), by Filippo Ferrari (2020, this issue) reflects on the role of family cohesion and its flexibility in the process of innovation, drawing upon the Olson Circumplex model (Olson, 2000) which is applied in a sample of Italian family businesses. The study indicates that unbalanced families show the lowest levels of innovation, although family cohesion and flexibility do not show a significant correlation with the overall level of organizational innovation. Flexibility shows a positive correlation with the process and behavioral innovation, which can be explained by the demand for new forms and organizational routines to deal with process innovation. Here the author suggests some human resources practices that promote flexibility, such as labor rotation (Ortega, 2001), or the development of a horizontal internal career (Ichniowsky et al. 1996, 1997, 1999). Families that lack cohesion show a negative correlation with strategic innovation and process innovation. Ferrari (2020, this issue) considers as disconnected family systems those in which family members are not cohesive and have little family loyalty. On the other hand, innovation in processes is encouraged with new ideas through contributions in terms of new ways of doing things. According to the authors, the Olson Circumplex model (Olson, 2000) offers a framework that can diagnose the extent to which family systems are balanced and how the effects of balanced or unbalanced family dynamics can affect the family business (Daspit et al. 2018). Business reviewers were especially interested on the conclusions of this paper, and also pointed that it would be necessary more research on that kind of negative influences stemmed from lack of cohesion within the business family. Entrepreneurial orientation and product innovation: The moderating role of family involvement in management, by Fredyma, Ruiz Palomo and Diéguez (2020, this issue) addresses a classic concept closely linked to the study of innovation such as entrepreneurial orientation. The relationships between this variable and product innovation, incremental innovation and radical innovation are examined. The influence of family performance on the company is also analyzed. In their conclusions, Fredyma, Ruiz Palomo and Diéguez (2020, this issue) point out that family involvement weakens the positive effect of entrepreneurial orientation in product innovation, especially in case of radical innovation. Therefore, the family business must be aware of these weaknesses to correct them, professionalizing with non-family managers and including their participation in innovation decisions. This conclusion is stressed by both business editors, Mr. Osborne and Mr. Gallardo, who point out that: “Having a network of external collaborators, some of them generalists and others specialized in specific problems, is nowadays practically indispensable.” Finally, the academic editors sincerely appreciate the contributions of two prominent Spanish businessmen, who have contributed to enrich this special issue with a business perspective, which helps to overcome the division that is sometimes perceived between the academic world and the business one. Both Antonio Gallardo and Ignacio Osborne represent the entrepreneurial vision that they have been able to maintain in their families and in their companies for generations. We all know how challenging it is for a family business to be entrepreneurial across generations (e.g., De Massis, Eddleston and Rovelli, 2020). Last but now least, we want to express our gratitude to the editor of the European Journal of Family Business, Professor Vanesa Guzmán for her collaboration and contributions. The Osborne Group, founded in 1772, is one of the oldest family businesses in Europe. The group evolved from the original business of raising and exporting wines from Jerez to a wider food and beverage group which includes quality wines from various Spanish designations of origin, premium spirits, and products derived from Iberian pork, with a growing international acceptance, entering markets as demanding as China. Ignacio Osborne, a member of the sixth family generation, is the current president of the company since 2017, after 21 years as CEO. The company has been especially innovative in marketing, creating the symbol of the bull in the 50s, which has become a symbol that identifies the Spanish, transcending its initial origin as a reference for the winery. Almirallis a pharmaceutical company founded in 1943. It is currently run by the second generation, which are giving way to the third. Although innovation is an essential requirement to compete in pharmaceutics, Almirall has managed to develop some well-known products in Spain, as Almax and Cleboril, becoming one of most innovative companies in the industry. Antonio Gallardo is honorary vice president of his company, which he chaired for 26 years. In addition, he was also president of the Family Council and the Family Office, as well as a member of the Executive Committee of the Family Business Network and vice president of the Family Business Institute.

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By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be f*cking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

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Abstract:

Song dedications are among commercial radio’s most enduring formats. Yet those very few studies which address music radio rarely consider its role within a consumer economy. As John Patrick noted when analysing ABC broadcaster Christopher Lawrence’s popular (and commercially exploited) Swoon genre as a form of nostalgic Utopianism, many music analysts view music listening as constructing a cultural space of other times and places, when romantic love held sway, when the certainties of religion vanquished doubt, and when authentic folk culture gave a sense of belonging to traditional ways of thinking and feeling (133). This “emotional, largely imaginary” space is explicity constructed outside the pragmatic focus and urgent stylings of commercial sponsorship. Patrick cites Flinn on the capacity of music to seemingly transcend social institutions and discourses. But here I will argue that commercial music-radio practice clearly operates within them. More significantly, it does so by very virtue of this capacity for offering transcendence: Music ... has the peculiar ability to ameliorate the social existence it allegedly overrides, and offers in one form or another the sense of something better. Music extends an impression of perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect, unintegrated world (Flinn). This study suggests that it is precisely this lack of any perceived connectedness into the social discourses of the day which marks music as available for the occupancy of individual desires, and which targets its various genres for integration into selected sets of social practice. What we do while listening to the radio… Willis (1990), investigating music as a key element of the “symbolic cultural creativity and informal artistry in people’s lives”, discovered multiple appropriations, creolisings and re-accentuations within social use of broadcast music (85). His empirical work provides accounts of the various uses made of broadcast music, including the audio-taping of new music tracks; planned social listening to particular shows or DJs, often combined with extended phone-call discussions with friends; the use of broadcast music as company in periods of social isolation, or its use in structuring daily living or working routines; the preparation of personal master-mixes and exchange of taped compilations or transcribed song lyrics. To these should be added more contemporary updates: digital sound-bite downloading and re-editing via Internet broadcasts; the burning of personally tailored CDs; MP3 collection-building through web-exchange, and the construction of a personalised virtual sensorium for asserting private space in public through the use of the Sony Walkman or Discplayer (Hosokawa, Chambers, Bull). The capacity music broadcast gives for personal engagement within various music sub-cultures needs further work at exactly this active-reception level. Nor has the activity of broadcasters in constructing technologies of reciprocity around mediated intimacy been fully explored. The social formational power, over 75 years, of the song-dedication formula, in compensating what Thompson described as the “non-reciprocal intimacy” of electronic media, is incalculable. Instead of opening spaces for “free association” working pre-discursively on the “physicality of the listening experience”, music-radio talk has been operating to structure those exact spaces: to create regulated activity, and interactivity, where none has been thought to exist. Fixing a self to a favourite track: music and memory From the 1930s to the 1960s, vastly popular “music request programs” encouraged radio listeners to write in to presenters, not only selecting a favourite music play, but describing in detail the social relation mediated for them by the music and lyrics, and the uniquely individualised expressive weight it was claimed was carried – ironically yet significantly, a reference often immediately generalised by the attachment of several other requestors to the particular track. More recently, Richard Mercer’s evening program of Lovesong dedications on Sydney’s MIX 106.5 connected this drive towards social identity work with the escalating sexual-emotional confessionalism of Australian radio talk. Mercer’s format: extended play of the staple love ballads of the “easy listening” mode – carefully selected to highlight the sexual arousal elements of the breathy female performer or the husky-voiced male balladeer – operated from the centre of the newly reciprocal expression of intimacy, made possible by the live call-in capacity of contemporary radio. Listener-callers can now model their identification techniques directly – or so it is made to appear. In fact, the emotional expressiveness and the centrality of the equation between direct listener-caller comment and emotional-interpretive link into music tracks remains problematic, for a number of reasons. How to construct loving sincerity – through the precision of digital editing Firstly, the apparent spontaneity and direct interface which underlie radio’s “live call-in” relations as a discourse of authenticity, are today heavily, if not obviously, compromised, by the production techniques used to guarantee the focus on caller concerns. This is phone-in but not talkback radio – a distinction not made often enough, in either professional production literature or academic analysis of radio practice. While talkback is relatively raw radio, centring on live-to-air talk-relations between callers and hosts (and thus fostering the highly confrontational hosting persona of the “shock-jock”), phone-in radio seeks briefer, more focused comment on topics pre-selected, constantly monitored and re-themed by both host and call-screening staff, who choose which caller comments get to air, and in which order. Lovesong dedications not only follows this more restrictive practice, but intensifies its commodification of the resultant calls, by a consistent top-and-tail editing of caller contributions before broadcast. This acts to heighten the expressiveness of each segment, and to insert the program ident. into the pivotal “bridge” position between caller-voice and music play. The host is thus able to present to listeners a tautly emotional sequence of seemingly spontaneous sentimental expression; but to his sponsors, a talk-flow which interpolates the show’s name fluently into the core of the fused private/public moment. With all the hesitations, over-explanations, initial embarrassment and on-air inexperience of the average caller cut away, what remains looks like this: Host: Hello Carly - I believe you want to dedicate a lovesong to Damien? Caller: Yes that’s right ... it’s our anniversary? Host: How many years ... Caller: Well actually it’s just our first! Host: And you’ve had a great first year together? Caller: Sure have: I love you more than ever Damien ... Host: And Damien: here’s Carly’s Lovesong dedication to you. The perversity of the practice lies in the way the host’s “prompt” cues, with their invitational suspensions, actually direct the caller contributions, not only to their moment of “personalised” emotion, but to the powerful agency of the program itself, always positioned between caller and dedicatee. Further: the fluency of the talk exchange, and especially its expert segue into the music track, conceal the fact that calls are very often being held before broadcast. Between the average call and its broadcast, a listener-caller’s phoned-in experiences and expressed feelings – even their peak-moment of address to their loved one – may be digitally edited, to remove awkward hesitations and intensify the emotionality. A 24-hour call line operates, highly promoted in other programming, allowing selection and sequencing of requests around music availability – including station play-rotation regimes. Even calls received during broadcast can be delayed, edited, and clustered around the – actually quite limited – availability of music tracks (some callers have reported being offered a playlist of only three tracks through which to “personally address” their loved one). Sincerity is fabricated, at the very moment of promoting its authenticity, and absorbed into the “seamless” flow of MIX106.5’s “easy listening” format. “Schmalzy like Oprah: almost Sleepless in Seattle” The Lovesong dedications host – busy elsewhere – plays a very restrained on-air role: often only three dedications per half-hour of programming. While back-to-back music play dominates, Mercer’s vocal performance marks the show with notably atypical radio qualities. The tone is low and subdued, without ranging into the close-in microphone huskiness of the “late-night listening” mode, which usually performs intimacy. Mercer is closer to the “serious music” style of ABC Classic FM announcers, with the male voice remaining in a medium-to-light vocal range. This is tenor rather baritone, with a clear suppression of its stressing, to produce a restrained authority, rather than a DJ exuberant enthusiasm (Montgomery) or an unassailable certainty (Goffman). Mercer and his interstate colleagues use a normal conversational level, with no electronic enhancement into “fullness of tone” as employed by both DJs and talk hosts to amplify their authority. In contrast, the Lovesong dedications voice is carefully, if naturally, dampened in tone – by which I mean as a result of physical voice-production control, rather than by sound-mixing in the broadcast console. Not only is the pitch slightly subdued and intonations compressed rather than stretched, as in the familiar DJ hype, but the dominant intonation is a very unusual terminal rise/slow fall. This provides a male host’s speech with an interestingly tentative note, which deflects or at least suspends power. Under-toned rather than over-toned, it invites sympathetic listening and increased attentiveness, while its suppression of the sorts of powerful masculine authoritativeness more common in male broadcasting (see Hutchby) cues listeners for conversational participation on their own terms, rather than on those dictated by the host. This structured tonal diffidence in the Lovesong hosts’ self-effacing vocality acts as an invitation to self-direction: a pathway to participation. No surprise then that its careful constructedness has been read as the exact opposite: sincerity. What is more surprising is that it has been read as sexually alluring – given its quite marked deviation from norms of high masculinity in relation to vocalisation. Other attempts to render a desirable masculinity at the level of voice have tended to the over-produced baritones of the traditional matinee idol: the “swoon” voice of lush-toned actorly excess, with deep pitch, slow pace, fruity vowels, and long glides – the vocal equivalent of TV comedy’s “Fabio” as kitsch or camped hyper-masculinity. This vocal problem in radio hosting is also endemic to operatic performance, where male vocal range is read as age. Patriarchy reserves deep voices for authority, therefore also reserving the most powerful roles for “older” characters, performed as baritone and base. Lovesong dedications are far more suitably presented by a male host whose vocality matches the sexually-active age profile suited to romantic seduction – and this calls for the tenor voice of a Richard Mercer. The Daily Telegraph’s Sandra Lee (1998) was among many who succumbed to that “mellifluous voice which drips with genuine sincerity, yes genuine, not that contrived radio fakeness, and is soothing enough to make you believe he really care”. Even when Mercer actually shifted in a phone conversation with Lee from his ordinary voice to “The Loooooovvvvve God with a voice so smooth it could be butter”, she remained a believer. No surprise, then, that as the format is franchised from state to state on the commercial networks, much the same vocalisations are reproduced. The host’s performance formula and the callers’ sentimental witness are both safely encoded as “sincere sentimental expressiveness” – while actually audio-processed and digitally edited to produce those qualities. Here, as elsewhere, Lee’s loathed “contrived radio fakeness” continues to work unseen and unexamined, producing in the service of its own commercial imperatives a surprising yet vastly popular reputation for sentimental expressiveness among “ordinary” Australians. Where music-radio analyst Barnard (2002) considers music-request shows as a cynical commercial device for “establishing a link with the audience” (124) – a key requirement of the sponsorship system of commercial broadcasting from its origins to the current day – Lee’s tabloid populism endorses every detail of Lovesong dedications’ techniques for acting upon and reproducing the lush romanticism it sets out to evoke. Between the two views the cultural work of this programming: the mediation and commodification of interpersonal emotional expressiveness in the homes, workplaces, bedrooms and parked cars of listener-callers around the nation, goes unnoticed. Works Cited Barnard, Stephen. Studying radio. London: Arnold, 2002. Barnard, Stephen. On the radio: Music radio in Britain. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989. Bull, M. “The dialectics of walking: Walkman use and the reconstruction of the site of experience.” Consuming culture: power and resistance. Eds. J. Hearn and S. Roseneil, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999. 199-220. Chambers, I. “A miniature history of the Walkman.” New formations, 11 (1990): 1-4. Flinn, C. Strains of Utopia. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. Goffman, Erving. Forms of talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Hosokawa, S. “The Walkman effect.” Popular music, 4 (1984):165-180. Hutchby, Ian. Confrontation talk: Arguments, asymmetries and power on talk radio. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996. Lee, Sandra. “When Love God comes to town.” The Daily Telegraph, 30 November 1998: 10. Montgomery, M. “DJ talk.” Media, culture and society, 8.4 (1986): 421-440. Patrick, John. “Swooning on ABC Classic FM.” Australian Journal of Communication (1998) 25.1: 127-138. Thompson, John B. The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Willis, Paul. Common culture. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. Willis, Paul. Moving culture – an inquiry into the cultural activities of young people. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1990. Links http://acnielsen.com/ For information on commercial radio ratings Useful site for watching music radio trends http://www.radioandrecords.com/ Ever wondered where radio presenters get that never-ending supply of historical trivia? Now their secrets can be Yours. http://www.jocksjournal.com/ APRA The Australian Performing Rights Association monitors Australian music content on radio – here’s how they do it. http://www.apra.com.au/Dist/DisRad.htm Two Internet broadcast sites offering online music streaming with an Australian bias. http://www.ozchannel.com.au/village-cgi-... http://www.thebasem*nt.com.au/ FARB: The Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters – a useful site for the organisation of commercial radio within Australia. http://www.commercialradio.com.au/index.cfm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Cook, Jackie. "Lovesong Dedications" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovesongdedications.php>. APA Style Cook, J., (2002, Nov 20). Lovesong Dedications. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovesongdedications.html

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Abstract:

The use of the family home as a setting for television sitcoms (situation comedies) has long been recognised for its ability to provide audiences with an identifiable site of ontological security (much discussed by Giddens, Scannell, Saunders and others). From the beginnings of American sitcoms with such programs as Leave it to Beaver, and through the trail of The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and on to Home Improvement, That 70s Show and How I Met Your Mother, the US has led the way with screenwriters and producers capitalising on the value of using the suburban family dwelling as a fixed setting. The most obvious advantage is the use of an easily constructed and inexpensive set, most often on a TV studio soundstage requiring only a few rooms (living room, kitchen and bedroom are usually enough to set the scene), and a studio audience. In Singapore, sitcoms have had similar successes; portraying the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in their home settings. Some programs have achieved phenomenal success, including an unprecedented ten year run for Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd from 1996-2007, closely followed by Under One Roof (1994-2000 and an encore season in 2002), and Living with Lydia (2001-2005). This article furthers Blunt and Dowling’s exploration of the “critical geography” of home, by providing a focused analysis of home-based sitcoms in the nation-state of Singapore. The use of the home tells us a lot. Roseanne’s cluttered family home represents a lived reality for working-class families throughout the Western world. In Friends, the seemingly wealthy ‘young’ people live in a fashionable apartment building, while Seinfeld’s apartment block is much less salubrious, indicating (in line with the character) the struggle of the humble comedian. Each of these examples tells us something about not just the characters, but quite often about class, race, and contemporary societies. In the Singaporean programs, the home in Under One Roof (hereafter UOR) represents the major form of housing in Singapore, and the program as a whole demonstrates the workability of Singaporean multiculturalism in a large apartment block. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK) demonstrates the entrepreneurial abilities of even under-educated Singaporeans, with its lead character, a building contractor, living in a large freestanding dwelling – generally reserved for the well-heeled of Singaporean society. And in Living with Lydia (LWL) (a program which demonstrates Singapore’s capacity for global integration), Hong Kong émigré Lydia is forced to share a house (less ostentatious than PCK’s) with the family of the hapless Billy B. Ong. There is perhaps no more telling cultural event than the sitcom. In the 1970s, The Brady Bunch told us more about American values and habits than any number of news reports or cop shows. A nation’s identity is uncovered; it bares its soul to us through the daily tribulations of its TV households. In Singapore, home-based sitcoms have been one of the major success stories in local television production with each of these three programs collecting multiple prizes at the region-wide Asian Television Awards. These sitcoms have been able to reflect the ideals and values of the Singaporean nation to audiences both at ‘home’ and abroad. This article explores the worlds of UOR, PCK, and LWL, and the ways in which each of the fictional homes represents key features of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Singapore. Through ownership and regulation, Singaporean TV programs operate as a firm link between the state and its citizens. These sitcoms follow regular patterns where the ‘man of the house’ is more buffoon than breadwinner – in a country defined by its neo-Confucian morality, sitcoms allow a temporary subversion of patriarchal structures. In this article I argue that the central theme in Singaporean sitcoms is that while home is a personal space, it is also a valuable site for national identities to be played out. These identities are visible in the physical indicators of the exterior and interior living spaces, and the social indicators representing a benign patriarchy and a dominant English language. Structure One of the key features of sitcoms is the structure: cold open – titles – establishing shot – opening scene. Generally the cold opening (aka “the teaser”) takes place inside the home to quickly (re)establish audience familiarity with the location and the characters. The title sequence then features, in the case of LWL and PCK, the characters outside the house (in LWL this is in cartoon format), and in UOR (see Figure 1) it is the communal space of the barbeque area fronting the multi-story HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks. Figure 1: Under One Roof The establishing shot at the end of each title sequence, and when returning from ad breaks, is an external view of the characters’ respective dwellings. In Seinfeld this establishing shot is the New York apartment block, in Roseanne it is the suburban house, and the Singaporean sitcoms follow the same format (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Phua Chu Kang External Visions of the Home This emphasis on exterior buildings reminds the viewer that Singaporean housing is, in many ways, unique. As a city-state (and a young one at that) its spatial constraints are particularly limiting: there simply isn’t room for suburban housing on quarter acre blocks. It rapidly transformed from an “empty rock” to a scattered Malay settlement of bay and riverside kampongs (villages) recognisable by its stilt houses. Then in the shadow of colonialism and the rise of modernity, the kampongs were replaced in many cases by European-inspired terrace houses. Finally, in the post-colonial era high-rise housing began to swell through the territory, creating what came to be known as the “HDB new town”, with some 90% of the population now said to reside in HDB units, and many others living in private high-rises (Chang 102, 104). Exterior shots used in UOR (see Figure 3) consistently emphasise the distinctive HDB blocks. As with the kampong housing, high-rise apartments continue notions of communal living in that “Living below, above and side by side other people requires tolerance of neighbours and a respect towards the environment of the housing estate for the good of all” (104). The provision of readily accessible public housing was part of the “covenant between the newly enfranchised electorate and the elected government” (Chua 47). Figure 3: Establishing shot from UOR In UOR, we see the constant interruption of the lives of the Tan family by their multi-ethnic neighbours. This occurs to such an extent as to be a part of the normal daily flow of life in Singaporean society. Chang argues that despite the normally interventionist activities of the state, it is the “self-enforcing norms” of behaviour that have worked in maintaining a “peaceable society in high-rise housing” (104). This communitarian attitude even extends to the large gated residence of PCK, home to an almost endless stream of relatives and friends. The gate itself seems to perform no restrictive function. But such a “peaceable society” can also be said to be a result of state planning which extends to the “racial majoritarianism” imposed on HDB units in the form of quotas determining “the actual number of households of each of the three major races [Chinese, Malay and Indian] … to be accommodated in a block of flats” (Chua 55). Issues of race are important in Singapore where “the inscription of media imagery bears the cultural discourse and materiality of the social milieu” (Wong 120) perhaps nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the segregation of TV channels along linguistic / cultural lines. These 3 programs all featured on MediaCorp TV’s predominantly English-language Channel 5 and are, in the words of Roland Barthes, “anchored” by dint of their use of English. Home Will Eat Itself The consumption of home-based sitcoms by audiences in their own living-rooms creates a somewhat self-parodying environment. As John Ellis once noted, it is difficult to escape from the notion that “TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113) in that it constantly attempts to “include the audiences own conception of themselves into the texture of its programmes” (115). In each of the three Singaporean programs living-rooms are designed to seat characters in front of a centrally located TV set – at most all the audience sees is the back of the TV, and generally only when the TV is incorporated into a storyline, as in the case of PCK in Figure 4 (note the TV set in the foreground). Figure 4: PCK Even in this episode of PCK when the lead characters stumble across a p*rnographic video starring one of the other lead characters, the viewer only hears the program. Perhaps the most realistic (and acerbic) view of how TV reorganises our lives – both spatially in the physical layout of our homes, and temporally in the way we construct our viewing habits (eating dinner or doing the housework while watching the screen) – is the British “black comedy”, The Royle Family. David Morley (443) notes that “TV and other media have adapted themselves to the circ*mstances of domestic consumption while the domestic arena itself has been simultaneously redefined to accommodate their requirements”. Morley refers to The Royle Family’s narrative that rests on the idea that “for many people, family life and watching TV have become indistinguishable to the extent that, in this fictional household, it is almost entirely conducted from the sitting positions of the viewers clustered around the set” (436). While TV is a central fixture in most sitcoms, its use is mostly as a peripheral thematic device with characters having their viewing interrupted by the arrival of another character, or by a major (within the realms of the plot) event. There is little to suggest that “television schedules have instigated a significant restructuring of family routines” as shown in Livingstone’s audience-based study of UK viewers (104). In the world of the sitcom, the temporalities of characters’ lives do not need to accurately reflect that of “real life” – or if they do, things quickly descend to the bleakness exemplified by the sedentary Royles. As Scannell notes, “broadcast output, like daily life, is largely uneventful, and both are punctuated (predictably and unpredictably) by eventful occasions” (4). To show sitcom characters in this static, passive environment would be anathema to the “real” viewer, who would quickly lose interest. This is not to suggest that sitcoms are totally benign though as with all genres they are “the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing” (Taylor 14). In other words, they feature a contextualisation that is readily identifiable to members of an established society. However, within episodes themselves, it as though time stands still – character development is almost non-existent, or extremely slow at best and we see each episode has “flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children forever” (Taylor 16). It takes some six seasons before the character of PCK becomes a father, although in previous seasons he acts as a mentor to his nephew, Aloysius. Contained in each episode, in true sitcom style, are particular “narrative lines” in which “one-liners and little comic situations [are] strung on a minimal plot line” containing a minor problem “the solution to which will take 22 minutes and pull us gently through the sequence of events toward a conclusion” (Budd et al. 111). It is important to note that the sitcom genre does not work in every culture, as each locale renders the sitcom with “different cultural meanings” (Nielsen 95). Writing of the failure of the Danish series Three whor*s and a Pickpocket (with a premise like that, how could it fail?), Nielsen (112) attributes its failure to the mixing of “kitchen sink realism” with “moments of absurdity” and “psychological drama with expressionistic camera work”, moving it well beyond the strict mode of address required by the genre. In Australia, soap operas Home and Away and Neighbours have been infinitely more popular than our attempts at sitcoms – which had a brief heyday in the 1980s with Hey Dad..!, Kingswood Country and Mother and Son – although Kath and Kim (not studio-based) could almost be counted. Lichter et al. (11) state that “television entertainment can be ‘political’ even when it does not deal with the stuff of daily headlines or partisan controversy. Its latent politics lie in the unavoidable portrayal of individuals, groups, and institutions as a backdrop to any story that occupies the foreground”. They state that US television of the 1960s was dominated by the “idiot sitcom” and that “To appreciate these comedies you had to believe that social conventions were so ironclad they could not tolerate variations. The scripts assumed that any minute violation of social conventions would lead to a crisis that could be played for comic results” (15). Series like Happy Days “harked back to earlier days when problems were trivial and personal, isolated from the concerns of a larger world” (17). By the late 1980s, Roseanne and Married…With Children had “spawned an antifamily-sitcom format that used sarcasm, cynicism, and real life problems to create a type of in-your-face comedy heretofore unseen on prime time” (20). This is markedly different from the type of values presented in Singaporean sitcoms – where filial piety and an unrelenting faith in the family unit is sacrosanct. In this way, Singaporean sitcoms mirror the ideals of earlier US sitcoms which idealise the “egalitarian family in which parental wisdom lies in appeals to reason and fairness rather than demands for obedience” (Lichter et al. 406). Dahlgren notes that we are the products of “an ongoing process of the shaping and reshaping of identity, in response to the pluralised sets of social forces, cultural currents and personal contexts encountered by individuals” where we end up with “composite identities” (318). Such composite identities make the presentation (or re-presentation) of race problematic for producers of mainstream television. Wong argues that “Within the context of PAP hegemony, media presentation of racial differences are manufactured by invoking and resorting to traditional values, customs and practices serving as symbols and content” (118). All of this is bound within a classificatory system in which each citizen’s identity card is inscribed as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (often referred to as CMIO), and a broader social discourse in which “the Chinese are linked to familial values of filial piety and the practice of extended family, the Malays to Islam and rural agricultural activities, and the Indians to the caste system” (Wong 118). However, these sitcoms avoid directly addressing the issue of race, preferring to accentuate cultural differences instead. In UOR the tables are turned when a none-too-subtle dig at the crude nature of mainland Chinese (with gags about the state of public toilets), is soon turned into a more reverential view of Chinese culture and business acumen. Internal Visions of the Home This reverence for Chinese culture is also enacted visually. The loungeroom settings of these three sitcoms all provide examples of the fashioning of the nation through a “ubiquitous semi-visibility” (Noble 59). Not only are the central characters in each of these sitcoms constructed as ethnically Chinese, but the furnishings provide a visible nod to Chinese design in the lacquered screens, chairs and settees of LWL (see Figure 5.1), in the highly visible pair of black inlaid mother-of-pearl wall hangings of UOR (see Figure 5.2) and in the Chinese statuettes and wall-hangings found in the PCK home. Each of these items appears in the central view of the shows most used setting, the lounge/family room. There is often symmetry involved as well; the balanced pearl hangings of UOR are mirrored in a set of silk prints in LWL and the pair of ceramic Chinese lions in PCK. Figure 5.1: LWL Figure 5.2: UOR Thus, all three sitcoms feature design elements that reflect visible links to Chinese culture and sentiments, firmly locating the sitcoms “in Asia”, and providing a sense of the nation. The sets form an important role in constructing a realist environment, one in which “identification with realist narration involves a temporary merger of at least some of the viewer’s identity with the position offered by the text” (Budd et al. 110). These constant silent reminders of the Chinese-based hegemon – the cultural “majoritarianism” – anchors the sitcoms to a determined concept of the nation-state, and reinforces the “imaginative geographies of home” (Blunt and Dowling 247). The Foolish “Father” Figure in a Patriarchal Society But notions of a dominant Chinese culture are dealt with in a variety of ways in these sitcoms – not the least in a playful attitude toward patriarchal figures. In UOR, the Tan family “patriarch” is played by Moses Lim, in PCK, Gurmit Singh plays Phua and in LWL Samuel Chong plays Billy B. Ong (or, as Lydia mistakenly refers to him Billy Bong). Erica Sharrer makes the claim that class is a factor in presenting the father figure as buffoon, and that US sitcoms feature working class families in which “the father is made to look inept, silly, or incompetent have become more frequent” partly in response to changing societal structures where “women are shouldering increasing amounts of financial responsibility in the home” (27). Certainly in the three series looked at here, PCK (the tradesman) is presented as the most derided character in his role as head of the household. Moses Lim’s avuncular Tan Ah Teck is presented mostly as lovably foolish, even when reciting his long-winded moral tales at the conclusion of each episode, and Billy B. Ong, as a middle-class businessman, is presented more as a victim of circ*mstance than as a fool. Sharrer ponders whether “sharing the burden of bread-winning may be associated with fathers perceiving they are losing advantages to which they were traditionally entitled” (35). But is this really a case of males losing the upper hand? Hanke argues that men are commonly portrayed as the target of humour in sitcoms, but only when they “are represented as absurdly incongruous” to the point that “this discursive strategy recuperates patriarchal notions” (90). The other side of the coin is that while the “dominant discursive code of patriarchy might be undone” (but isn’t), “the sitcom’s strategy for containing women as ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ is always contradictory and open to alternative readings” (Hanke 77). In Singapore’s case though, we often return to images of the women in the kitchen, folding the washing or agonising over the work/family dilemma, part of what Blunt and Dowling refer to as the “reproduction of patriarchal and heterosexist relations” often found in representations of “the ideal’ suburban home” (29). Eradicating Singlish One final aspect of these sitcoms is the use of language. PM Lee Hsien Loong once said that he had no interest in “micromanaging” the lives of Singaporeans (2004). Yet his two predecessors (PM Goh and PM Lee Senior) both reflected desires to do so by openly criticising the influence of Phua Chu Kang’s liberal use of colloquial phrases and phrasing. While the use of Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English / SCE) in these sitcoms is partly a reflection of everyday life in Singapore, by taking steps to eradicate it through the Speak Good English movement, the government offers an intrusion into the private home-space of Singaporeans (Ho 17). Authorities fear that increased use of Singlish will damage the nation’s ability to communicate on a global basis, withdrawing to a locally circ*mscribed “pidgin English” (Rubdy 345). Indeed, the use of Singlish in UOR is deliberately underplayed in order to capitalise on overseas sales of the show (which aired, for example, on Australia’s SBS television) (Srilal). While many others have debated the Singlish issue, my concern is with its use in the home environment as representative of Singaporean lifestyles. As novelist Hwee Hwee Tan (2000) notes: Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port. Our language grew out of the hardships of these ancestors. Singlish thus offers users the opportunity to “show solidarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite differences in background)” and against the state’s determined efforts to adopt the language of its colonizer (Ho 19-20). For this reason, PCK’s use of Singlish iterates a “common man” theme in much the same way as Paul Hogan’s “Ocker” image of previous decades was seen as a unifying feature of mainstream Australian values. That the fictional PCK character was eventually “forced” to take “English” lessons (a storyline rapidly written into the program after the direct criticisms from the various Prime Ministers), is a sign that the state has other ideas about the development of Singaporean society, and what is broadcast en masse into Singaporean homes. Conclusion So what do these home-based sitcoms tell us about Singaporean nationalism? Firstly, within the realms of a multiethnic society, mainstream representations reflect the hegemony present in the social and economic structures of Singapore. Chinese culture is dominant (albeit in an English-speaking environment) and Indian, Malay and Other cultures are secondary. Secondly, the home is a place of ontological security, and partial adornment with cultural ornaments signifying Chinese culture are ever-present as a reminder of the Asianness of the sitcom home, ostensibly reflecting the everyday home of the audience. The concept of home extends beyond the plywood-prop walls of the soundstage though. As Noble points out, “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54) through the banal nationalism exhibited in “the furniture of everyday life” (55). In a Singaporean context, Velayutham (extending the work of Morley) explores the comforting notion of Singapore as “home” to its citizens and concludes that the “experience of home and belonging amongst Singaporeans is largely framed in the materiality and social modernity of everyday life” (4). Through the use of sitcoms, the state is complicit in creating and recreating the family home as a site for national identities, adhering to dominant modes of culture and language. References Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Budd, Mike, Steve Craig, and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999. Chang, Sishir. “A High-Rise Vernacular in Singapore’s Housing Development Board Housing.” Berkeley Planning Journal 14 (2000): 97-116. Chua, Beng Huat. “Public Housing Residents as Clients of the State.” Housing Studies 15.1 (2000). Dahlgren, Peter. “Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture”. Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. London: Arnold, 2000. 310-328. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Hanke, Robert. “The ‘Mock-Macho’ Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration.” Western Journal of Communication 62.1 (1998). Ho, Debbie G.E. “‘I’m Not West. I’m Not East. So How Leh?’” English Today 87 22.3 (2006). Lee, Hsien Loong. “Our Future of Opportunity and Promise.” National Day Rally 2004 Speech. 29 Apr. 2007 http://www.gov.sg/nd/ND04.htm>. Lichter, S. Robert, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman. Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1994. Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage, 2002 Morley, David. “What’s ‘Home’ Got to Do with It? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003). Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002). Rubdy, Rani. “Creative Destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement.” World Englishes 20.3 (2001). Scannell, Paddy. “For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television.” Journal of Communication 45.3 (1995). Scharrer, Erica. “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s-1990s.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45.1 (2001). Srilal, Mohan. “Quick Quick: ‘Singlish’ Is Out in Re-education Campaign.” Asia Times Online (28 Aug. 1999). Tan, Hwee Hwee. “A War of Words over ‘Singlish’: Singapore’s Government Wants Its Citizens to Speak Good English, But They Would Rather Be ‘Talking co*ck’.” Time International 160.3 (29 July 2002). Taylor, Ella. “From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Television.” Qualitative Sociology 12.1 (1989). Velayutham, Selvaraj. “Affect, Materiality, and the Gift of Social Life in Singapore.” SOJOURN 19.1 (2004). Wong, Kokkeong. Media and Culture in Singapore: A Theory of Controlled Commodification. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2001. Images Under One Roof: The Special Appearances. Singapore: Television Corporation of Singapore. VCD. 2000. Living with Lydia (Season 1, Volume 1). Singapore: MediaCorp Studios, Blue Max Enterprise. VCD. 2001. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (Season 5, Episode 10). Kuala Lumpur: MediaCorp Studios, Speedy Video Distributors. VCD. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Pugsley, Peter. "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>. APA Style Pugsley, P. (Aug. 2007) "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>.

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Abstract:

About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circ*mscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. 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Root, Nicole Estrella, Bernard Seguin, Piotr Tryjanowski, Chunzhen Liu, Samuel Rawlins, and Anton Imeson. “Attributing Physical and Biological Impacts to Anthropogenic Climate Change.” Nature 453.7193 (2008): 353–58. Roser-Renouf, Connie, and Edward W. Maibach. “Communicating Climate Change.” Encyclopaedia of Science and Technology Communication. Ed. Susanna Hornig Priest. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. 2010. 141–47. Stamm, Keith R., Fiona Clark, and Paula R. Eblacas. “Mass Communication and the Public Understanding of Environmental Problems: The Case of Global Warming.” Public Understanding of Science 9 (2000): 219–37. Turner, Victor. “Dramatic Ritual – Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology.” The Kenyon Review, New Series 1.3 (1979): 80–93. —-. “Symbols in African Ritual.” Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology. Ed. Herbert A. Applebaum. Albany: State U of New York P, 1987. 488–501. —-. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008.

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My message is this in regard to SMS messages and swarming crowds; this is ludicrous behaviour; it is unAustralian. We all share this wonderful country. (NSW Police Assistant Commissioners Mark Goodwin, quoted in Kennedy) The cops hate and fear the swarming packs of Lebanese who respond when some of their numbers are confronted, mobilising quickly via mobile phones and showing open contempt for Australian law. All this is the real world, as distinct from the world preferred by ideological academics who talk about “moral panic” and the oppression of Muslims. They will see only Australian racism as the problem. (Sheehan) The Politics of Transmission On 11 December 2005, as Sydney was settling into early summer haze, there was a race riot on the popular Cronulla beach in the city’s southern suburbs. Hundreds of people, young men especially, gathered for a weekend protest. Their target and pretext were visitors from the culturally diverse suburbs to the west, and the need to defend their women and beaches in the face of such unwelcome incursions and behaviours. In the ensuing days, there were violent raids and assaults criss-crossing back and forth across Sydney’s beaches and suburbs, involving almost farcical yet deadly earnest efforts to identify, respectively, people of “anglo” or “Middle Eastern” appearance (often specifically “Lebanese”) and to threaten or bash them. At the very heart of this state of siege and the fear, outrage, and sadness that gripped those living in Sydney were the politics of transmission. The spark that set off this conflagration was widely believed to have been caused by the transmission of racist and violent “calls to arms” via mobile text messages. Predictably perhaps media outlets sought out experts on text messaging and cell phone culture for commentary, including myself and most mainstream media appeared interested in portraying a fascination for texting and reinforcing its pivotal role in the riots. In participating in media interviews, I found myself torn between wishing to attest to the significance and importance of cell phone culture and texting, on the one hand (or thumb perhaps), while being extremely sceptical about its alleged power in shaping these unfolding events, on the other — not to mention being disturbed about the ethical implications of what had unfolded. In this article, I wish to discuss the subject of transmission and the power of mobile texting culture, something that attracted much attention elsewhere — and to which the Sydney riots offer a fascinating and instructive lesson. My argument runs like this. Mobile phone culture, especially texting, has emerged over the past decade, and has played a central role in communicative and cultural practice in many countries and contexts as scholars have shown (Glotz and Bertschi; Harper, Palen and Taylor). Among other features, texting often plays a significant, if not decisive, role in co-ordinated as well as spontaneous social and political organization and networks, if not, on occasion, in revolution. However, it is important not to over-play the role, significance and force of such texting culture in the exercise of power, or the formation of collective action and identities (whether mobs, crowds, masses, movements, or multitudes). I think texting has been figured in such a hyperbolic and technological determinist way, especially, and ironically, through how it has been represented in other media (print, television, radio, and online). The difficulty then is to identify the precise contribution of mobile texting in organized and disorganized social networks, without the antimonies conferred alternatively by dystopian treatments (such as moral panic) or utopian ones (such as the technological sublime) — something which I shall try to elucidate in what follows. On the Beach Again Largely caught unawares and initially slow to respond, the New South Wales state government responded with a massive show of force and repression. 2005 had been marked by the state and Federal enactment of draconian terror laws. Now here was an opportunity for the government to demonstrate the worth of the instruments and rationales for suppression of liberties, to secure public order against threats of a more (un)civil than martial order. Outflanking the opposition party on law-and-order rhetoric once again, the government immediately formulated new laws to curtail accused and offender’s rights (Brown). The police “locked” down whole suburbs — first Cronulla, then others — and made a show of policing all beaches north and south (Sydney Morning Herald). The race riots were widely reported in the international press, and, not for the first time (especially since the recent Redfern and Macquarie Fields), the city’s self-image of a cosmopolitan, multicultural nation (or in Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s prim and loaded terms, a nation “relaxed and comfortable”) looked like a mirage. Debate raged on why the riots occurred, how harmony could be restored and what the events signified for questions of race and identity — the latter most narrowly construed in the Prime Minister’s insistence that the riots did not reflect underlying racism in Australia (Dodson, Timms and Creagh). There were suggestions that the unrest was rather at base about the contradictions and violence of masculinity, some two-odd decades after Puberty Blues — the famous account of teenage girls growing up on the (Cronulla) Shire beaches. Journalists agonized about whether the media amounted to reporter or amplifier of tensions. In the lead-up to the riots, at their height, and in their wake, there was much emphasis on the role mobile text messages played in creating the riots and sustaining the subsequent atmosphere of violence and racial tension (The Australian; Overington and Warne-Smith). Not only were text messages circulating in the Sydney area, but in other states as well (Daily Telegraph). The volume of such text messages and emails also increased in the wake of the riot (certainly I received one personally from a phone number I did not recognise). New messages were sent to exhort Lebanese-Australians and others to fight back. Those decrying racism, such as the organizers of a rally, pointedly circulated text messages, hoping to spread peace. Media commentators, police, government officials, and many others held such text messages directly and centrally responsible for organizing the riot and for the violent scuffles that followed: The text message hate mail that inspired 5000 people to attend the rally at Cronulla 10 days ago demonstrated to the police the power of the medium. The retaliation that followed, when gangs marauded through Maroubra and Cronulla, was also co-ordinated by text messaging (Davies). It is rioting for a tech-savvy generation. Mobile phones are providing the call to arms for the tribes in the race war dividing Sydney. More than 5000 people turn up to Cronulla on Sunday … many were drawn to the rally, which turned into a mob, by text messages on their mobiles (Hayes and Kearney). Such accounts were crucial to the international framing of the events as this report from The Times in London illustrates: In the days leading up to the riot racist text messages had apparently been circulating calling upon concerned “white” Australians to rally at Cronulla to defend their beach and women. Following the attacks on the volunteer lifeguards, a mobile telephone text campaign started, backed up by frenzied discussions on weblogs, calling on Cronulla locals to rally to protect their beach. In response, a text campaign urged youths from western Sydney to be at Cronulla on Sunday to protect their friends (Maynard). There were calls upon the mobile companies to intercept and ban such messages, with industry spokespeople pointing out text messages were usually only held for twenty-four hours and were in many ways more difficult to intercept than it was to tap phone calls (Burke and Cubby). Mobs and Messages I think there are many reasons to suggest that the transmission of text messages did constitute a moral panic (what I’ve called elsewhere a “mobile panic”; see Goggin), pace columnist Paul Sheehan. Notably the wayward texting drew a direct and immediate response from the state government, with legislative changes that included provisions allowing the confiscation of cell phones and outlawing sending, receipt or keeping of racist or inflammatory text messages. For some days police proceeded to stop cars and board buses and demand to inspect mobiles, checking and reading text messages, arresting at least one person for being responsible for transmitting banned text messages. However, there is another important set of ideas adduced by commentators to explain how people came together to riot in Sydney, taking their cue from Howard Rheingold’s 2002 book Smart Mobs, a widely discussed and prophetic text on social revolution and new technologies. Rheingold sees text messaging as the harbinger of such new, powerful forms of collectivity, studying emergent uses around the world. A prime example he uses to illustrate the “power of the mobile many” is the celebrated overthrow of President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines in January 2001: President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob. More than 1 million Manila residents, mobilized and coordinated by waves of text messages, assembled … Estrada fell. The legend of “Generation Txt” was born (Rheingold 157-58). Rheingold is careful to emphasize the social as much as technical nature of this revolution, yet still sees such developments leading to “smart mobs”. As with his earlier, prescient book Virtual Community (Rheingold 1993) did for the Internet, so has Smart Mobs compellingly fused and circulated a set of ideas about cell phones and the pervasive, wearable and mobile technologies that are their successors. The received view of the overthrow of the Estrada government is summed up in a remark attributed to Estrada himself: “I was ousted by a coup d’text” (Pertierra et al. ch. 6). The text-toppling of Estrada is typically attributed to “Generation Txt”, underlining the power of text messaging and the new social category which marks it, and has now passed into myth. What is less well-known is that the overriding role of the cell phone in the Estrada overthrow has been challenged. In the most detailed study of text messaging and subjectivity in the Philippines, which reviewed accounts of the events of the Estrada overthrow, as well as conducting interviews with participants, Pertierra et al. discern in EDSA2 a “utopian vision of the mobile phone that is characteristic of ‘discourses of sublime technology’”: It focuses squarely on the mobile phone, and ignores the people who used it … the technology is said to possess a mysterious force, called “Text Power” ... it is the technology that does things — makes things happen — not the people who use it. (Pertierra et al. ch. 6) Given the recrudescence of the technological sublime in digital media (on which see Mosco) the detailed examination of precise details and forms of agency and coordination using cell phones is most instructive. Pertierra et al. confirm that the cell phone did play an important role in EDSA2 (the term given to the events surrounding the downfall of Estrada). That role, however, was not the one for which it has usually been praised in the media since the event — namely, that of crowd-drawer par excellence … less than half of our survey respondents who took part in People Power 2 noted that text messaging influenced them to go. If people did attend, it was because they were persuaded to by an ensemble of other reasons … (2002: ch. 6) Instead, they argue, the significance of the cell phone lay firstly, in the way it helped join people who disapproved of Pres. Estrada in a network of complex connectivity … Secondly, the mobile phone was instrumental as an organizational device … In the hands of activists and powerbrokers from politics, the military, business groups and civil society, the mobile phone becomes a “potent communications tool” … (Pertierra et al. 2002: ch. 6) What this revisionist account of the Estrada coup underscores is that careful research and analysis is required to understand how SMS is used and what it signifies. Indeed it is worth going further to step back from either the celebratory or minatory discourses on the cell phone and its powerful effects, and reframe this set of events as very much to do with the mutual construction of society and technology, in which culture is intimately involved. This involves placing both the technology of text messaging and the social and political forces manifested in this uprising in a much wider setting. For instance, in his account of the Estrada crisis Vicente L. Rafael terms the tropes of text messaging and activism evident in the discourses surrounding it as: a set of telecommunicative fantasies among middle-class Filipinos … [that] reveal certain pervasive beliefs of the middle classes … in the power of communication technologies to transmit messages at a distance and in their own ability to possess that power (Rafael 399). For Rafael, rather than possessing instrinsic politics in its own right, text messaging here is about a “media politics (understood in both senses of the phrase: the politics of media systems, but also the inescapable mediation of the political) [that] reveal the unstable workings of Filipino middle-class sentiments” (400). “Little Square of Light” Doubtless there are emergent cultural and social forms created in conjunction with new technologies, which unfreeze and open up (for a time) social relations. As my discussion of the Estrada “coup d’text” shows, however, the dynamics of media, politics and technology in any revolution or riot need to be carefully traced. A full discussion of mobile media and the Sydney uprising will need to wait for another occasion. However, it is worth noting that the text messages in question to which the initial riot had been attributed, were actually read out on one of the country’s highest-rating and most influential talk-radio programs. The contents of such messages had also been detailed in print media, especially tabloids, and been widely discussed (McLellan, Marr). What remains unknown and unclear, however, is the actual use of text messages and cell phones in the conceiving, co-ordination, and improvisational dynamics of the riots, and affective, cultural processing of what occurred. Little retrospective interpretation at all has emerged in the months since the riots, but it certainly felt as if the police and state’s over-reaction, and the arrival of the traditionally hot and lethargic Christmas — combined with the underlying structures of power and feeling to achieve the reinstitution of calm, or rather perhaps the habitual, much less invisible, expression of whiteness as usual. The policing of the crisis had certainly been fuelled by the mobile panic, but setting law enforcement the task of bringing those text messages to book was much like asking them to catch the wind. For analysts, as well as police, the novel and salience appearance of texting also has a certain lure. Yet in concentrating on the deadly power of the cell phone to conjure up a howling or smart mob, or in the fascination with the new modes of transmission of mobile devices, it is important to give credit to the formidable, implacable role of media and cultural representations more generally, in all this, as they are transmitted, received, interpreted and circulated through old as well as new modes, channels and technologies. References The Australian. “SMS Message Goes Out: Let’s March for Racial Tolerance.” The Australian. 17 September, 2005. 6. Brown, M. “Powers Tested in the Text”. Sydney Morning Herald. 20 December, 2005. 7. Burke, K. and Cubby, B. “Police Track Text Message Senders”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23-25 December, 2005. 7. Daily Telegraph. “Police Intercept Interstate Riot SMS — Race Riot: Flames of Fear.” Daily Telegraph. 15 December, 2005. 5. Davis, A. “Flying Bats Rang Alarm”. Sydney Morning Herald. 21 December, 2005. 1, 5. Dodson, L., Timms, A. and Creagh, S. “Tourism Starts Counting the Cost of Race Riots”, Sydney Morning Herald. 21 December, 2005. 1. Goggin, G. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2006. In press. Glotz, P., and Bertschi, S. (ed.) Thumb Culture: Social Trends and Mobile Phone Use, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Harper, R., Palen, L. and Taylor, A. (ed.)_ _The Inside Text: Social, Cultural and Design Perspectives on SMS. Dordrecht: Springer. Hayes, S. and Kearney, S. “Call to Arms Transmitted by Text”. Sydney Morning Herald. 13 December, 2005. 4. Kennedy, L. “Police Act Swiftly to Curb Attacks”. Sydney Morning Herald. 13 December, 2005. 6. Maynard, R. “Battle on Beach as Mob Vows to Defend ‘Aussie Way of Life.’ ” The Times. 12 December 2005. 29. Marr, D. “One-Way Radio Plays by Its Own Rules.” Sydney Morning Herald. 13 December, 2005. 6. McLellan, A. “Solid Reportage or Fanning the Flames?” The Australian. 15 December, 2005. 16. Mosco, V. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Overington, C. and Warne-Smith, D. “Countdown to Conflict”. The Australian. 17 December, 2005. 17, 20. Pertierra, R., E.F. Ugarte, A. Pingol, J. Hernandez, and N.L. Dacanay, N.L. Txt-ing Selves: Cellphones and Philippine Modernity. Manila: De La Salle University Press, 2002. 1 January 2006 http://www.finlandembassy.ph/texting1.htm>. Rafael, V. L. “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines.” Public Culture 15 (2003): 399-425. Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002. Sheehan, P. “Nasty Reality Surfs In as Ugly Tribes Collide”. Sydney Morning Herald. 12 December, 2005. 13. Sydney Morning Herald. “Beach Wars 1: After Lockdown”. Editorial. Sydney Morning Herald. 20 December, 2005. 12. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "SMS Riot: Transmitting Race on a Sydney Beach, December 2005." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/02-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (Mar. 2006) "SMS Riot: Transmitting Race on a Sydney Beach, December 2005," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/02-goggin.php>.

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IntroductionCulinary education in Ireland has long been influenced by culinary education being delivered in catering colleges in the United Kingdom (UK). Institutionalised culinary education started in Britain through the sponsorship of guild conglomerates (Lawson and Silver). The City & Guilds of London Institute for the Advancement of Technical Education opened its central institution in 1884. Culinary education in Ireland began in Kevin Street Technical School in the late 1880s. This consisted of evening courses in plain cookery. Dublin’s leading chefs and waiters of the time participated in developing courses in French culinary classics and these courses ran in Parnell Square Vocational School from 1926 (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). St Mary’s College of Domestic Science was purpose built and opened in 1941 in Cathal Brugha Street. This was renamed the Dublin College of Catering in the 1950s. The Council for Education, Recruitment and Training for the Hotel Industry (CERT) was set up in 1963 and ran cookery courses using the City & Guilds of London examinations as its benchmark. In 1982, when the National Craft Curriculum Certification Board (NCCCB) was established, CERT began carrying out their own examinations. This allowed Irish catering education to set its own standards, establish its own criteria and award its own certificates, roles which were previously carried out by City & Guilds of London (Corr). CERT awarded its first certificates in professional cookery in 1989. The training role of CERT was taken over by Fáilte Ireland, the State tourism board, in 2003. Changing Trends in Cookery and Culinary Textbooks at DIT The Dublin College of Catering which became part of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) is the flagship of catering education in Ireland (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The first DIT culinary award, was introduced in 1984 Certificate in Diet Cookery, later renamed Higher Certificate in Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts. On the 19th of July 1992 the Dublin Institute of Technology Act was enacted into law. This Act enabled DIT to provide vocational and technical education and training for the economic, technological, scientific, commercial, industrial, social and cultural development of the State (Ireland 1992). In 1998, DIT was granted degree awarding powers by the Irish state, enabling it to make major awards at Higher Certificate, Ordinary Bachelor Degree, Honors Bachelor Degree, Masters and PhD levels (Levels six to ten in the National Framework of Qualifications), as well as a range of minor, special purpose and supplemental awards (National NQAI). It was not until 1999, when a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education in Ireland (Duff, The Story), that a more diverse range of textbooks was recommended based on a new liberal/vocational educational philosophy. DITs School of Culinary Arts currently offers: Higher Certificates Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts; Higher Certificate in Culinary Arts (Professional Culinary Practice); BSc (Ord) in Baking and Pastry Arts Management; BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts; BSc (Hons) Bar Management and Entrepreneurship; BSc (Hons) in Culinary Entrepreneurship; and, MSc in Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development. From 1942 to 1970, haute cuisine, or classical French cuisine was the most influential cooking trend in Irish cuisine and this is reflected in the culinary textbooks of that era. Haute cuisine has been influenced by many influential writers/chefs such as Francois La Varenne, Antoine Carême, Auguste Escoffier, Ferand Point, Paul Bocuse, Anton Mosiman, Albert and Michel Roux to name but a few. The period from 1947 to 1974 can be viewed as a “golden age” of haute cuisine in Ireland, as more award-winning world-class restaurants traded in Dublin during this period than at any other time in history (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). Hotels and restaurants were run in the Escoffier partie system style which is a system of hierarchy among kitchen staff and areas of the kitchens specialising in cooking particular parts of the menu i.e sauces (saucier), fish (poissonnier), larder (garde manger), vegetable (legumier) and pastry (patissier). In the late 1960s, Escoffier-styled restaurants were considered overstaffed and were no longer financially viable. Restaurants began to be run by chef-proprietors, using plate rather than silver service. Nouvelle cuisine began in the 1970s and this became a modern form of haute cuisine (Gillespie). The rise in chef-proprietor run restaurants in Ireland reflected the same characteristics of the nouvelle cuisine movement. Culinary textbooks such as Practical Professional Cookery, La Technique, The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking, The Art of the Garde Mange and Patisserie interpreted nouvelle cuisine techniques and plated dishes. In 1977, the DIT began delivering courses in City & Guilds Advanced Kitchen & Larder 706/3 and Pastry 706/3, the only college in Ireland to do so at the time. Many graduates from these courses became the future Irish culinary lecturers, chef-proprietors, and culinary leaders. The next two decades saw a rise in fusion cooking, nouvelle cuisine, and a return to French classical cooking. Numerous Irish chefs were returning to Ireland having worked with Michelin starred chefs and opening new restaurants in the vein of classical French cooking, such as Kevin Thornton (Wine Epergne & Thorntons). These chefs were, in turn, influencing culinary training in DIT with a return to classical French cooking. New Classical French culinary textbooks such as New Classical Cuisine, The Modern Patisserie, The French Professional Pastry Series and Advanced Practical Cookery were being used in DIT In the last 15 years, science in cooking has become the current trend in culinary education in DIT. This is acknowledged by the increased number of culinary science textbooks and modules in molecular gastronomy offered in DIT. This also coincided with the launch of the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts in DIT moving culinary education from a technical to a liberal education. Books such as The Science of Cooking, On Food and Cooking, The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy now appear on recommended textbooks for culinary students.For the purpose of this article, practical classes held at DIT will be broken down as follows: hot kitchen class, larder classes, and pastry classes. These classes had recommended textbooks for each area. These can be broken down into three sections: hot kitche, larder, and pastry. This table identifies that the textbooks used in culinary education at DIT reflected the trends in cookery at the time they were being used. Hot Kitchen Larder Pastry Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. The International Confectioner. 1968. Le Repertoire De La Cuisine. 1914. The Larder Chef, Classical Food Preparation and Presentation. 1969. Patisserie. 1971. All in the Cooking, Books 1&2. 1943 The Art of the Garde Manger. 1973. The Modern Patissier. 1986 Larousse Gastronomique. 1961. New Classic Cuisine. 1989. Professional French Pastry Series. 1987. Practical Cookery. 1962. The Curious Cook. 1990. Complete Pastrywork Techniques. 1991. Practical Professional Cookery. 1972. On Food and Cooking. The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991 La Technique. 1976. Advanced Practical Cookery. 1995. Desserts: A Lifelong Passion. 1994. Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. 1979. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Culinary Artistry. Dornenburg, 1996. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach. 1985. Garde Manger, The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. 2004. Grande Finales: The Art of the Plated Dessert. 1997. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Fat Duck Cookbook. 2009. Modern Gastronomy. 2010. Tab.1. DIT Culinary Textbooks.1942–1960 During the first half of the 20th century, senior staff working in Dublin hotels, restaurants and clubs were predominately foreign born and trained. The two decades following World War II could be viewed as the “golden age” of haute cuisine in Dublin as many award-wining restaurants traded in the city at this time (Mac Con Iomaire “The Emergence”). Culinary education in DIT in 1942 saw the use of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire as the defining textbook (Bowe). This was first published in 1903 and translated into English in 1907. In 1979 Cracknell and Kaufmann published a more comprehensive and update edited version under the title The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery by Escoffier for use in culinary colleges. This demonstrated that Escoffier’s work had withstood the test of the decades and was still relevant. Le Repertoire de La Cuisine by Louis Saulnier, a student of Escoffier, presented the fundamentals of French classical cookery. Le Repertoire was inspired by the work of Escoffier and contains thousands of classical recipes presented in a brief format that can be clearly understood by chefs and cooks. Le Repertoire remains an important part of any DIT culinary student’s textbook list. All in the Cooking by Josephine Marnell, Nora Breathnach, Ann Mairtin and Mor Murnaghan (1946) was one of the first cookbooks to be published in Ireland (Cashmann). This book was a domestic science cooking book written by lecturers in the Cathal Brugha Street College. There is a combination of classical French recipes and Irish recipes throughout the book. 1960s It was not until the 1960s that reference book Larousse Gastronomique and new textbooks such as Practical Cookery, The Larder Chef and International Confectionary made their way into DIT culinary education. These books still focused on classical French cooking but used lighter sauces and reflected more modern cooking equipment and techniques. Also, this period was the first time that specific books for larder and pastry work were introduced into the DIT culinary education system (Bowe). Larousse Gastronomique, which used Le Guide Culinaire as a basis (James), was first published in 1938 and translated into English in 1961. Practical Cookery, which is still used in DIT culinary education, is now in its 12th edition. Each edition has built on the previous, however, there is now criticism that some of the content is dated (Richards). Practical Cookery has established itself as a key textbook in culinary education both in Ireland and England. Practical Cookery recipes were laid out in easy to follow steps and food commodities were discussed briefly. The Larder Chef was first published in 1969 and is currently in its 4th edition. This book focuses on classical French larder techniques, butchery and fishmongery but recognises current trends and fashions in food presentation. The International Confectioner is no longer in print but is still used as a reference for basic recipes in pastry classes (Campbell). The Modern Patissier demonstrated more updated techniques and methods than were used in The International Confectioner. The Modern Patissier is still used as a reference book in DIT. 1970s The 1970s saw the decline in haute cuisine in Ireland, as it was in the process of being replaced by nouvelle cuisine. Irish chefs were being influenced by the works of chefs such as Paul Boucuse, Roger Verge, Michel Guerard, Raymond Olivier, Jean & Pierre Troisgros, Alain Senderens, Jacques Maniere, Jean Delaveine and Michel Guerard who advanced the uncomplicated natural presentation in food. Henri Gault claims that it was his manifesto published in October 1973 in Gault-Millau magazine which unleashed the movement called La Nouvelle Cuisine Française (Gault). In nouvelle cuisine, dishes in Carème and Escoffier’s style were rejected as over-rich and complicated. The principles underpinning this new movement focused on the freshness of ingredients, and lightness and harmony in all components and accompaniments, as well as basic and simple cooking methods and types of presentation. This was not, however, a complete overthrowing of the past, but a moving forward in the long-term process of cuisine development, utilising the very best from each evolution (Cousins). Books such as Practical Professional Cookery, The Art of the Garde Manger and Patisserie reflected this new lighter approach to cookery. Patisserie was first published in 1971, is now in its second edition, and continues to be used in DIT culinary education. This book became an essential textbook in pastrywork, and covers the entire syllabus of City & Guilds and CERT (now Fáilte Ireland). Patisserie covered all basic pastry recipes and techniques, while the second edition (in 1993) included new modern recipes, modern pastry equipment, commodities, and food hygiene regulations reflecting the changing catering environment. The Art of the Garde Manger is an American book highlighting the artistry, creativity, and cooking sensitivity need to be a successful Garde Manger (the larder chef who prepares cold preparation in a partie system kitchen). It reflected the dynamic changes occurring in the culinary world but recognised the importance of understanding basic French culinary principles. It is no longer used in DIT culinary education. La Technique is a guide to classical French preparation (Escoffier’s methods and techniques) using detailed pictures and notes. This book remains a very useful guide and reference for culinary students. Practical Professional Cookery also became an important textbook as it was written with the student and chef/lecturer in mind, as it provides a wider range of recipes and detailed information to assist in understanding the tasks at hand. It is based on classical French cooking and compliments Practical Cookery as a textbook, however, its recipes are for ten portions as opposed to four portions in Practical Cookery. Again this book was written with the City & Guilds examinations in mind. 1980s During the mid-1980s, many young Irish chefs and waiters emigrated. They returned in the late-1980s and early-1990s having gained vast experience of nouvelle and fusion cuisine in London, Paris, New York, California and elsewhere (Mac Con Iomaire, “The Changing”). These energetic, well-trained professionals began opening chef-proprietor restaurants around Dublin, providing invaluable training and positions for up-and-coming young chefs, waiters and culinary college graduates. The 1980s saw a return to French classical cookery textbook such as Professional Cookery: The Process Approach, New Classic Cuisine and the Professional French Pastry series, because educators saw the need for students to learn the basics of French cookery. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach was written by Daniel Stevenson who was, at the time, a senior lecturer in Food and Beverage Operations at Oxford Polytechnic in England. Again, this book was written for students with an emphasis on the cookery techniques and the practices of professional cookery. The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking by Escoffier continued to be used. This book is used by cooks and chefs as a reference for ingredients in dishes rather than a recipe book, as it does not go into detail in the methods as it is assumed the cook/chef would have the required experience to know the method of production. Le Guide Culinaire was only used on advanced City & Guilds courses in DIT during this decade (Bowe). New Classic Cuisine by the classically French trained chefs, Albert and Michel Roux (Gayot), is a classical French cuisine cookbook used as a reference by DIT culinary educators at the time because of the influence the Roux brothers were having over the English fine dining scene. The Professional French Pastry Series is a range of four volumes of pastry books: Vol. 1 Doughs, Batters and Meringues; Vol. 2 Creams, Confections and Finished Desserts; Vol. 3 Petit Four, Chocolate, Frozen Desserts and Sugar Work; and Vol. 4 Decorations, Borders and Letters, Marzipan, Modern Desserts. These books about classical French pastry making were used on the advanced pastry courses at DIT as learners needed a basic knowledge of pastry making to use them. 1990s Ireland in the late 1990s became a very prosperous and thriving European nation; the phenomena that became known as the “celtic tiger” was in full swing (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The Irish dining public were being treated to a resurgence of traditional Irish cuisine using fresh wholesome food (Hughes). The Irish population was considered more well-educated and well travelled than previous generations and culinary students were now becoming interested in the science of cooking. In 1996, the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts program at DIT was first mooted (Hegarty). Finally, in 1999, a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education underpinned by a new liberal/vocational philosophy in education (Duff). Teaching culinary arts in the past had been through a vocational education focus whereby students were taught skills for industry which were narrow, restrictive, and constraining, without the necessary knowledge to articulate the acquired skill. The reading list for culinary students reflected this new liberal education in culinary arts as Harold McGee’s books The Curious Cook and On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen explored and explained the science of cooking. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen proposed that “science can make cooking more interesting by connecting it with the basic workings of the natural world” (Vega 373). Advanced Practical Cookery was written for City & Guilds students. In DIT this book was used by advanced culinary students sitting Fáilte Ireland examinations, and the second year of the new BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts. Culinary Artistry encouraged chefs to explore the creative process of culinary composition as it explored the intersection of food, imagination, and taste (Dornenburg). This book encouraged chefs to develop their own style of cuisine using fresh seasonal ingredients, and was used for advanced students but is no longer a set text. Chefs were being encouraged to show their artistic traits, and none more so than pastry chefs. Grande Finale: The Art of Plated Desserts encouraged advanced students to identify different “schools” of pastry in relation to the world of art and design. The concept of the recipes used in this book were built on the original spectacular pieces montées created by Antoine Carême. 2000–2013 After nouvelle cuisine, recent developments have included interest in various fusion cuisines, such as Asia-Pacific, and in molecular gastronomy. Molecular gastronomists strive to find perfect recipes using scientific methods of investigation (Blanck). Hervè This experimentation with recipes and his introduction to Nicholos Kurti led them to create a food discipline they called “molecular gastronomy”. In 1998, a number of creative chefs began experimenting with the incorporation of ingredients and techniques normally used in mass food production in order to arrive at previously unattainable culinary creations. This “new cooking” (Vega 373) required a knowledge of chemical reactions and physico-chemical phenomena in relation to food, as well as specialist tools, which were created by these early explorers. It has been suggested that molecular gastronomy is “science-based cooking” (Vega 375) and that this concept refers to conscious application of the principles and tools from food science and other disciplines for the development of new dishes particularly in the context of classical cuisine (Vega). The Science of Cooking assists students in understanding the chemistry and physics of cooking. This book takes traditional French techniques and recipes and refutes some of the claims and methods used in traditional recipes. Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen is used for the advanced larder modules at DIT. This book builds on basic skills in the Larder Chef book. Molecular gastronomy as a subject area was developed in 2009 in DIT, the first of its kind in Ireland. The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy underpin the theoretical aspects of the module. This module is taught to 4th year BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts students who already have three years experience in culinary education and the culinary industry, and also to MSc Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development students. Conclusion Escoffier, the master of French classical cuisine, still influences culinary textbooks to this day. His basic approach to cooking is considered essential to teaching culinary students, allowing them to embrace the core skills and competencies required to work in the professional environment. Teaching of culinary arts at DIT has moved vocational education to a more liberal basis, and it is imperative that the chosen textbooks reflect this development. This liberal education gives the students a broader understanding of cooking, hospitality management, food science, gastronomy, health and safety, oenology, and food product development. To date there is no practical culinary textbook written specifically for Irish culinary education, particularly within this new liberal/vocational paradigm. There is clearly a need for a new textbook which combines the best of Escoffier’s classical French techniques with the more modern molecular gastronomy techniques popularised by Ferran Adria. References Adria, Ferran. Modern Gastronomy A to Z: A Scientific and Gastronomic Lexicon. London: CRC P, 2010. Barker, William. The Modern Patissier. London: Hutchinson, 1974. Barham, Peter. The Science of Cooking. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2000. Bilheux, Roland, Alain Escoffier, Daniel Herve, and Jean-Maire Pouradier. Special and Decorative Breads. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987. Blanck, J. "Molecular Gastronomy: Overview of a Controversial Food Science Discipline." Journal of Agricultural and Food Information 8.3 (2007): 77-85. Blumenthal, Heston. The Fat Duck Cookbook. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Bode, Willi, and M.J. Leto. The Larder Chef. Oxford: Butter-Heinemann, 1969. Bowe, James. Personal Communication with Author. Dublin. 7 Apr. 2013. Boyle, Tish, and Timothy Moriarty. Grand Finales, The Art of the Plated Dessert. New York: John Wiley, 1997. Campbell, Anthony. Personal Communication with Author. Dublin, 10 Apr. 2013. Cashman, Dorothy. "An Exploratory Study of Irish Cookbooks." Unpublished M.Sc Thesis. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. Ceserani, Victor, Ronald Kinton, and David Foskett. Practical Cookery. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1962. Ceserani, Victor, and David Foskett. Advanced Practical Cookery. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1995. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma, 1987. Cousins, John, Kevin Gorman, and Marc Stierand. "Molecular Gastronomy: Cuisine Innovation or Modern Day Alchemy?" International Journal of Hospitality Management 22.3 (2009): 399–415. Cracknell, Harry Louis, and Ronald Kaufmann. Practical Professional Cookery. London: MacMillan, 1972. Cracknell, Harry Louis, and Ronald Kaufmann. Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. New York: John Wiley, 1979. Dornenburg, Andrew, and Karen Page. Culinary Artistry. New York: John Wiley, 1996. Duff, Tom, Joseph Hegarty, and Matt Hussey. The Story of the Dublin Institute of Technology. Dublin: Blackhall, 2000. Escoffier, Auguste. Le Guide Culinaire. France: Flammarion, 1921. Escoffier, Auguste. The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. Ed. Crachnell, Harry, and Ronald Kaufmann. New York: John Wiley, 1986. Gault, Henri. Nouvelle Cuisine, Cooks and Other People: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1995. Devon: Prospect, 1996. 123-7. Gayot, Andre, and Mary, Evans. "The Best of London." Gault Millau (1996): 379. Gillespie, Cailein. "Gastrosophy and Nouvelle Cuisine: Entrepreneurial Fashion and Fiction." British Food Journal 96.10 (1994): 19-23. Gisslen, Wayne. Professional Cooking. Hoboken: John Wiley, 2011. Hanneman, Leonard. Patisserie. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1971. Hegarty, Joseph. Standing the Heat. New York: Haworth P, 2004. Hsu, Kathy. "Global Tourism Higher Education Past, Present and Future." Journal of Teaching in Travel and Tourism 5.1/2/3 (2006): 251-267 Hughes, Mairtin. Ireland. Victoria: Lonely Planet, 2000. Ireland. Irish Statute Book: Dublin Institute of Technology Act 1992. Dublin: Stationery Office, 1992. James, Ken. Escoffier: The King of Chefs. Hambledon: Cambridge UP, 2002. Lawson, John, and Harold, Silver. Social History of Education in England. London: Methuen, 1973. Lehmann, Gilly. "English Cookery Books in the 18th Century." The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 227-9. Marnell, Josephine, Nora Breathnach, Ann Martin, and Mor Murnaghan. All in the Cooking Book 1 & 2. Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland, 1946. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. "The Changing Geography and Fortunes of Dublin's Haute Cuisine Restaurants, 1958-2008." Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisiplinary Research 14.4 (2011): 525-45. ---. "Chef Liam Kavanagh (1926-2011)." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 12.2 (2012): 4-6. ---. "The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History". PhD. Thesis. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. McGee, Harold. The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore. New York: Hungry Minds, 1990. ---. On Food and Cooking the Science and Lore of the Kitchen. London: Harper Collins, 1991. Montague, Prosper. Larousse Gastronomique. New York: Crown, 1961. National Qualification Authority of Ireland. "Review by the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland (NQAI) of the Effectiveness of the Quality Assurance Procedures of the Dublin Institute of Technology." 2010. 18 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.dit.ie/media/documents/services/qualityassurance/terms_of_ref.doc› Nicolello, Ildo. Complete Pastrywork Techniques. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991. Pepin, Jacques. La Technique. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1976. Richards, Peter. "Practical Cookery." 9th Ed. Caterer and Hotelkeeper (2001). 18 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.catererandhotelkeeper.co.uk/Articles/30/7/2001/31923/practical-cookery-ninth-edition-victor-ceserani-ronald-kinton-and-david-foskett.htm›. Roux, Albert, and Michel Roux. New Classic Cuisine. New York: Little, Brown, 1989. Roux, Michel. Desserts: A Lifelong Passion. London: Conran Octopus, 1994. Saulnier, Louis. Le Repertoire De La Cuisine. London: Leon Jaeggi, 1914. Sonnenschmidt, Fredric, and John Nicholas. The Art of the Garde Manger. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973. Spang, Rebecca. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Stevenson, Daniel. Professional Cookery the Process Approach. London: Hutchinson, 1985. The Culinary Institute of America. Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. Hoboken: New Jersey, 2004. Vega, Cesar, and Job, Ubbink. "Molecular Gastronomy: A Food Fad or Science Supporting Innovation Cuisine?". Trends in Food Science & Technology 19 (2008): 372-82. Wilfred, Fance, and Michael Small. The New International Confectioner: Confectionary, Cakes, Pastries, Desserts, Ices and Savouries. 1968.

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Abstract:

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, hom*o Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how hom*o Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

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Abstract:

Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. Conjoining the future-oriented performative mode of disidentification and the forking of the past and the present by ghostly performances, disidentificatory ghostly performances enable not only people of colour but also particularly diasporic populations of colour to challenge racial chains of signification and orchestrate future-oriented visions, where time is of the most compassion, at its utmost capacity.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–168.Axel, Brian Keith. “Time and Threat: Questioning the Production of the Diaspora as an Object of Study.” History and Anthropology 9.4 (1996): 415–443.Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Bush, Christopher. “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age.” Representations 99.1 (2007): 74–98. Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. 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Abstract:

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peaco*ck with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.