Journal articles on the topic 'Architecture, Domestic – South Africa – North-West'

<p class="Abstracttext-VITRUVIOCxSpFirst">Previously colonized by both Holland and Britain, South Africans have always borrowed; many taking aesthetic clues from memories of ‘home’. Applied seemingly irrelevantly, these ‘clues’ often border on the pastiche. Pre and post Union in 1910, the British-controlled colonies of Natal and the Cape absorbed imported architectural influences which not only introduced an Arts and Crafts layer to Victorian Gothic and Classical revivals, but introduced vital new ideas, namely Art Deco and Modernism.</p><p class="Abstracttext-VITRUVIOCxSpFirst">Somehow this polemic embraced another revival: a melange of Tudor and Elizabethan focusing on detail, craftsmanship and nostalgia. The ‘Tudorbethan’ Revival occurred at a vital point in the inter-war era, and it is contended that this style demonstrated a calculated resistance to the hybrid ‘Union Period’ architecture and its political role in forging a common diasporic identity and culture in the 1930s, rather than a mere application of fashion.</p><p class="Abstracttext-VITRUVIOCxSpFirst">This paper situates the Tudorbethan Revival within contemporary architectural themes in Durban, South Africa, and contextualises the socio-political production of buildings between the wars before examining the works of architects who conceived this well-crafted, nostalgic and irrelevant architecture. It concludes by comparing this complex aesthetic with the contemporary architectural thread of ‘Gwelo’ Goodman’s Cape Dutch Revival suggesting the degree to which domestic architecture is able to support political positions in contested societies.</p>

This paper is a first attempt to describe the flora of domestic gardens from an urban environment in South Africa. A total of 835 plant species of 501 genera in 145 families was recorded from 100 gardens in a 54.9 km2 area of the Tlokwe City Municipality [Potchefstroom], North-West Province. A substantial number of alien species (580) were recorded, but also many indigenous species (255) that included South African endemics (61) and protected species on the National Red Data List (18). A number of the alien species that were commonly cultivated are declared invasive plants in South Africa (88). Most of the cultivated indigenous taxa originated from the southeastern provinces of South Africa. This study provides new knowledge on the often overlooked biodiversity of urban areas in a developing, mega-diverse country. Most studies of a similar nature were conducted in the developed countries of Europe and are of limited use in the development of management plans of urban ecosystems in southern Africa.

Thanks to a number of well-stratified sequences, the authors can offer a new history of clay image-making in West Africa. From the first known human occupation in the second millennium BC, the shaped clay figurines remain remarkably conservative, suggesting their use as offerings, toys or in games or some role rooted in domestic everyday life. Only in the late first millennium BC and in one area (Walasa) does a more formal art emerge in north-eastern Nigeria, a development contemporary with the famous Nok culture further south.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) dissemination occurred from December 2019 and quickly spread to all countries. Infected patients with COVID-19 have had a wide range of symptoms, ranging from mild to severe illness. The most mortality was observed in patients with underlying disease and over 45 years. World statistics have shown that the COVID-19 outbreak is most expanded in Middle Eastern, West Asian, European, North, and South American countries, and is least expanded in African countries. Therefore, the aim of the paper was the evaluation of six African countries including Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Guinea, Togo, and Djibouti to find why this disease is least expanded in African countries. Study was conducted by Questioner for countries health organizers to define their different aspect exposure and fight with COVID-19 including epidemiology, clinical aspects of the disease, case definitions, diagnosis laboratory confirmation, and referral of cases by the portal of entry, case management, and disease prevention in these countries. According to this opinion review, due to the low international flights and low domestic travel, the spread, and prevalence of COVID-19 was low and the return of the immigrants of these countries has caused the spread of COVID-19 among these countries. Experience, preparation, and impact of previous infections epidemic such as the Ebola virus epidemic would have beneficial, which have promoted certain reflexes among people that cause low dissemination in these countries.

Only in the recent few years have a number of facsimile publications on architecture offered a possibility of studying the original texts from different time periods. Those, already rare studies on the theory of architecture in the western civilization, almost regularly completely omit the Byzantine achievements in the so-called entirety of thoughtfulness (enkyklios paideia), that was a main characteristic of Byzantine learning. This learning, based on the ancient Greek and Hellenistic foundations, in many ways concern architecture, especially the architectural theory. That is why writing a good account of the architectural theory of this, historically such an important country as Byzantium, in such a long historical period (since 312 till 1453), has been a difficult task (this contribution is just the initial part of the study). One should not be disregarded that the architectural theories are never completely independent of historical geographical or even personal prejudices of their authors. In this sense, a subject matter of this treatise is just one 1141 year long part of the architectural theory of the West (West - in civilizational terms, not a political West), the part that rests on Christian foundations that is the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant ones, mainly. It is all treated in order, from ancient pagan Greece and Rome, ancient and Middle Ages Orthodox Byzantium, until Middle Ages and New Age Europe, altogether, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe, and then those parts of the world in which the said civilizational circle managed to take root in: parts of Asia, North and South America, parts of Africa and Australia.

This study examines the trends in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows to Africa, with the ultimate aim of proposing implications for policy action. The main source of data for this study is the UNCTAD (2018) database which at the time of the study contained FDI data from 1990 to 2016. The findings show that, although Africa is in dire need for FDI due to scarcity of capital, it is not able to attract as much FDI compared to advanced countries and other developing regions. The little FDI that comes to Africa is concentrated sub-regionally and country-wise. Region-wise, most FDI is concentrated on Southern Africa followed by Northern Africa with East Africa and Central Africa at the bottom. Country-wise, the two main recipients of FDI in each sub-region are Angola and South Africa (Southern Africa); Egypt and Morocco (North Africa); Nigeria and Ghana (West Africa); Tanzania and Ethiopia (East Africa) and Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Central Africa). The FDI that comes into the continent is further concentrated in the primary (extractive) sector. As a result the benefits to the region have not been as significant as in East Asia where FDI was mainly into the secondary (manufacturing) sector. It is concluded that, FDI is a growth point that countries can count on as a source of resources for development, however, Africa need to change the approach adopted in promoting FDI, which focuses on providing incentives to creating a domestic environment conducive to entrepreneurship and business in general.

By the beginning of the third millennium, Euro-American culture, which is usually labelled as global culture, can be encountered in almost every corner of the world, even in remote areas. Not only physical structures but also social structures tend to be affected by the new culture. These phenomena evoke questions about the life and continuity of local traditions in the face of development or globalisation.The dominant perspective argued that a global culture was being merged through the economic and political domination of the USA, which forced its hegemonic power into local cultures. This expansive cultural wave was regarded as a ‘corrosive homogenizing force’ against cultural diversity. The local culture would eventually give way under the relentless modernizing force of American cultural imperialism. With reference to the rise of Japanese economic domination, however, some scholars indicated that there is a new phenomenon of survival of the local culture. The Japanese adopted a global outlook and adapted to local conditions. This phenomenon however, should not be overly romanticized, due to the fact that global relations between the West and the East, or the North and the South are actually uneven, asymmetrical and unequal. Let alone the majority of developing countries are implementing development programmes that barely copy the capitalist development of Euro-American countries. Aspects of the Japanese experience however, still have influence on developing countries seeking revitalisation. In developing countries, where development and globalization are taking place, ordinary people and their ordinary settlements are the crucial point of cultural interaction, which has not been well understood in terms of the process itself or the outcomes. It raises fundamental questions about the relationship between broad socio-economic and cultural change, under the general heading of ‘development’, to housing environments, as well as the more intimate relationship at the micro level between dwellers and their dwellings in situation where transformation is carried out by the people themselves. The use of domestic space as a part of culture is certainly influenced by the process of development and eventually results in new environmental outcomes in domestic architecture. This phenomenon could be spotlighted from Kent’s segmentation theory that concerns the relation of culture segmentation to architecture segmentation. It is of interest to investigate the process of architecture segmentation within the development process on the same level of culture segmentation that is still questioned by Kent’s proposition. This paper investigates this within the context of Indonesia’s development programme. It consists of a detailed empirical study of three Madurese housing environments, which represent a continuum of settlements from the inner city of Surabaya to the inner remote area of Madura Island. Participant observation by living with households, in-depth interviews, measured drawings and photographs were the main methods of data collection complemented by a statistical survey. A projective test using models and in-depth interviews were used to explore peoples’ preferences as a tool to forecast future actions. The central conclusion to be drawn from this research is that domestic architecture in Madura has undergone a fundamental transformation, mainly since Independence. This transformation is manifested in domestic space organisation and housing style. Although Kent’s theory appears to explain the match between culture segmentation and architecture segmentation, that proposition alone was found inadequate in explaining the differences within the highest levels of culture segmentation. This research found that within the same level of segmentation, the most segmented culture, persist the different architecture segmentation. Other factors, such as changes in the economic system, social structure and social relations, interplay within the development process affecting the different types of domestic space segmentation within the most segmented culture. Furthermore, within the transformation process, where the old and new forms meet, the nuance of hybridisation is always present. People adopted new forms that separated from existing practices and recombined with new forms in new practices. It is a part of people’s adaptation to smooth the transformation process of culture change.

AbstractThe fortifications of the Hellenistic and Roman city of Tocra are over 2 km long (including the sea-wall) and comprise a curtain wall up to 2 m wide flanked by 31 rectangular towers. Three main structural phases were noted in the survey carried out in 1966 by David Smith: (1) Hellenistic walls of isodomic ashlar, (2) later Hellenistic work of isodomic ashlar with bevelled edges, associated with the indented trace along the south rampart, and (3) an extensive rebuild of plain ashlar blocks including the towers and reconstruction to the East and West Gates, dateable, on the basis of Procopius, to the reign of Justinian. The general significance of the fortifications at Tocra is considered in the second part: these include the Hellenistic indented trace along the south side, later reinforced by towers in the sixth century AD. Also of wider importance was the use of an outer wall or proteichisma, and the pentagonal, pointed towers at the two main gates. Both these elements were unusual in Byzantine North Africa and they are discussed as part of the more general repertory of Byzantine fortifications. The unusual tower adjacent to the West Church is considered in the context of literary accounts. The article concludes by considering how the architecture and magnitude of the fortifications can allow a reassessment of the wider role of the city in the sixth and seventh century defences of Cyrenaica.

For the expired time of seventy years historiography of this comprehensive problem was enriched with a large number of researches in our country and in western countries. The author associate himself with those historians, who support the origin of idea about the efficient strategy of attack against enemy simultaneously from different directions by the defeat of Germany, against which in the years of world war first two-front war was going: Russian army - from the east and Anglo-Franco-American soldiers from the west. The concept «second front» in its modern meaning, as it was suggested in the article, came into use widely since 1941 due to the beginning of German aggression against the USSR. In author's opinion, it is fully grounded historically, that front, formed by the Anglo-American troops in Normandy, for example, was called not norman or western, but «second». As it is generally known, to the summer of 1944 western allies have already conducted battle actions in North Africa, Italy, on the Pacific Ocean and in South-east Asia. Moreover, in war process their activity in battles with enemy increased both in the air, and at the seaside. However, as author shows, the USSR decision-makers persevering defended the other way, leading to more rapid victory over an aggressor - to the opening by allies of the second front in Europe. Both for the western politicians and for the allied command armies it was abundantly clear, but for Anglo-American decision-makers such choice was unacceptable. The article deals with the view of the reasons of such position of allies. Thus, an author relies not only on the results of his personal study of a problem but also onto a large extent of researches both domestic and foreign historians. Therefore he answers on the row of concrete questions, such as Why did the second front in Europe became reality only on the fifth year of Second world war? What led soviet government to strive so persistently for its fastest opening? What underplots of western allies did determine their attitude toward the problem of opening of the second front?

The continuous increase in clean energy demand and reduced CO2 emissions in the UAE and specifically the Emirate of Ajman has put an extreme challenge to the Government. Ajman is one of the seven emirates constituting the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Ajman is located along the Arabian Gulf on its West and bordered by the Emirate of Sharjah on its North, South, and East. The government is taking huge steps in including sustainability principles and clean energy in all of its developments. Successful implementation of green architecture law decree No 10 of 2018 effectively is a sign of such an initiative. Renewable energy sources in this country have had two folds of interest in solar and wind. Recent research works supported the feasibility of using wind energy as an alternative clean source of energy. Site-specific and accurate wind speed information is the first step in the process of bankable wind potential and wind Atlas. This study has compared how wind speed and its distribution varies for similar offshore and onshore locations between two different mesoscale data sources. Also, discussed the main environmental characteristics of Ajman that would influence the implementation of a major wind energy project. In addition, the study made a brief critical overview of the major studies undertaken in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region on wind resource assessment. Finally, based on the results, the study makes conclusions, recommendations and a way forward for a bankable wind resources assessment in the Emirate of Ajman. This paper would alert the wind energy industry about the consequence of not considering the best error corrected site specific suitable wind resource data along with other environmental characteristics. The study results show that for offshore, there is 2.9 m/s and for Onshore 4.9 m/s variations in wind speed at the same location between ECMWF Reanalysis (ERA-5) and NASA Satellite data. Hence It is concluded that error corrected site-specific wind resource assessment is mandatory for assessing the available bankable wind potential since there are considerable variations in wind speed distributions between mesoscale data sets for similar locations. The study also identifies that the Emirate of Ajman has limited space for onshore wind farms; hence the offshore site seems to have good potential that can be utilised for energy generation. However, individual wind turbines can be installed for exploiting the available site-specific onshore wind energy. Finally, the study recommends a way forward for a comprehensive wind resource assessment to help the Emirate of Ajman form a sustainable wind power generation policy.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the formation mechanism of the host country people's coping behavior regarding the construction of transnational railways to help engineering managers and decision makers improve their risk management and lead to sustainable transnational railway construction projects.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopted the grounded theory methodology to analyze the news stories reported by “Belt and Road Portal” and “The New York Times” about eight transnational railways. They were China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan (Central Asia), Mecca-to-Medina (West Asia), Hungarian–Serbia (Europe), China–Nepal (South Asia), Bi-Oceanic (South America), Mombasa–Nairobi (Africa), China–Laos (Southeast Asia) and Panama railways (North America). The keywords for news search were the names of each railway. After eliminating the problem sentences with semantic repetition and ambiguity, 2,631 effective sentences were formed to screen the information and code. The process included open, axial and selective coding.FindingsIt was concluded that the core structure of the formation mechanism was “situation,” “influence factor,” “cognition” and “coping behavior.” The country-of-origin image has served as an adjustment function in the analysis for the host country people. Governance strategies were suggested focusing on risk prevention, risk mitigation and risk response according to social risk management.Research limitations/implicationsThe rise of transnational railway construction is encouraged by the process of globalization. But during the long construction period, the host country people's coping behavior would develop into social conflicts and mass incidents, becoming a significant obstacle to construction objectives. Thus, studying the formation mechanism of public coping behaviors can better take measures to prevent social risks.Originality/valueThe contributions of this research are three aspects: first, a formation mechanism of the host country people's coping behavior based on grounded theory is presented. Second, the country-of-origin image is found to be a factor that cannot be ignored in a transnational context. The formation mechanism of public coping behaviors is improved compared to risk management in the domestic situation. Finally, the host country people pay more attention to the motivations of country-of-origin's controlling interests and their own emotions compared with internal stakeholders.

The distributions of endemic tick vector species as well as the presence of species not endemic to Free State Province, South Africa, were determined during surveys or opportunistic collections from livestock, wildlife and vegetation. Amongst endemic ticks, the presence of Rhipicephalus appendiculatus was confirmed in the north of the province, whilst Rhipicephalus decoloratus was collected at 31 localities mostly in the centre and east, and Ixodes rubicundus at 11 localities in the south, south-west and centre of the province. Amongst the non-endemic species adult Amblyomma hebraeum were collected from white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum) on four privately owned farms, whilst the adults of Rhipicephalus microplus were collected from cattle and a larva from vegetation at four localities in the east of the province. The collection of Rhipicephalus evertsi mimeticus from a sheep in the west of the province is the second record of its presence in the Free State, whereas the presence of Haemaphysalis silacea on helmeted guineafowl (Numida meleagris) and vegetation in the centre of the province represents a first record for this species in the Free State. The first collection of the argasid tick, Ornithodoros savignyi, in the Free State was made from a domestic cow and from soil in the west of the province. The localities at which the ticks were collected have been plotted and the ticks’ role in the transmission or cause of disease in domestic livestock and wildlife is discussed.

The Banana is a widely grown edible and perennial crop cultivated all over Africa. This is a theoretical paper based on the facets of theories of production and enterprise development. Banana value creation through entrepreneurship for industrial growth in Africa is aimed at job creation, wealth creation, enterprise development, crowd funding, industrial clusters and sustainable development in Africa. The Banana, when well-nurtured, has a capacity to sustain production over a long period of time, suckering and multiplying successively, even on low-nutrient soils of African countries. In Nigeria, production appears best in the South-West, South-East and South-South geopolitical zones of the country. The North-Central zone can also competitively produce comparable scales. African entrepreneurs engaging in banana production or processing would obtain sustained economic satisfaction in terms of food security and income for small-scale farmers; international trade; domestic consumption; flour, chips and fried banana processing; and alcoholic/non-alcoholic beverages. This paper finds that banana value creation and entrepreneurship can enhance consistent wealth creation and industrialization in Africa.

Both domestic and wild carnivore species are commonly diagnosed with rabies virus (RABV) infection in South Africa. Although the majority of confirmed rabies cases in wild carnivore species are reported from the yellow mongoose (Cynictis penicillata), the rest are from other wild carnivores including the highly endangered wild dog (Lycaon pictus). Lyssavirus infection was confirmed in two wild dogs and a spotted hyaena (Crocuta crocuta) in the Madikwe Game Reserve, North West province in South Africa, in 2014 and 2015, using a direct fluorescent antibody test and immunohistochemistry. There had been no new wild dog introductions to the Madikwe Game Reserve for many years and the wild dogs were last vaccinated against rabies approximately 11 years prior to the incident. The first euthanised wild dog was the last surviving of a break-away pack of 6, and the second was the last of a larger pack of 18, the rest of which died with no carcasses being found or carcasses too decomposed for sampling. Subsequent antigenic typing of the lyssaviruses indicated that they were canid RABVs. The RABVs originating from 22 wild carnivore species, 7 dogs, and a caprine, mostly from the North West province, were genetically characterised by targeting a partial region of the nucleoprotein gene. The nucleotide sequence analyses of these viruses and two previously characterised RABVs confirmed that the outbreak viruses were also canid rabies, phylogenetically clustering with virus isolates originating from black-backed jackals recovered between 2012 and 2015 from the North West province, and domestic dogs from neighbouring communal areas. The source(s) of the mortalities and possible reservoir host(s) for the virus could only be speculated upon from data on specific predator numbers, movements and behaviour, kills, park management and the changing environmental ecology, which were monitored closely in Madikwe over several years. The most likely rabies sources were from boundary fence contacts between wild carnivores within the park, with domestic dogs or cats and/or naturally occurring wild carnivores outside the park. The associated risk of zoonotic infection and threat to important and endangered predators may be mitigated through regional rabies control primarily in domestic dogs and cats, as well as by preventative vaccination of at-risk park employees and their pets. The importance of ongoing prophylactic rabies protection by regular vaccination of highly endangered wildlife carnivores and the submission of carcasses for rabies diagnosis of any wild or domestic animals behaving uncharacteristically or found dead is emphasised.

The aim of the study was to determine the species spectrum of ixodid ticks that infest horses and donkeys in South Africa and to identify those species that act as vectors of disease to domestic livestock. Ticks were collected opportunistically from 391 horses countrywide by their owners or grooms, or by veterinary students and staff at the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria. Ticks were also collected from 76 donkeys in Limpopo Province, 2 in Gauteng Province and 1 in North West province. All the ticks were identified by means of a stereoscopic microscope. Horses were infested with 17 tick species, 72.1% with Rhipicephalus evertsi evertsi, 19.4% with Amblyomma hebraeum and 15.6% with Rhipicephalus decoloratus. Rhipicephalus evertsi evertsi was recovered from horses in all nine provinces of South Africa and R. decoloratus in eight provinces. Donkeys were infested with eight tick species, and 81.6% were infested with R. evertsi evertsi, 23.7% with A. hebraeum and 10.5% with R. decoloratus. Several tick species collected from the horses and donkeys are the vectors of economically important diseases of livestock. Rhipicephalus evertsi evertsi is the vector of Theileria equi, the causative organism of equine piroplasmosis. It also transmits Anaplasma marginale, the causative organism of anaplasmosis in cattle. Amblyomma hebraeum is the vector of Ehrlichia ruminantium, the causative organism of heartwater in cattle, sheep and goats, whereas R. decoloratus transmits Babesia bigemina, the causative organism of babesiosis in cattle.

In recent years, the term “social cohesion” has become an important concept in post-apartheid South Africa.[i] In this paper, we discuss the potential of the Community Work Programme (CWP) as a violence-prevention project based on a study conducted[ii] in six communities, namely Ivory Park, Orange Farm and Kagiso (situated in Gauteng Province), Bokfontein (North West Province), Grabouw and Mannenberg (Western Cape). In this paper, we discuss the potential of CWP in facilitating social cohesion to prevent violence in communities. The CWP work includes community violence-prevention programmes against gangsterism, drug abuse, domestic violence and xenophobic violence. Ordinarily many of these violence prevention projects would not have been possible if it was not for the CWP. However, this paper shows that that the impact of the CWP is not always positive. In some of the six communities, the CWP was a source of racial or interpersonal conflicts, power struggles amongst the local elites for the control of the CWP, xenophobic or ethnic divisions. This paper provides all this analysis to show tensions and contradictions of the CWP in facilitating and hindering social cohesion in communities. It is recommended in conclusion that, if not implemented well, the CWP may be a source of conflict rather than social cohesion. It needs to be implemented in a reliable and stable way if it is to assist in reducing violence in communities.[i] Ingrid Palmary, Reflections on social cohesion in contemporary South Africa, Psychology in Society (forthcoming)[ii] This study was conducted by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR)

Background: Globalisation has accentuated the need for small-scale agricultural businesses (SSABs) to network horizontally and vertically into world markets. However, the capacity of SSABs to cement foreign alliances to capitalise on business opportunities that the expansion of global markets presents, while simultaneously mitigating against the negative forces of globalisation remains a grey area.Aim: The study sought to contribute to internationalisation literature by examining: (1) the extent to which SSABs’ owner and/or managers in selected South African provinces establish foreign alliances, (2) whether there are any statistically significant differences in SSABs’ performance based on their extent of establishment of foreign alliances.Setting: The setting for this study was Vryburg-Pokwani in the North West and Northern Cape provinces of South Africa, respectively.Method: A survey was conducted on 151 SSAB owner and/or managers in the aforementioned study area.Results: The results revealed that although a majority (51.7%) had some (i.e. few) foreign alliances, 48.3% of SSABs had no foreign alliances at all. The results also demonstrated that the establishment of foreign alliances was positively and statistically significantly related to the performance of SSABs in the Vryburg-Pokwani area. Post-hoc comparisons (Bonferroni) results showed that while SSABs with 1–2 foreign alliances perform better than those with no foreign alliances at all, those SSABs with 6–10 foreign alliances perform better than those with none, 1–2 and 3–5 foreign linkages respectively.Conclusion: Since SSABs with foreign alliances tended to outperform those that were dependent on domestic links, the extent to which the economic benefits derived from internationalisation are reinvested into the businesses for the continued sustenance of businesses needs more rigorous investigation.

Rivers in the North West Province (NWP) of South Africa are polluted by various anthropogenic activities that are associated with agricultural, domestic, industrial, and mining activities. Pollutants and effluent resulting from these activities impact the physico-chemical and biological characteristics of river water. More particularly, domestic and agricultural pollution has been associated with the occurrence of pathogenic yeast species in water. The aim of this study was to determine physico-chemical parameters, yeast levels, and the antifungal susceptibility of pathogenic yeasts in river water. Physico-chemical parameters and yeast levels were determined using standard procedures. Yeasts were identified by biochemical tests and 26S rRNA gene sequencing. Disc diffusion antifungal susceptibility tests were conducted on identified potential pathogenic yeasts. Physico-chemical parameters were within target water quality ranges (TWQR) for livestock farming but were mostly out of range for irrigation. Yeast levels (incubation at 37°C) ranged from 363 to 1 778 CFU/L. There were significant differences (p < 0.05) in the physico-chemical parameters and yeast levels between some seasons and among the river systems under study. A positive association was observed between temperature, COD and yeast levels in all the river systems. Ascomycetes, which were the most prevalent isolates, were identified as Candida spp. (35%), Pichia spp. (13%), Cyberlinera spp. (12%), Meyerozyma spp. (11%), Clavispora spp. (10%), Saccharomyces spp. (6%), Kluyveromyces spp. (5%), Yamadazyma spp. (4%), Trichosporon spp. (3%), and Wickerhamomyces spp. (1%). Antifungal resistance of the potential pathogenic yeasts was as follows: flucytosine and miconazole (100%) > fluconazole (78.5%) > econazole, and miconazole and ketoconazole (49.6%) > nystatin (15.2%). The river water systems explored in the study are used for agricultural, domestic and recreational purposes. Direct contact with the water, especially by immune-compromised people, may pose a health threat and should be further investigated.

AbstractThe Review has chosen to open this edition with an interview with General Abdoulaye Kaka as a representative of State practice in counterterrorism detention. The journal chose to focus on Niger as a State that is affected by an ongoing armed conflict and which arrests, detains and tries suspected members of a non-State armed group under its domestic legal system.General Abdoulaye Kaka has been working as Head of Niger's Central Counterterrorism Agency (Service Central de Lutte Contre le Terrorisme) since 2014. He previously worked for the judicial police in Niger as head of the anti-gang section before opening the first office of the judicial police in Zinder. General Kaka worked for the United Nations (UN) police forces in Ivory Coast between 2006 and 2012, when he became the Commander-in-Chief of the Niger UN police forces.In his current role as Head of the Central Counterterrorism Agency, General Kaka oversees detention operations throughout the country, many of which involve suspected members of the group that calls itself Islamic State's West Africa Province (ISWAP), also known as Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad or, as it is most widely known under its former name, Boko Haram.Niger has suffered the effects of the ongoing conflict between ISWAP and State forces in the Lake Chad region, resulting in casualties, arrests and repeated displacement among civilians. The government of Niger contributes troops to the Multinational Joint Task Force, which conducts operations against the group. At the same time, the government arrests and detains suspected members of ISWAP as part of its counterterrorism efforts. These detention operations are coordinated by the Central Counterterrorism Agency. Established in 2011, the Central Counterterrorism Agency, successor to the counterterrorism section of the judicial police, is made up of representatives from the three primary law enforcement organizations in the country – the national police, the national guard and the gendarmerie – and is principally responsible for counterterrorism investigations in Niger.In Niger, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) helps people affected by conflict in the south-east or fleeing fighting in north-east Nigeria. With the Niger Red Cross, the ICRC delivers aid, treats the wounded, provides water and supports farmers. The ICRC also monitors compliance with international humanitarian law, visits detainees and helps them to maintain contact with their families.The ICRC visits people held by the authorities in at least five places of detention in Niger. After the visits, the ICRC shares its findings on the treatment and living conditions of the detainees confidentially with the authorities and urges them to take steps to address concerns. The ICRC also helps bolster prison management capacities and health services for detainees through technical and material support, and round-table discussions on these topics. The ICRC helps detainees, particularly minors, maintain contact with their families. At the request of foreign detainees, the ICRC informs their families or consular representatives of their detention. Lastly, the ICRC covers transportation costs for security detainees returning home after their release.


 
 
 If the home is traditionally considered to be a space of safety associated with the warm and cosy feeling of the familial hearth, it is also continuously portrayed as a space under threat from the outside from which we must secure ourselves and our families. Securing the home entails a series of material, discursive and performative strategies, a host of precautionary measures aimed at regulating and ultimately producing security. When I was eleven my family returned home from the local fruit markets to find our house had been ransacked. Clothes were strewn across the floor, electrical appliances were missing and my parents’ collection of jewellery – wedding rings and heirlooms – had been stolen. Few things remained untouched and the very thought of someone else’s hands going through our personal belongings made our home feel tainted. My parents were understandably distraught. As Filipino immigrants to Australia the heirlooms were not only expensive assets from both sides of my family, but also signifiers of our homeland. Added to their despair was the fact that this was our first house – we had rented prior to that. During the police interviews, we discovered that our area, Sydney’s Western suburbs, was considered ‘high-risk’ and we were advised to install security. In their panic my parents began securing their home. Grills were installed on every window. Each external wooden door was reinforced by a metal security door. Movement detectors were installed at the front of the house, which were set to blind intruders with floodlights. Even if an intruder could enter the back through a window a metal grill security door was waiting between the backroom and the kitchen to stop them from getting to our bedrooms. In short, through a series of transformations our house was made into a residential fortress. Yet home security had its own dangers. A series of rules and regulations were drilled into me ‘in case of an emergency’: know where your keys are in case of a fire so that you can get out; remember the phone numbers for an emergency and the work numbers of your parents; never let a stranger into the house; and if you need to speak to a stranger only open the inside door but leave the security screen locked. Thus, for my Filipino-migrant family in the 1990s, a whole series of defensive behaviours and preventative strategies were produced and disseminated inside and around the home to regulate security risks. Such “local knowledges” were used to reinforce the architectural manifestations of security at the same time that they were a response to the invasion of security systems into our house that created a new set of potential dangers. This article highlights “the interplay of material and symbolic geographies of home” (Blunt and Varley 4), focusing on the relation between urban fears circulating around and within the home and the spatial practices used to negotiate such fears. In exploring home security systems it extends the exemplary analysis of home technologies already begun in Lynn Spigel’s reading of the ‘smart home’ (381-408). In a similar vein, David Morley’s analysis of mediated domesticity shows how communications technology has reconfigured the inside and outside to the extent that television actually challenges the physical boundary that “protects the privacy and solidarity of the home from the flux and threat of the outside world” (87). Television here serves as a passage in which the threat of the outside is reframed as news or entertainment for family viewing. I take this as a point of departure to consider the ways that this mediated fear unfolds in the technology of our homes. Following Brian Massumi, I read the home as “a node in a circulatory network of many dimensions (each corresponding to a technology of transmission)” (85). For Massumi, the home is an event-space at the crossroads of media technologies and political technologies. “In spite of the locks on the door, the event-space of the home must be seen as one characterized by a very loose regime of passage” (85). The ‘locked door’ is not only a boundary marker that defines the inside from the outside but another technology that leads us outside the home into other domains of inquiry: the proliferation of security technologies and the mundane, fearful intimacies of the home. In this context, we should heed Iris Marion Young’s injunction to feminist critics that the home does provide some positives including a sense of privacy and the space to build relationships and identities. Yet, as Colomina argues, the traditional domestic ideal “can only be produced by engaging the home in combat” (20). If, as Colomina’s comment suggests, ontological security is at least partially dependent on physical security, then this article explores the ontological effects of our home security systems. Houses at War: Targeting the Family As Beatriz Colomina reminds us, in times of war we leave our homelands to do battle on the front line, but battle lines are also being drawn in our homes. Drawing inspiration from Virilio’s claim that contemporary war takes place without fighting, Colomina’s article ‘Domesticity at War’ contemplates the domestic interior as a “battlefield” (15). The house, she writes, is “a mechanism within a war where the differences between defense [sic] and attack have become blurred” (17). According to the Home Security Precautions, New South Wales, October 1999 report conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 47% of NSW dwellings were ‘secure’ (meaning that they either had a burglar alarm, or all entry points were secured or they were inside a security block) while only 9% of NSW households had no home security devices present (Smith 3). In a similar report for Western Australia conducted in October 2004, an estimated 71% of WA households had window security of some sort (screens, locks or shutters) while 67% had deadlocks on at least one external door (4). An estimated 27% had a security alarm installed while almost half (49%) had sensor lights (Hubbard 4-5). This growing sense of insecurity means big business for those selling security products and services. By the end of June 1999, there were 1,714 businesses in Australia’s security services industry generating $1,395 million of income during 1998-99 financial year (McLennan 3; see also Macken). This survey did not include locksmith services or the companies dealing with alarm manufacturing, wholesaling or installing. While Colomina’s article focuses on the “war with weather” and the attempts to control environmental conditions inside the home through what she calls “counterdomesticity” (20), her conceptualisation of the house as a “military weapon” (17) provides a useful tool for thinking the relation between the home, architecture and security. Conceiving of the house as a military weapon might seem like a stretch, but we should recall that the rhetoric of war has already leaked into the everyday. One hears of the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on crime’ in the media. ‘War’ is the everyday condition of our urban jungles (see also Diken and Lausten) and in order to survive, let alone feel secure, one must be able to defend one’s family and home. Take, for example, Signal Security’s website. One finds a panel on the left-hand side of the screen to all webpages devoted to “Residential Products”. Two circular images are used in the panel with one photograph overlapping the other. In the top circle, a white nuclear family (stereotypical mum, dad and two kids), dressed in pristine white clothing bare their white teeth to the internet surfer. Underneath this photo is another photograph in which an arm clad in a black leather jacket emerges through a smashed window. In the foreground a black-gloved hand manipulates a lock, while a black balaclava masks an unrecognisable face through the broken glass. The effect of their proximity produces a violent juxtaposition in which the burglar visually intrudes on the family’s domestic bliss. The panel stages a struggle between white and black, good and bad, family and individual, security and insecurity, recognisability and unidentifiability. It thus codifies the loving, knowable family as the domestic space of security against the selfish, unidentifiable intruder (presumed not to have a family) as the primary reason for insecurity in the family home – and no doubt to inspire the consumption of security products. Advertisements of security products thus articulate the family home as a fragile innocence constantly vulnerable from the outside. From a feminist perspective, this image of the family goes against the findings of the National Homicide Monitoring Program, which shows that 57% of the women killed in Australia between 2004 and 2005 were killed by an intimate partner while 17% were killed by a family member (Mouzos and Houliaras 20). If, on the one hand, the family home is targeted by criminals, on the other, it has emerged as a primary site for security advertising eager to exploit the growing sense of insecurity – the family as a target market. The military concepts of ‘target’ and ‘targeting’ have shifted into the benign discourse of strategic advertising. As Dora Epstein writes, “We arm our buildings to arm ourselves from the intrusion of a public fluidity, and thus our buildings, our architectures of fortification, send a very clear message: ‘avoid this place or protect yourself’” (1997: 139). Epstein’s reference to ‘architectures of fortification’ reminds us that the desire to create security through the built environment has a long history. Nan Ellin has argued that fear’s physical manifestation can be found in the formation of towns from antiquity to the Renaissance. In this sense, towns and cities are always already a response to the fear of foreign invaders (Ellin 13; see also Diken and Lausten 291). This fear of the outsider is most obviously manifested in the creation of physical walls. Yet fortification is also an effect of spatial allusions produced by the configuration of space, as exemplified in Fiske, Hodge and Turner’s semiotic reading of a suburban Australian display home without a fence. While the lack of a fence might suggest openness, they suggest that the manicured lawn is flat so “that eyes can pass easily over it – and smooth – so that feet will not presume to” (30). Since the front garden is best viewed from the street it is clearly a message for the outside, but it also signifies “private property” (30). Space is both organised and lived, in such a way that it becomes a medium of communication to passers-by and would-be intruders. What emerges in this semiotic reading is a way of thinking about space as defensible, as organised in a way that space can begin to defend itself. The Problematic of Defensible Space The incorporation of military architecture into civil architecture is most evident in home security. By security I mean the material systems (from locks to electronic alarms) and precautionary practices (locking the door) used to protect spaces, both of which are enabled by a way of imagining space in terms of risk and vulnerability. I read Oscar Newman’s 1972 Defensible Space as outlining the problematic of spatial security. Indeed, it was around that period that the problematic of crime prevention through urban design received increasing attention in Western architectural discourse (see Jeffery). Newman’s book examines how spaces can be used to reinforce human control over residential environments, producing what he calls ‘defensible space.’ In Newman’s definition, defensible space is a model for residential environments which inhibits crime by creating the physical expression of a social fabric that defends itself. All the different elements which combine to make a defensible space have a common goal – an environment in which latent territoriality and sense of community in the inhabitants can be translated into responsibility for ensuring a safe, productive, and well-maintained living space (3). Through clever design space begins to defend itself. I read Newman’s book as presenting the contemporary problematic of spatialised security: how to structure space so as to increase control; how to organise architecture so as to foster territorialism; how to encourage territorial control through amplifying surveillance. The production of defensible space entails moving away from what he calls the ‘compositional approach’ to architecture, which sees buildings as separate from their environments, and the ‘organic approach’ to architecture, in which the building and its grounds are organically interrelated (Newman 60). In this approach Newman proposes a number of changes to space: firstly, spaces need to be multiplied (one no longer has a simple public/private binary, but also semi-private and semi-public spaces); secondly, these spaces must be hierarchised (moving from public to semi-public to semi-private to private); thirdly, within this hierarchy spaces can also be striated using symbolic or material boundaries between the different types of spaces. Furthermore, spaces must be designed to increase surveillance: use smaller corridors serving smaller sets of families (69-71); incorporate amenities in “defined zones of influence” (70); use L-shaped buildings as opposed to rectangles (84); use windows on the sides of buildings to reveal the fire escape from outside (90). As he puts it, the subdivision of housing projects into “small, recognisable and comprehensible-at-a-glance enclaves is a further contributor to improving the visual surveillance mechanism” (1000). Finally, Newman lays out the principle of spatial juxtaposition: consider the building/street interface (positioning of doors and windows to maximise surveillance); consider building/building interface (e.g. build residential apartments next to ‘safer’ commercial, industrial, institutional and entertainment facilities) (109-12). In short, Newman’s book effectively redefines residential space in terms of territorial zones of control. Such zones of influence are the products of the interaction between architectural forms and environment, which are not reducible to the intent of the architect (68). Thus, in attempting to respond to the exigencies of the moment – the problem of urban crime, the cost of housing – Newman maps out residential space in what Foucault might have called a ‘micro-physics of power’. During the mid-1970s through to the 1980s a number of publications aimed at the average householder are printed in the UK and Australia. Apart from trade publishing (Bunting), The UK Design Council released two small publications (Barty, White and Burall; Design Council) while in Australia the Department of Housing and Construction released a home safety publication, which contained a small section on security, and the Australian Institute of Criminology published a small volume entitled Designing out Crime: Crime prevention through environmental design (Geason and Wilson). While Newman emphasised the responsibility of architects and urban planners, in these publications the general concerns of defensible space are relocated in the ‘average homeowner’. Citing crime statistics on burglary and vandalism, these publications incite their readers to take action, turning the homeowner into a citizen-soldier. The householder, whether he likes it or not, is already in a struggle. The urban jungle must be understood in terms of “the principles of warfare” (Bunting 7), in which everyday homes become bodies needing protection through suitable architectural armour. Through a series of maps and drawings and statistics, the average residential home is transformed into a series of points of vulnerability. Home space is re-inscribed as a series of points of entry/access and lines of sight. Simultaneously, through lists of ‘dos and don’ts’ a set of precautionary behaviours is inculcated into the readers. Principles of security begin codifying the home space, disciplining the spatial practices of the intimate, regulating the access and mobility of the family and guests. The Architectural Nervous System Nowadays we see a wild, almost excessive, proliferation of security products available to the ‘security conscious homeowner’. We are no longer simply dealing with security devices designed to block – such as locks, bolts and fasteners. The electronic revolution has aided the production of security devices that are increasingly more specialised and more difficult to manipulate, which paradoxically makes it more difficult for the security consumer to understand. Detection systems now include continuous wiring, knock-out bars, vibration detectors, breaking glass detectors, pressure mats, underground pressure detectors and fibre optic signalling. Audible alarm systems have been upgraded to wire-free intruder alarms, visual alarms, telephone warning devices, access control and closed circuit television and are supported by uninterruptible power supplies and control panels (see Chartered Institution of Building Service Engineers 19-39). The whole house is literally re-routed as a series of relays in an electronic grid. If the house as a security risk is defined in terms of points of vulnerability, alarm systems take these points as potential points of contact. Relays running through floors, doors and windows can be triggered by pressure, sound or dislocation. We see a proliferation of sensors: switching sensors, infra-red sensors, ultrasonic sensors, microwave radar sensors, microwave fence sensors and microphonic sensors (see Walker). The increasing diversification of security products attests to the sheer scale of these architectural/engineering changes to our everyday architecture. In our fear of crime we have produced increasingly more complex security products for the home, thus complexifying the spaces we somehow inherently feel should be ‘simple’. I suggest that whereas previous devices merely reinforced certain architectural or engineering aspects of the home, contemporary security products actually constitute the home as a feeling, architectural body capable of being affected. This recalls notions of a sensuous architecture and bodily metaphors within architectural discourse (see Thomsen; Puglini). It is not simply our fears that lead us to secure our homes through technology, but through our fears we come to invest our housing architecture with a nervous system capable of fearing for itself. Our eyes and ears become detection systems while our screams are echoed in building alarms. Body organs are deterritorialised from the human body and reterritorialised on contemporary residential architecture, while our senses are extended through modern security technologies. The vulnerable body of the family home has become a feeling body conscious of its own vulnerability. It is less about the physical expression of fear, as Nan Ellin has put it, than about how building materialities become capable of fearing for themselves. What we have now are residential houses that are capable of being more fully mobilised in this urban war. Family homes become bodies that scan the darkness for the slightest movements, bodies that scream at the slightest possibility of danger. They are bodies that whisper to each other: a house can recognise an intrusion and relay a warning to a security station, informing security personnel without the occupants of that house knowing. They are the newly produced victims of an urban war. Our homes are the event-spaces in which mediated fear unfolds into an architectural nervous system. If media plug our homes into one set of relations between ideologies, representations and fear, then the architectural nervous system plugs that back into a different set of relations between capital, fear and the electronic grid. The home is less an endpoint of broadcast media than a node in an electronic network, a larger nervous system that encompasses the globe. It is a network that plugs architectural nervous systems into city electronic grids into mediated subjectivities into military technologies and back again, allowing fear to be disseminated and extended, replayed and spliced into the most banal aspects of our domestic lives. 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New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Epstein, Dora. “Abject Terror: A Story of Fear, Sex, and Architecture.” Architecture of Fear. Ed. Nan Ellin. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Fiske, John, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Geason, Susan, and Paul Wilson. Designing Out Crime: Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1989. Hubbard, Alan. Home Safety and Security, Western Australia. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2005. Jeffery, C. Ray. Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1971. Macken, Julie. “Why Aren’t We Happier?” Australian Financial Review 26 Nov. 1999: 26. Mallory, Keith, and Arvid Ottar. Architecture of Aggression: A History of Military Architecture in North West Europe, 1900-1945. Hampshire: Architectural Press, 1973. Massumi, Brian. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. McLennan, W. Security Services, Australia, 1998-99. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Mouzos, Jenny, and Tina Houliaras. Homicide in Australia: 2004-05 National Homicide Monitoring Program (NHMP) Annual Report. Research and Public Policy Series 72. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2006. Newman, Oscar. Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design. New York: Collier, 1973. Puglini, Luigi. HyperArchitecture: Space in the Electronic Age. Basel: Bikhäuser, 1999. Signal Security. 13 January 2007 http://www.signalsecurity.com.au/securitysystems.htm>. Smith, Geoff. Home Security Precautions, New South Wales, October 1999. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000. Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Thomsen, Christian W. Sensuous Architecture: The Art of Erotic Building. Munich and New York: Prestel, 1998. Walker, Philip. Electronic Security Systems: Better Ways to Crime Prevention. London: Butterworths, 1983. Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.” Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger. Eds. Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001. 
 
 
 
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IntroductionTasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a homogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an “Antarctic city”, central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.A Centre at the End of the Earth? Tasmania as ParadoxThe islands of Tasmania owe their existence to climate change: a period of warming at the end of the last ice age melted the vast sheets of ice covering the polar regions, causing sea levels to rise by more than one hundred metres (Tasmanian Climate Change Office 8). Eleven thousand years ago, Aboriginal people would have witnessed the rise of what is now called Bass Strait, turning what had been a peninsula into an archipelago, with the large island of Tasmania at its heart. The heterogeneous practices and narratives of Tasmanian regional identity have been shaped by the geography of these islands, and their connection to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Regions, understood as “centres of collective consciousness and sociospatial identities” (Paasi 241) are constantly reproduced and reimagined through place-based social practices and communications over time. As we will show, diverse and contradictory narratives of Tasmanian regionality often co-exist, interacting in complex and sometimes complementary ways. Ecocritical literary scholar C.A. Cranston considers duality to be embedded in the textual construction of Tasmania, writing “it was hell, it was heaven, it was penal, it was paradise” (29). Tasmania is multiply polarised: it is both isolated and connected; close and far away; rich in resources and poor in capital; the socially conservative birthplace of radical green politics (Hay 60). The weather, as if sensing the fine balance of these paradoxes, blows hot and cold at a moment’s notice.Tasmania has wielded extraordinary political influence at times in its history—notably during the settlement of Melbourne in 1835 (Boyce), and during protests against damming the Franklin River in the early 1980s (Mercer). However, twentieth-century historical and political narratives of Tasmania portray the Bass Strait as a barrier, isolating Tasmanians from the mainland (Harwood 61). Sir Bede Callaghan, who headed one of a long line of federal government inquiries into “the Tasmanian problem” (Harwood 106), was clear that Tasmania was a victim of its own geography:the major disability facing the people of Tasmania (although some residents may consider it an advantage) is that Tasmania is an island. Separation from the mainland adversely affects the economy of the State and the general welfare of the people in many ways. (Callaghan 3)This perspective may stem from the fact that Tasmania has maintained the lowest Gross Domestic Product per capita of all states since federation (Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics 9). Socially, economically, and culturally, Tasmania consistently ranks among the worst regions of Australia. Statistical comparisons with other parts of Australia reveal the population’s high unemployment, low wages, poor educational outcomes, and bad health (West 31). The state’s remoteness and isolation from the mainland states and its reliance on federal income have contributed to the whole of Tasmania, including Hobart, being classified as ‘regional’ by the Australian government, in an attempt to promote immigration and economic growth (Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development 1). Tasmania is indeed both regional and remote. However, in this article we argue that, while regionality may be cast as a disadvantage, the island’s remote location is also an asset, particularly when viewed from a far southern perspective (Image 1).Image 1: Antarctica (Orthographic Projection). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Modified Shading of Tasmania and Addition of Captions by H. Nielsen.Connecting Oceans/Collapsing DistanceTasmania and Antarctica have been closely linked in the past—the future archipelago formed a land bridge between Antarctica and northern land masses until the opening of the Tasman Seaway some 32 million years ago (Barker et al.). The far south was tangible to the Indigenous people of the island in the weather blowing in from the Southern Ocean, while the southern lights, or “nuyina”, formed a visible connection (Australia’s new icebreaker vessel is named RSV Nuyina in recognition of these links). In the contemporary Australian imagination, Tasmania tends to be defined by its marine boundaries, the sea around the islands represented as flat, empty space against which to highlight the topography of its landscape and the isolation of its position (Davies et al.). A more relational geographic perspective illuminates the “power of cross-currents and connections” (Stratford et al. 273) across these seascapes. The sea country of Tasmania is multiple and heterogeneous: the rough, shallow waters of the island-scattered Bass Strait flow into the Tasman Sea, where the continental shelf descends toward an abyssal plain studded with volcanic seamounts. To the south, the Southern Ocean provides nutrient-rich upwellings that attract fish and cetacean populations. Tasmania’s coast is a dynamic, liminal space, moving and changing in response to the global currents that are driven by the shifting, calving and melting ice shelves and sheets in Antarctica.Oceans have long been a medium of connection between Tasmania and Antarctica. In the early colonial period, when the seas were the major thoroughfares of the world and inland travel was treacherous and slow, Tasmania’s connection with the Southern Ocean made it a valuable hub for exploration and exploitation of the south. Between 1642 and 1900, early European explorers were followed by British penal colonists, convicts, sealers, and whalers (Kriwoken and Williamson 93). Tasmania was well known to polar explorers, with expeditions led by Jules Dumont d’Urville, James Clark Ross, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson all transiting through the port of Hobart. Now that the city is no longer a whaling hub, growing populations of cetaceans continue to migrate past the islands on their annual journeys from the tropics, across the Sub-Antarctic Front and Antarctic circumpolar current, and into the south polar region, while southern species such as leopard seals are occasionally seen around Tasmania (Tasmania Parks and Wildlife). Although the water surrounding Tasmania and Antarctica is at times homogenised as a ‘barrier’, rendering these places isolated, the bodies of water that surround both are in fact permeable, and regularly crossed by both humans and marine species. The waters are diverse in their physical characteristics, underlying topography, sea life, and relationships, and serve to connect many different ocean regions, ecosystems, and weather patterns.Views from the Far SouthWhen considered in terms of its relative proximity to Antarctic, rather than its distance from Australia’s political and economic centres, Tasmania’s identity undergoes a significant shift. A sign at Cockle Creek, in the state’s far south, reminds visitors that they are closer to Antarctica than to Cairns, invoking a discourse of connectedness that collapses the standard ten-day ship voyage to Australia’s closest Antarctic station into a unit comparable with the routinely scheduled 5.5 hour flight to North Queensland. Hobart is the logistical hub for the Australian Antarctic Division and the French Institut Polaire Francais (IPEV), and has hosted Antarctic vessels belonging to the USA, South Korea, and Japan in recent years. From a far southern perspective, Hobart is not a regional Australian capital but a global polar hub. This alters the city’s geographic imaginary not only in a latitudinal sense—from “top down” to “bottom up”—but also a longitudinal one. Via its southward connection to Antarctica, Hobart is also connected east and west to four other recognized gateways: Cape Town in South Africa, Christchurch in New Zealand; Punta Arenas in Chile; and Ushuaia in Argentina (Image 2). The latter cities are considered small by international standards, but play an outsized role in relation to Antarctica.Image 2: H. Nielsen with a Sign Announcing Distances between Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities and Antarctica, Ushuaia, Argentina, 2018. Image Credit: Nicki D'Souza.These five cities form what might be called—to adapt geographer Klaus Dodds’ term—a ‘Southern Rim’ around the South Polar region (Dodds Geopolitics). They exist in ambiguous relationship to each other. Although the five cities signed a Statement of Intent in 2009 committing them to collaboration, they continue to compete vigorously for northern hemisphere traffic and the brand identity of the most prominent global gateway. A state government brochure spruiks Hobart, for example, as the “perfect Antarctic Gateway” emphasising its uniqueness and “natural advantages” in this regard (Tasmanian Government, 2016). In practice, the cities are automatically differentiated by their geographic position with respect to Antarctica. Although the ‘ice continent’ is often conceived as one entity, it too has regions, in both scientific and geographical senses (Terauds and Lee; Antonello). Hobart provides access to parts of East Antarctica, where the Australian, French, Japanese, and Chinese programs (among others) have bases; Cape Town is a useful access point for Europeans going to Dronning Maud Land; Christchurch is closest to the Ross Sea region, site of the largest US base; and Punta Arenas and Ushuaia neighbour the Antarctic Peninsula, home to numerous bases as well as a thriving tourist industry.The Antarctic sector is important to the Tasmanian economy, contributing $186 million (AUD) in 2017/18 (Wells; Gutwein; Tasmanian Polar Network). Unsurprisingly, Tasmania’s gateway brand has been actively promoted, with the 2016 Australian Antarctic Strategy and 20 Year Action Plan foregrounding the need to “Build Tasmania’s status as the premier East Antarctic Gateway for science and operations” and the state government releasing a “Tasmanian Antarctic Gateway Strategy” in 2017. The Chinese Antarctic program has been a particular focus: a Memorandum of Understanding focussed on Australia and China’s Antarctic relations includes a “commitment to utilise Australia, including Tasmania, as an Antarctic ‘gateway’.” (Australian Antarctic Division). These efforts towards a closer relationship with China have more recently come under attack as part of a questioning of China’s interests in the region (without, it should be noted, a concomitant questioning of Australia’s own considerable interests) (Baker 9). In these exchanges, a global power and a state of Australia generally classed as regional and peripheral are brought into direct contact via the even more remote Antarctic region. This connection was particularly visible when Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to Hobart in 2014, in a visit described as both “strategic” and “incongruous” (Burden). There can be differences in how this relationship is narrated to domestic and international audiences, with issues of sovereignty and international cooperation variously foregrounded, laying the ground for what Dodds terms “awkward Antarctic nationalism” (1).Territory and ConnectionsThe awkwardness comes to a head in Tasmania, where domestic and international views of connections with the far south collide. Australia claims sovereignty over almost 6 million km2 of the Antarctic continent—a claim that in area is “roughly the size of mainland Australia minus Queensland” (Bergin). This geopolitical context elevates the importance of a regional part of Australia: the claims to Antarctic territory (which are recognised only by four other claimant nations) are performed not only in Antarctic localities, where they are made visible “with paraphernalia such as maps, flags, and plaques” (Salazar 55), but also in Tasmania, particularly in Hobart and surrounds. A replica of Mawson’s Huts in central Hobart makes Australia’s historic territorial interests in Antarctica visible an urban setting, foregrounding the figure of Douglas Mawson, the well-known Australian scientist and explorer who led the expeditions that proclaimed Australia’s sovereignty in the region of the continent roughly to its south (Leane et al.). Tasmania is caught in a balancing act, as it fosters international Antarctic connections (such hosting vessels from other national programs), while also playing a key role in administering what is domestically referred to as the Australian Antarctic Territory. The rhetoric of protection can offer common ground: island studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino notes that as island narratives have moved “away from the perspective of the ‘explorer-discoverer-colonist’” they have been replaced by “the perspective of the ‘custodian-steward-environmentalist’” (49), but reminds readers that a colonising disposition still lurks beneath the surface. It must be remembered that terms such as “stewardship” and “leadership” can undertake sovereignty labour (Dodds “Awkward”), and that Tasmania’s Antarctic connections can be mobilised for a range of purposes. When Environment Minister Greg Hunt proclaimed at a press conference that: “Hobart is the gateway to the Antarctic for the future” (26 Apr. 2016), the remark had meaning within discourses of both sovereignty and economics. Tasmania’s capital was leveraged as a way to position Australia as a leader in the Antarctic arena.From ‘Gateway’ to ‘Antarctic City’While discussion of Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities often focuses on the economic and logistical benefit of their Antarctic connections, Hobart’s “gateway” identity, like those of its counterparts, stretches well beyond this, encompassing geological, climatic, historical, political, cultural and scientific links. Even the southerly wind, according to cartoonist Jon Kudelka, “has penguins in it” (Image 3). Hobart residents feel a high level of connection to Antarctica. In 2018, a survey of 300 randomly selected residents of Greater Hobart was conducted under the umbrella of the “Antarctic Cities” Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by Assoc. Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar (and involving all three present authors). Fourteen percent of respondents reported having been involved in an economic activity related to Antarctica, and 36% had attended a cultural event about Antarctica. Connections between the southern continent and Hobart were recognised as important: 71.9% agreed that “people in my city can influence the cultural meanings that shape our relationship to Antarctica”, while 90% agreed or strongly agreed that Hobart should play a significant role as a custodian of Antarctica’s future, and 88.4% agreed or strongly agreed that: “How we treat Antarctica is a test of our approach to ecological sustainability.” Image 3: “The Southerly” Demonstrates How Weather Connects Hobart and Antarctica. Image Credit: Jon Kudelka, Reproduced with Permission.Hobart, like the other gateways, activates these connections in its conscious place-branding. The city is particularly strong as a centre of Antarctic research: signs at the cruise-ship terminal on the waterfront claim that “There are more Antarctic scientists based in Hobart […] than at any other one place on earth, making Hobart a globally significant contributor to our understanding of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.” Researchers are based at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), with several working between institutions. Many Antarctic researchers located elsewhere in the world also have a connection with the place through affiliations and collaborations, leading journalist Jo Chandler to assert that “the breadth and depth of Hobart’s knowledge of ice, water, and the life forms they nurture […] is arguably unrivalled anywhere in the world” (86).Hobart also plays a significant role in Antarctica’s governance, as the site of the secretariats for the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), and as host of the Antarctic Consultative Treaty Meetings on more than one occasion (1986, 2012). The cultural domain is active, with Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) featuring a permanent exhibit, “Islands to Ice”, emphasising the ocean as connecting the two places; the Mawson’s Huts Replica Museum aiming (among other things) to “highlight Hobart as the gateway to the Antarctic continent for the Asia Pacific region”; and a biennial Australian Antarctic Festival drawing over twenty thousand visitors, about a sixth of them from interstate or overseas (Hingley). Antarctic links are evident in the city’s natural and built environment: the dolerite columns of Mt Wellington, the statue of the Tasmanian Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi on the waterfront, and the wharfs that regularly accommodate icebreakers such as the Aurora Australis and the Astrolabe. Antarctica is figured as a southern neighbour; as historian Tom Griffiths puts it, Tasmanians “grow up with Antarctica breathing down their necks” (5). As an Antarctic City, Hobart mediates access to Antarctica both physically and in the cultural imaginary.Perhaps in recognition of the diverse ways in which a region or a city might be connected to Antarctica, researchers have recently been suggesting critical approaches to the ‘gateway’ label. C. Michael Hall points to a fuzziness in the way the term is applied, noting that it has drifted from its initial definition (drawn from economic geography) as denoting an access and supply point to a hinterland that produces a certain level of economic benefits. While Hall looks to keep the term robustly defined to avoid empty “local boosterism” (272–73), Gabriela Roldan aims to move the concept “beyond its function as an entry and exit door”, arguing that, among other things, the local community should be actively engaged in the Antarctic region (57). Leane, examining the representation of Hobart as a gateway in historical travel texts, concurs that “ingress and egress” are insufficient descriptors of Tasmania’s relationship with Antarctica, suggesting that at least discursively the island is positioned as “part of an Antarctic rim, itself sharing qualities of the polar region” (45). The ARC Linkage Project described above, supported by the Hobart City Council, the State Government and the University of Tasmania, as well as other national and international partners, aims to foster the idea of the Hobart and its counterparts as ‘Antarctic cities’ whose citizens act as custodians for the South Polar region, with a genuine concern for and investment in its future.Near and Far: Local Perspectives A changing climate may once again herald a shift in the identity of the Tasmanian islands. Recognition of the central role of Antarctica in regulating the global climate has generated scientific and political re-evaluation of the region. Antarctica is not only the planet’s largest heat sink but is the engine of global water currents and wind patterns that drive weather patterns and biodiversity across the world (Convey et al. 543). For example, Tas van Ommen’s research into Antarctic glaciology shows the tangible connection between increased snowfall in coastal East Antarctica and patterns of drought southwest Western Australia (van Ommen and Morgan). Hobart has become a global centre of marine and Antarctic science, bringing investment and development to the city. As the global climate heats up, Tasmania—thanks to its low latitude and southerly weather patterns—is one of the few regions in Australia likely to remain temperate. This is already leading to migration from the mainland that is impacting house prices and rental availability (Johnston; Landers 1). The region’s future is therefore closely entangled with its proximity to the far south. Salazar writes that “we cannot continue to think of Antarctica as the end of the Earth” (67). Shifting Antarctica into focus also brings Tasmania in from the margins. As an Antarctic city, Hobart assumes a privileged positioned on the global stage. This allows the city to present itself as central to international research efforts—in contrast to domestic views of the place as a small regional capital. The city inhabits dual identities; it is both on the periphery of Australian concerns and at the centre of Antarctic activity. Tasmania, then, is not in freefall, but rather at the forefront of a push to recognise Antarctica as entangled with its neighbours to the north.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Australian Research Council under LP160100210.ReferencesAntonello, Alessandro. “Finding Place in Antarctica.” Antarctica and the Humanities. Eds. Peder Roberts, Lize-Marie van der Watt, and Adrian Howkins. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 181–204.Australian Government. 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There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. Acknowledgements I’m indebted to both David Fosdick and Phil Roe for alerting me to the importance to the Fremantle Dockers Football Club. The research and an original draft of this essay were carried out under the auspices of a PhD scholarship from Central Queensland University, and from whom I would also like to thank Denis Cryle and Geoff Danaher for their advice. References Benjamin, Walter. “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: New Left Books, 1973. 155–176. Bennett, Tony, Michael Emmison and John Frow. Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Berry, Wendell. “The Regional Motive.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. 63–70. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Diagram.” The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Constantin Boundas and Jacqueline Code. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 193–200. Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 16–30. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus.” Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. 156–193. Hassan, Ihab. “How Australian Is It?” The Best Australian Essays. Ed. Peter Craven. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000. 405–417. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 145–161. Hughes, John. The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays. Sydney: Giramondo, 2004. Iyer, Pico. “Australia 1988: Five Thousand Miles from Anywhere.” Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World. London: Jonathon Cape, 1993. 173–190. “Keeping Track.” Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club. Edition 3, September (2005): 21. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41–61. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. “The Suppression and Rethinking of Regionalism and Tropicalism After 1945.” Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Eds. Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2001. 14–58. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World. New York: Prestel, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1976. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Diagrammatology.” Critical Inquiry 7.3 (1981): 622–633. Morse, Margaret. “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam.” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. 63–74. Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Desmond Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973. Porteous, J. Douglas. “Home: The Territorial Core.” Geographical Review LXVI (1976): 383-390. Rothwell, Nicolas. Wings of the Kite-Hawk: A Journey into the Heart of Australia. Sydney: Pidador, 2003. Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indianapolis UP, 1999. Scott, Allen J. Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Storper, Michael. The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. New York: The Guildford Press, 1997. Ulmer, Gregory L. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: John Hopkins UP, 1994. Ulmer, Gregory. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Longman: Boston, 2003. Wilken, Rowan. “Diagrammatology.” Illogic of Sense: The Gregory Ulmer Remix. Eds. Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye. Alt-X Press, 2007. 48–60. Available at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/ulmer.html. (Retrieved 12 June 2007)

Image 1: View from Geodha Sgoilt towards the sea stacks, Uig, Isle of Lewis. Image credit: George Jaramillo.IntroductionOver the cliffs of Mangerstadh on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, is a small plot of land called Geodha Sgoilt that overlooks the North Atlantic Ocean (Image 1). On the site is a small dirt gravel road and the remnants of a World War II listening station. Below, sea stacks rise from the waters, orange and green cliff sides stand in defiance to the crashing waves. An older gentleman began to tell me of what he believed could be located here on the site. A place where visitors could learn of the wonders of St Kilda that contained all types of new storytelling technologies to inspire them. He pointed above the ruined buildings, mentioning that a new road for the visitors’ vehicles and coaches would be built. With his explanations, you could almost imagine such a place on these cliffs. Yet, before that new idea could even be built, this gentleman and his group of locals and incomers had to convince themselves and others that this new heritage centre was something desired, necessary and inevitable in the development of the Western Isles.This article explores the developing relationships that come about through design innovation with community organisations. This was done through a partnership between an academic institution and a non-profit heritage community group as part of growing study in how higher education design research can play an active partner in community group development. It argues for the use of design thinking and innovation in improving strategy and organisational processes within non-profit organisations. In this case, it looks at what role it can play in building and enabling organisational confidence in its mission, as well as, building “beyond the museum”. The new approach to this unique relationship casts new light towards working with complexities and strategies rather than trying to resolve issues from the outset of a project. These enabling relationships are divided into three sections of this paper: First it explores the context of the island community group and “building” heritage, followed by a brief history of St Kilda and its current status, and designation as a World Heritage site. Second, it seeks the value of developing strategy and the introduction of the Institute of Design Innovation (INDI). This is followed by a discussion of the six-month relationship and work that was done that elucidates various methods used and ending with its outcomes. The third section reflects upon the impacts at the relationship building between the two groups with some final thoughts on the partnership, where it can lead, and how this can represent new ways of working together within community groups. Building HeritageCurrent community research in Scotland has shown struggles in understanding issues within community capability and development (Barker 11; Cave 20; Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 23) though most focus on the land tenure and energy (McMorran 21) and not heritage groups. The need to maintain “resilient” (Steiner 17) communities has shown that economic resilience is of primary importance for these rural communities. Heritage as economic regenerator has had a long history in the United Kingdom. Some of these like the regeneration of Wirksworth in the Peak District (Gordon 20) have had great economic results with populations growing, as well as, development in the arts and design. These changes, though positive, have also adversely impacted the local community by estranging and forcing lower income townspeople to move away due to higher property values and lack of work. Furthermore, current trends in heritage tourism have managed to turn many rural regions into places of historic consumption (Ronström 7) termed “heritagisation” (Edensor 35). There is thus a need for critical reflection within a variety of heritage organisations with the increase in heritage tourism.In particular, existing island heritage organisations face a variety of issues that they focus too much on the artefactual or are too focused to strive for anything beyond the remit of their particular heritage (Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 33; Ronström 4). Though many factors including funding, space, volunteerism and community capability affect the way these groups function they have commonalities that include organisational methods, volunteer fatigue, and limited interest from community groups. It is within this context that the communities of the Outer Hebrides. Currently, projects within the Highlands and islands focus on particular “grassroots” development (Cave 26; Robertson 994) searching for innovative ways to attract, maintain, and sustain healthy levels of heritage and development—one such group is Ionad Hiort. Ionad Hiort Ionad Hiort is a community non-profit organisation founded in 2010 to assist in the development of a new type of heritage centre in the community of Uig on the Isle of Lewis (“Proposal-Ionad Hiort”). As stated in their website, the group strives to develop a centre on the history and contemporary views of St Kilda, as well as, encouraging a much-needed year-round economic impetus for the region. The development of the group and the idea of a heritage centre came about through the creation of the St Kilda Opera, a £1.5 million, five-country project held in 2007, led by Scotland’s Gaelic Arts agency, Proiseact nan Ealan (Mckenzie). This opera, inspired by the cliffs, people, and history of St Kilda used creative techniques to unite five countries in a live performance with cliff aerobatics and Gaelic singing to present the island narrative. From this initial interest, a commission from the Western Isles council (2010), developed by suggestions and commentary from earlier reports (Jura Report 2009; Rebanks 2009) encouraged a fiercely contentious competition, which saw Ionad Hiort receive the right to develop a remote-access heritage centre about the St Kilda archipelago (Maclean). In 2013, the group received a plot of land from the local laird for the establishment of the centre (Urquhart) thereby bringing it closer to its goal of a heritage centre, but before moving onto this notion of remote-heritage, a brief history is needed on the archipelago. Image 2: Location map of Mangerstadh on the Isle of Lewis and St Kilda to the west, with inset of Scotland. Image credit: © Crown Copyright and Database Right (2017). Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence).St KildaSt Kilda is an archipelago about 80 kilometres off the coast of the Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic (Image 2). Over 2000 years of habitation show an entanglement between humans and nature including harsh weather, limited resources, but a tenacity and growth to develop a way of living upon a small section of land in the middle of the Atlantic. St Kilda has maintained a tenuous relationship between the sea, the cliffs and the people who have lived within its territory (Geddes, and Gannon 18). Over a period of three centuries beginning in the eighteenth century an outside influence on the island begin to play a major role, with the loss of a large portion of its small (180) population. This population would later decrease to 100 and finally to 34 in 1930, when it was decided to evacuate the final members of the village in what could best be called a forced eviction.Since the evacuation, the island has maintained an important military presence as a listening station during the Second World War and in its modern form a radar station as part of the Hebridean Artillery (Rocket) Range (Geddes 14). The islands in the last thirty years have seen an increase in tourism with the ownership of the island by the National Trust of Scotland. The UNESCO World Heritage Organisation (UNESCO), who designated St Kilda in 1986 and 2004 as having outstanding universal value, has seen its role evolve from not just protecting (or conserving) world heritage sites, but to strategically understand sustainable tourism of its sites (“St Kilda”). In 2012, UNESCO selected St Kilda as a case study for remote access heritage conservation and interpretation (Hebrides News Today; UNESCO 15). This was partly due to the efforts of 3D laser scanning of the islands by a collaboration between The Glasgow School of Art and Historic Environment Scotland called the Centre for Digital Documentation and Visualisation (CDDV) in 2009.The idea of a remote access heritage is an important aspect as to what Ionad Hiort could do with creating a centre at their site away from St Kilda. Remote access heritage is useful in allowing for sites and monuments to be conserved and monitored “from afar”. It allows for 3D visualisations of sites and provides new creative engagements with a variety of different places (Remondino, and Rizzi 86), however, Ionad Hiort was not yet at a point to even imagine how to use the remote access technology. They first needed a strategy and direction, as after many years of moving towards recognition of proposing the centre at their site in Uig, they had lost a bit of that initial drive. This is where INDI was asked to assist by the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the regional development organisation for most of rural Scotland. Building ConfidenceINDI is a research institute at The Glasgow School of Art. It is a distributed, creative collective of researchers, lecturers and students specialising in design innovation, where design innovation means enabling creative capabilities within communities, groups and individuals. Together, they address complex issues through new design practices and bespoke community engagement to co-produce “preferable futures” (Henchley 25). Preferable futures are a type of future casting that seeks to strive not just for the probable or possible future of a place or idea, but for the most preferred and collectively reached option for a society (McAra-McWilliam 9). INDI researches the design processes that are needed to co-create contexts in which people can flourish: at work, in organisations and businesses, as well as, in public services and government. The task of innovation as an interactive process is an example of the design process. Innovation is defined as “a co-creation process within social and technological networks in which actors integrate their resources to create mutual value” (Russo‐Spena, and Mele 528). Therefore, innovation works outside of standard consultancy practices; rather it engenders a sense of mutual co-created practices that strive to resolve particular problems. Examples include the work that has looked at creating cultures of innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (Lockwood 4) where the design process was used to alter organisational support (Image 3). These enterprises tend to emulate larger firms and corporations and though useful in places where economies of scale are present, smaller business need adaptable, resilient and integrated networks of innovation within their organisational models. In this way, innovation functioned as a catalyst for altering the existing organisational methods. These innovations are thus a useful alternative to existing means of approaching problems and building resilience within any organisation. Therefore, these ideas of innovation could be transferred and play a role in enabling new ways of approaching non-profit organisational structures, particularly those within heritage. Image 3: Design Council Double Diamond model of the design process. Image credit: Lockwood.Developing the WorkIonad Hiort with INDI’s assistance has worked together to develop a heritage centre that tries to towards a new definition of heritage and identity through this island centre. Much of this work has been done through local community investigations revolving around workshops and one-on-one talks where narratives and ideas are held in “negative capability” (McAra-McWilliam 2) to seek many alternatives that would be able to work for the community. The initial aims of the partnership were to assist the Uig community realise the potential of the St Kilda Centre. Primarily, it would assist in enabling the capabilities of two themes. The first would be, strategy, for Ionad Hiort’s existing multi-page mission brief. The second would be storytelling the narrative of St Kilda as a complex and entangled, however, its common views are limited to the ‘fall from grace’ or ‘noble savage’ story (Macdonald 168). Over the course of six months, the relationship involved two workshops and three site visits of varying degrees of interaction. An initial gathering had InDI staff meet members of Ionad Hiort to introduce members to each other. Afterwards, INDI ran two workshops over two months in Uig to understand, reflect and challenge Ionad Hiort’s focus on what the group desired. The first workshop focused on the group’s strategy statement. In a relaxed and facilitated space in the Uig Community Hall, the groups used pens, markers, and self-adhesive notes to engage in an open dialogue about the group’s desires. This session included reflecting on what their heritage centre could look like, as well as what their strategy needed to get there. These resulted in a series of drawings of their ‘preferred’ centre, with some ideas showing a centre sitting over the edge of the cliffs or one that had the centre be an integral component of the community. In discussing that session, one of members of the group recalled:I remember his [one of INDI’s staff] interrogation of the project was actually pretty – initially – fairly brutal, right? The first formal session we had talking about strategy and so on. To the extent that I think it would be fair to say he pissed everybody off, right? So much so that he actually prompted us to come back with some fairly hard hitting ripostes, which, after a moment’s silence he then said, ‘That’s it, you’ve convinced me’, and at that point we kind of realised that that’s what he’d been trying to do; he’d been trying to really push us to go further in our articulation of what we were doing and … why we were doing it in this particular way than we had done before. (Participant A, 2016).The group through this session found out that their strategy could be refined into a short mission statement giving a clear focus as to what they wanted and how they wanted to go about doing it. In the end, drawings, charts, stories (Image 4) were drawn to reflect on what the community had discussed. These artefacts became a key role-player in the following months of the development of the group. Image 4: View of group working through their strategy workshop session. Image credit: Fergus Fullarton-Pegg (2014). The second set of workshops and visits involved informal discussion with individual members of the group and community. This included a visit to St Kilda with members from INDI, Ionad Hiort and the Digital Design Studio, which allowed for everyone to understand the immensity of the project and its significance to World Heritage values. The initial aims thus evolved into understanding the context of self-governance for distributed communities and how to develop the infrastructure of development. As discussed earlier, existing development processes are useful, though limited to only particular types of projects, and as exemplified in the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Western Isles Council commission, it tends to put communities against each other for limited pots of money. This existing system can be innovated upon by becoming creative liaisons, sharing and co-creating from existing studies to help develop more effective processes for the future of Ionad Hiort and their ‘preferable future’. Building RelationshipsWhat the relationship with GSA has done, as a dialogue with the team of people that have been involved, has been to consolidate and clarify our own thinking and to get us to question our own thinking across several different aspects of the whole project. (Participant A, 2016)As the quote states, the main notion of using design thinking has allowed Ionad Hiort to question their thinking and challenge preconceptions of what a “heritage centre” is, by being a critical sounding board that is different from what is provided by consultants and other stakeholders. Prior to meeting INDI, Ionad Hiort may have been able to reach their goal of a strategy, however, it would have taken a few more years. The work, which involved structured and unstructured workshops, meetings, planning events, and gatherings, gave them a structured focus to move ahead with their prospectus planning and bidding. INDI enabled the compression and focus of their strategy making and mission strategy statement over the course of six months into a one-page statement that gave direction to the group and provided the impetus for the development of the prospectus briefs. Furthermore, INDI contributed a sense of contemporary content to the historic story, as well as, enable the community to see that this centre would not just become another gallery with café. The most important outcome has been an effective measure in building relationships in the Outer Hebrides, which shows the changing roles between academic and third sector partnerships. Two key points can be deemed from these developing relationships: The first has been to build a research infrastructure in and across the region that engages with local communities about working with the GSA, including groups in North Uist, Barra and South Uist. Of note is a comment made by one of the participants saying: “It’s exciting now, there’s a buzz about it and getting you [INDI] involved, adding a dimension—we’ve got people who have got an artistic bent here but I think your enthusiasm, your skills, very much complement what we’ve got here.” (Participant B, 2016). Second, the academic/non-profit partnership has encouraged younger people to work and study in the area through a developing programme of student research activity. This includes placing taught masters students with local community members on the South Uist, as well as, PhD research being done on Stornoway. These two outcomes then have given rise to interest in not only how heritage is re-developed in a community, but also, encourages future interest, by staff and students to continue the debate and fashion further developments in the region (GSAmediacentre). Today, the cliffs of Mangerstadh continue to receive the pounding of waves, the blowing wind and the ever-present rain on its rocky granite surface. The iterative stages of work that the two groups have done showcase the way that simple actions can carve, change and evolve into innovative outcomes. The research outcomes show that through this new approach to working with communities we move beyond the consultant and towards an ability of generating a preferable future for the community. In this way, the work that has been created together showcases a case study for further island community development. We do not know what the future holds for the group, but with continued support and maintaining an open mind to creative opportunities we will see that the community will develop a space that moves “beyond the museum”. AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Ionad Hiort and all the residents of Uig on the Isle of Lewis for their assistance and participation in this partnership. For more information on their work please visit http://www.ionadhiort.org/. The author also thanks the Highlands and Islands Enterprise for financial support in the research and development of the project. Finally, the author thanks the two reviewers who provided critical commentary and critiques to improve this paper. ReferencesBarker, Adam. “Capacity Building for Sustainability: Towards Community Development in Coastal Scotland.” Journal of Environmental Management 75.1 (2005): 11-19. 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Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. 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