Journal articles on the topic 'Duty solicitor'

<p>The opportunity to take part in the local County Court hearings of repossession cases arose around 3 years ago, the same time as I joined the University of Northumbria as a solicitor/ tutor working in the Student Law Office. I wanted to keep up my own hands-on skills as a solicitor, and so grasped this opportunity with enthusiasm. It has been an invaluable teaching tool as part of student’s experiences within the student law office, but only recently have I stopped to take stock of the nature and value of this experience, and to consider more carefully the aims and objectives, from the Student Law Office point of view, in taking part in this.</p><p>This paper looks at experiences with students at court repossession days, and the messages we are giving students when we expose them to this type of work – are we moving closer towards clinical legal education with a social justice agenda? And what do we get out of these court days as a student learning experience. </p>

Although the principle of the confidentiality between client and attorney or solicitor is only one among many other professional duties of confidentiality, its nature is exceptional. Especially in the context of its legal regulation and a notion of controversy towards it. The main aim of the article is to analyze bodies of law that recognizes the duty of confidentiality between an attorney or a solicitor and their client, with particular focus on the regulation of the legal acts that allow the organs in criminal procedure to exempt the lawyer form a duty of professional confidentiality. Within the articles not only statutory law provisions has been analyzed but also norms of a corporate nature. The articles stress also that exists a dichotomy in the perception of the issue not only among professionals but also by the legislator himself.

The article is sanctified to research of problem questions of cognitive activity of inquisitional judge in judicial control realization in pretrial investigation. Certain limits of activity of inquisitional judge are in the process of finishing telling during realization of judicial control, and set forth a conclusion, that an inquisitional judge is an active subject in criminal realization on the stage of pretrial investigation, that conditioned by both the tasks of criminal realization and features of judicial control. Duty of court, including inquisitional judge, in relation to providing of principle of contentionness of parties and absence of duty to take participating in finishing telling is important, but not qualificatory during realization of discretionary plenary powers an inquisitional judge in the process of finishing telling. It is thus accented, that activity of inquisitional judge must be directed not in support of or refutation of the proofs given by the subjects of finishing telling, but on finding out of circumstances, establishment of that is a necessity for consideration of solicitor or complaint essentially and acceptance of legal, reasonable and explained judicial decision.Participation of inquisitional judge is analysed in the process of assembly of proofs, and set forth a conclusion, that an inquisitional judge carries out the activity, sent to "providing" of proofs of parties of criminal realization or representative of legal entity in relation to that realization comes true. It is suggested to make alteration to КПК and give a right to the inquisitional judge at consideration of any solicitor, statement or complaint on own initiative to hear any witness or investigate any materials of criminal case.Certain features of verification and estimation of proofs by an inquisitional judge during realization of judicial control. It is marked that an inquisitional judge at a decisionmaking carries out the estimation of proofs, taking into account the article of consideration, and requirements set in КПК in relation to the necessity of circumstances of wellproven. Investigational problem questions of application of part are 2 articles of 89 КПК in judicial control realization and a conclusion is reasonable in relation to impossibility by an inquisitional judge during judicial control to acknowledge proofs "obviously" impermissible.

It is a core feature of agency – where one person contractually agrees to act on behalf of another – that the agent owes a duty of loyalty to his principal. This means that an agent must disclose to his principal any profits or gains which he stands to make personally from the transaction involved. An agent is not allowed to receive a corrupt payment such as a bribe to act in a way which is not in his principal’s interest. Indeed, to prevent an abuse of the relationship, even if an agent does not act corruptly, he cannot retain any personal profit made in a transaction relating to his principal unless that profit (for instance an additional commission) has been disclosed to and approved by the principal. So, in Boardman v Phippsa solicitor who made a large profit for a trust was prevented from keeping the profit he made for himself because it had not been agreed by all the trustees and beneficiaries. It was never suggested that he acted dishonestly.

This article was conceived by as an object lesson on how Islamic teachings may be incorporated into the Civil law to improve its moral contents. It was written in memory the author’s son Muhammad Zayd bin Bohorudin (1985-2017), advocate and solicitor, and alumnus of the Ahmad Ibrahim Kulliyyah of Laws (‘AIKOL)’. It is a continuation of Part I, published in the IIUM Law Journal Vol. 26 (2) 2018. In this part, the issue of constitutionality of the developer using the purchaser’s property to secure loan is discussed. It furthermore examines the defects and weaknesses in the operation of several clauses in the Act to the purchaser. Other key issues discussed are the criticism on the house purchase loans, the purchase price and other expenses, the post-execution position of the purchaser as beneficial owner, construction issues, and the developer’s first duty, namely to give clean title to purchaser. At a later part of the article, the position of purchasers in relation to the abandonment of the housing estate, foreclosure, private sale and other disasters are scrutinised. Purchasers’ rights pertaining to the completion of the construction, transfer and registration of the house, as well as their right to life vis-à-vis housing matters are assessed.

The article deals with the problematic issues of pre-trial investigation of criminal offenses, under investigation by the units of the National Police of Ukraine, have not been studied in the scientific literature. The author of the article points out the problems of the legal status of a head of an inquest body, the author's definition of this term is given and proposed changes to the current criminal procedural legislation, which should eliminate legal gaps. Considered the inconsistencies of the current criminal procedural legislation in terms of regulating the order of attachment for seizure of the property during the pre-trial investigation of criminal offenses. Analyzed judicial practice on this issue and proposed changes to legislation according to the needs of practice, what consist release from a duty side of prosecution to apply with a solicitor about the arrest of property during pre-trial investigation of criminal misconducts. With the aim of non-admission of abuses of law enforcement authorities by the right, it offers in the head of 25 criminal procedural code of Ukraine to envisage a right for persons in that property is temporally withdrawn or such property belongs that, apply in a court with a solicitor about verification of validity of exception and storage of material proofs by the side of prosecution and to require a transmission on storage to them of such material proofs. The drawbacks are noted in establishing the terms of pre-trial investigation of criminal offenses, which are caused by the need to conduct psychiatric and other forensic examinations, it is proposed to provide in the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine for an inquiry period of 2 months from the moment a person is informed of suspicion. The author's specified legal inconsistencies in the issue of regulating the conduct of a search during an inquiry, it is indicated that there is a need to standardize Articles 234–236 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Due to fact that the activities of the inquest bodies of the National Police of Ukraine are noticeably inefficient, it is proposed to introduce a shortened inquiry procedure in order to implement the principle of economy in the criminal process and saving resources used during the pre-trial investigation.

There are a number of ways in which a person can share the guilt of another's wrongdoing. He might advise it, command it or consent to it. He might provoke it, praise it, flatter the wrongdoer, or conceal the wrong. He might stay silent when there is a clear duty to denounce the wrong or its perpetrator; or he might positively defend the wrong done. Finally, he might actively participate or cooperate in the wrongdoing. These various activities, apart from cooperation, typically occur before or after the commission of the wrong itself, only provocation being essentially before the fact. As such they fall into the categories of seduction or comfort, seduction being essentially pre-commission and comfort post-commission. In seduction (mutatis mutandis for comfort), the seducer typically leads another into doing wrong who has not definitely made up his mind. He does not assist in the commission, but he leads to its occurring. If the principal (as I will call the one who commits the wrong) has made up his mind, actions which might otherwise amount to seduction are best characterized as amounting to scandal, since they do not lead to wrong but reinforce the principal in his wrongful intent or provide to third parties a bad example since they connote approval of the principal's action. Closely related to the concept of seduction is that of solicitation, though perhaps these are best thought of as two aspects of the same kind of activity. Seduction can be thought of as a strong form of inducement to wrong, typified by command, counsel (where the seducer knows the advice is likely to be relied upon) and enticement through praise or provocation. Solicitation is a softer form of inducement typically involving requests, appeals, and invitations. Whereas the seducer or solicitor leads another into wrong but does not assist in its commission, the co-operator does not lead the principal into wrong but assists in its commission.

The question of whether a shareholder may bring a personal action to recover diminution in value of his shares as a result of a wrong committed by the defendant against the company appears to be settled by the House of Lords in Johnson v. Gore Wood & Co. (to be referred to as the Johnson case). The facts may be stated briefly. Gore Wood, a firm of solicitors, had acted for Johnson's company, in which he owned almost entirely all the shares. The solicitors were alleged to have acted negligently when they failed to exercise an option to purchase a piece of land for Johnson's company. The solicitors then settled a suit brought by the company. After the settlement, Johnson sued the solicitors, arguing that they also owed a duty to him personally. As some of the losses claimed by Johnson were also losses which the company suffered and which had been settled, the solicitors applied to strike out those claims on the ground that they were “reflective losses”. The House of Lords struck out those claims which were reflective losses, namely, claims for diminution in value of his shares and reduction in dividend stream, but allowed other claims to go to trial. The concern of this article is with a shareholder's personal claim for diminution in value of shares.

The Criminal Justice System Efficiency Program aims to deal ‘promptly and efficiently’ with ‘low-level, straightforward cases’ in order to dispense ‘swift and sure justice’. To meet these objectives, the Ministry of Justice places a duty on defence solicitors to reduce the ‘costs and delay associated with forensic evidence’. It justifies its requirements with reference to the Criminal Procedure Rules, highlighting the need for solicitors to actively manage criminal cases, to take part in pre-trial hearings and to engage with forensic evidence through a new form of discourse: Streamlined Forensic Reporting (SFR). The SFR scheme operates ‘by taking a more proportionate approach to forensic evidence through the early preparation of a short report that details the key forensic evidence the prosecution intends to rely upon’. The aim is to avoid the costs associated with thorough forensic analysis by encouraging an early guilty plea. In circumstances where such a plea cannot be elicited, the scheme aims to secure agreement on forensic issues at the earliest stage. It places an obligation on the defence to identify these problematic areas. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research within the forensic science and criminal justice sectors, this article questions the safety or utility of these attenuated and instrumental forms of ‘efficient’ forensic discourse. It demonstrates that streamlined reports are often compiled by non-expert administrators, lack contextual evaluation or technical explanation and are frequently inaccurate or misleading. It asks whether the veiled and incremental approach to the issue of disclosure forms an adequate basis for proper scrutiny or legal challenge, and questions whether this scheme, which exhibits a marked ambivalence towards forensic expertise, may ultimately subvert the duty placed on the courts to place forensic evidence in its proper context.

The article reviews significant recent developments in civil procedure in Alberta. With respect to the examination of documents, the author looks at recent cases dealing with: "possession or power"; whether the cost of producing affects a party's obligation to produce; the consequences of failing to produce a document; the description of privileged documents; and what do and do not qualify as privileged documents. In terms of the examination of witnesses, the author surveys recent cases which deal with: whom may be examined (including the cases of corporate solicitors, spouses, advisors and consultants); compelling examination of witnesses outside the province; the scope of questioning allowed in discovery; the duty to inform; and the use of discovery evidence at trial, especially for the case of employees.

This special section breaks an important silence in British international relations journals toward Noam Chomsky's political writings. Behind this silence lies the bigger matter of the silence in these journals about the issues contained in Chomsky's work. These issues include the use and sponsorship by the United States of terrorism on a massive scale for many years; the failure of most Western academics to take any interest in those US actions; and the dereliction by Western academics of their duty to help those who are trying to stop the United States from acting in this way. Once we started to read Chomsky's work, we concluded that there was a great deal to be learned from it. However, when we began to draw on it, we came up against widespread hostility towards his work combined with both ignorance and misrepresentation of precisely what he writes. In order to explore this undue marginalisation, we solicited a number of articles, including one from Chomsky, which resulted in this collection.

Resumen: Con la actual crisis migratoria y de los refugiados, juristas, politólogos y autoridades competentes de la Unión Europea se enfrentan cada vez más con la cuestión de la llegada de menores necesitados de protección internacional. Esta investigación se enfoca en las diversas e interconectadas di­ficultades prácticas surgidas en el curso del proceso concerniente al otorgamiento de esa protección: «in­visibilidad» del menor, derecho a ser escuchado, preservación de la unidad familiar, deber internacional de no devolución, evaluación del riesgo individual en función del «temor fundado» y del riesgo objetivo.Palabras clave: asilo, menores, solicitud de protección internacional.Abstract: With the current migration and refugee crisis, jurists, political scientists and competent authorities in the European Union are increasingly faced with the issue of the arrival of minors in need of international protection. This research focuses on the diverse and interconnected practical difficulties encountered in the course of the process concerning the granting of such protection: «invisibility» of the minor, right to be heard, preservation of the family unit, international duty of non-refoulement, indivi­dual risk assessment in terms of «well-founded fear» and objective risk.Keywords: asylum, minors, application for international protection.

Famines and food scarcities in the Highlands and Islands, apart from those of the 1690s and 1847, have been under-examined in Scottish historiography. This article considers an aspect of the serious famine of 1836–7: the public response to the famine as reflected by the committees set up to solicit public subscriptions, principally in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London and by the contemporary newspaper reportage. Three themes in particular are examined: the motive and role of the proprietors in seeking subscriptions; the extent to which the evangelical ethos of the day – that the most potent weapon of God's wrathful providence was famine – influenced the public response; and the highlander as a suitable recipient of public aid. The public response was generous, driven by a strong belief in Christian charity, benevolence, divine direction and philanthropic duty. The highlanders were seen as an object of charity for the debt owed to them by the nation for war time services rendered. The proprietors never shook off the criticism that their appeals to the public were self-serving.

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the approach of UK institutional funds to considering flood risk to property investments in the light of their fiduciary duty, the widespread floods in 2007 and 2010 and the predicted increase in future incidence due to climate change. It explores the due diligence process and the challenges to investment decision-making and to property valuation. The case is made for further research to establish the extent of UK investment property potentially at risk from flooding, the degree of risk exposure and the way the risk is translated into valuations. Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive literature review informed the design of interviews with senior managers in major investment funds, their professional advisers and other stakeholder representatives, including environmental consultants, valuers, solicitors, lenders and the insurance industry. Case studies illustrate how the due diligence process is used to identify risks, inform purchase decisions and devise mitigation and management actions. Findings – Property represents about 4 per cent of investments managed in the UK, but there is no clear picture of where and how much could be at risk of flooding. There is a common false assumption among investors that risk levels are unlikely to change and a reluctance to expose an otherwise hidden problem. Originality/value – Property is an important diversification asset in investment portfolios, underpinning individual pension, insurance and savings plans. Prior research indicated flood risk to commercial investment property was under-researched; a need for awareness raising; and for guidance relevant to investors and their professional advisers.

Cash waqf is an Islamic financial instrument which recently is developed by most Muslim scholars. This Islamic financial instrument is believed to be one alternative to solicit social funds from people, other than zakat, with a purpose to gain sustainable benefits without reducing the amount of used fund.Cash waqf is not similar to zakat that is a mandatory and an Islamic pillar for Muslims across the world. Cash waqf is a preferable (sunnah) that is encouraged to be carried out by Muslims to gain ceaseless reward from God. Muslims who spend their money for this Islamic charity have an awareness to do more kindness as a worship form to God.This study aims to analyse the influence of four independent variables, namely religiosity, trust, service quality, and promotion factor on wakif decision to select cash waqf product in Badan Wakaf Indonesia region of Yogyakarta City. The findings showed a positive significant impact, simultaneously and partially, from all observed independent variables toward the dependent variable.Another purpose of this study is to investigate a cash waqf management that is applied in the waqf institution. The duty of Badan Wakaf Indonesia as the waqf institution is only to supervise the nazhirs, waqf managers, regarding their cash waqf management. Badan Wakaf Indonesia indirectly collects and distributes all cash waqf through all its five nazhirs.Keywords: Waqf, Cash Waqf, Wakif Preferences, Wakif Decision

Purpose – To provide an overview of the guidance for proxy firms and investment advisers included in the Staff Legal Bulletin released this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after its four-year comprehensive review of the proxy system. Design/methodology/approach – Discusses briefly the context in which the SEC’s review was conducted; the general themes of the guidance provided; the most notable aspects of the guidance; and the matters that were expected to be, but were not, addressed by the SEC. Findings – The guidance does not go as far in regulating proxy advisory firms as many had anticipated it would. The key obligations specified in the guidance are imposed on the investment advisers who engage the proxy firms. The responsibilities, policies and procedures mandated do not change the fundamental paradigm that has supported the influence of proxy firms – that is, investment advisers continue to be permitted to fulfill their duty to vote client shares in a “conflict-free manner” by voting based on the recommendations of independent third parties, and continue to be exempted from the rules that generally apply to persons who solicit votes or make proxy recommendations. Practical implications – The SEC staff states in the Bulletin that it expects that proxy firms and investment advisers will conform to the obligations imposed in the Bulletin “promptly, but in any event in advance of [the 2015] proxy season.” Originality/value – Practical guidance from experienced M&A lawyers.

Purpose In July 2012, in response to residents' concerns regarding the impact of the traditional 24-hour call system on their personal well-being and educational experience, the University of British Columbia Radiology residency program adopted a 12-hour night float system. This shift takes place in the context of increasing concerns, both across Canada and internationally, about resident well-being and the impact of prolonged duty hours on patient care. Methods An anonymous survey was distributed to all 25 postgraduate years 2-5 University of British Columbia radiology residents 12 months after the introduction of night float. This study sought to solicit residents' feedback about these changes and to identify potential future changes to optimize the call system. Results The response rate was 100%; 96% of residents were in favor of continuing with night float rather than the traditional call system; 72% of residents reported that their judgement was affected secondary to being on night float. Although most residents described varying degrees of impairment, the rate of acute discrepancies between resident preliminary and attending radiologist final reports decreased by more than half, from 2% to less than 1%. Conclusions The vast majority of our residents were in favor of maintaining the night float call system. Night float had a beneficial effect on the resident educational experience: by eliminating the pre-call morning and post-call day off rotation, residents gained an additional 24 days per year on other clinical rotations.

Resumen:La presente investigación trata de analizar el uso que se hizo del artículo 81.3 del Reglamento del Parlamento de Cataluña para alterar el orden del día y aprobar tanto la proposición de ley de referéndum como la de transitoriedad. Para ello, primero se ha examinado tanto el contenido que posee dicho artículo como aquellas cuestiones dudosas sobre el mismo. En segundo lugar, se ha resumido tanto la interpretación que se le dio a dicho precepto por la mayoría parlamentaria catalana para poder introducir ambas proposiciones de ley como las consecuencias que ello tuvo en forma de recursos de amparo. En tercer lugar, se ha contrastado la jurisprudencia del Tribunal Constitucional con las diferentes cuestiones planteadas durante el procedimiento de aprobación de ambas proposiciones de ley. En cuarto lugar, se ha intentado realizar una propuesta de resolución de aquellos recursos de amparo presentados por el grupo parlamentario de Ciudadanos sobre los que el Tribunal Constitucional todavía no se ha pronunciado. Y, en quinto y último lugar, se han analizado las SSTC 10/2018 y 27/2018 que resuelven los recursos de amparo sobre los acuerdos de la Mesa por los que se desestimaba la solicitud de dictamen del CGE.Una vez realizado todo ello, seis han sido las principales conclusiones. Uno: que la Mesa del Parlamento de Cataluña tenía tanto la obligación de realizar un análisis más allá de la estricta verificación de los requisitos formales por existir unos incidentes de ejecución que le obligaban expresamente a ello, como el deber de acordar su inadmisión por ser las proposiciones de ley palmaria y evidentemente inconstitucionales. Dos: que el Tribunal Constitucional debería fallar en contra de la parte del recurso de Ciudadanos donde se pedía anular los acuerdos del Pleno mediante los cuales se alteró el orden del día, pero debería resolver a favor de aquella otra parte del mismo recurso donde se pedía anular los acuerdos del Pleno mediante los cuales se creó un procedimiento legislativo ad hoc a través del art. 81.3 RPC. Tres: que las SSTC 10/2018 y 27/2018 estiman positivamente los recursos de amparo del grupo parlamentario Socialista en los que se pedía declarar la nulidad tanto de los Acuerdos de la Mesa de los días 6 y 7 de septiembre por los que se desestimaba tramitar la solicitud de dicho dictamen como de sus efectos. Cuatro: que no parece ser manifiestamente inconstitucional que a través del art. 81.3 RPC se pueda modificar el orden del día para incluir el debate y votación de una proposición de ley, afirmación esta que bien puede ser ampliable a todos aquellos preceptos de los demás reglamentos parlamentarios cuyo contenido sea similar. Cinco: que ni el art. 81.3 RPC ni ningún otro precepto que desarrolle la alteración del orden del día en los demás reglamentos parlamentarios, habilita para que a su través la mayoría parlamentaria cree un procedimiento legislativo ad hoc gracias al cual posteriormente se puedan aprobar proposiciones de ley. Y seis: que el motivo principal por el cual se acabaron tramitando las proposiciones de ley de esa manera no es otro que la voluntad de la mayoría parlamentaria (y, por ende, del Gobierno catalán) de tramitar y aprobar con apariencia de legalidad dos proposiciones de ley que eran ya en su origen evidentemente inconstitucionales.Summary:1. Introduction. 2. The content of article 81.3 Of the standing orders of the parliament of catalonia. 3. The consequences of the use of article 81.3 Rpc to introduce the laws of referendum and transitoriness on the agenda. 4. The jurisprudence of the constitutional court on the questions raised during the procedure to approve both bills. 4.1 The problem of whether the Parliamentary Bureau could have inadmitted to process both bills. 4.2 The problem of whether art. 81.3 RPC allows through it to develop that legislative procedure that was eventually used to approve both bills. 4.3 The problem regarding the suppression of the possibility of requesting a Dictum from the Council of Statutory Guarantees. 5. A possible resolution of the appeal submitted by the ciudadanos parliamentary group. 5.1 In relation to the plenary agreements by means of which the agenda was changed to introduce the bills of the referendum and of transitoriness. 5.2 In relation to the agreements of the Plenary throughwhich an ad hoc legislative procedure was created to proceed to the debateand definitive voting of the bills of the referendum and of transitoriness.6. The SSTC 10/2018 and 27/2018 that solve the appeal in relation to theagreements of the parliamentary bureau that rejected the request for theCGE’s dictum. 7. Conclusion.Abstract:The present investigation tries to analyse the use that was made of article 81.3 of the Catalan Parliamentary rules of procedure to alter the order of the day and approve both the Referendum Law and the Transitoriness Act. For this, first the content of the article as well as the dubious questions about it have been examined. Secondly, the interpretation given to this precept by the Catalan parliamentary majority in order to introduce both bills as well as the consequences that it had in the form of appeals has been summarized. Thirdly, the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court has been contrasted with the different issues raised during the approval procedure of the Referendum and Transitoriness Acts. Fourthly, an attempt has been made to make a proposal for a resolution of the appeals filed and on which the Constitutional Court has not yet ruled. And fifthly, analyse the STCC 10/2018 and 27/2018 that solve the appeal in relation to the agreements of the Parliamentary Bureau that rejectedthe request for the CGE’s dictum.Once all this has been done, six have been the main conclusions. One: that the Catalan Parliament Bureau was so obliged to carry out an analysis beyond the strict verification of the formal requirements because there were some execution incidents that expressly obliged it, as well as the duty to agree on its inadmissibility because the proposals were of obvious law and evidently unconstitutional. Two: that the Constitutional Court should rule against the part of the Citizens’ appeal where it was requested to annul the agreements of the Plenary by means of which the agenda was altered, but it should resolve in favour of that other part of the same resource where it was requested cancel the agreements of the Plenary through which an ad hoc legislative procedure was created through art. 81.3 RPC. Three: that the SSTC 10/2018 and 27/2018 positively estimate both the appeal of the Socialist parliamentary group and one of the parties to the appeal for protection of Citizens, in which it was requested to declare the nullity of both the Agreements of the Bureau of the 6th and September 7 for which it was rejected to process the request for such opinion and its effects. Four: it does not seem to be manifestly unconstitutional that, through art. 81.3 RPC, the agenda can be modified to include the debate and vote on a proposed law, an affirmation that may well be extended to all those precepts of the other regulations parliamentarians whose content is similar. Five: that neither art. 81.3 RPC nor any other precept that develops the alteration of the agenda in the other parliamentary regulations, enables the parliamentary majority to create an ad hoc legislative procedure through which subsequent proposals can be approved. Of law. And six: that the main reason why they ended up processing the proposals of law in this way is none other than the will of the Catalan parliamentary majority (and, thus his government) to process and approve with appearance of legality two propositions of law that were already in their origin evidently unconstitutional.

This article concerns an issue that has become increasingly relevant for international coalition forces participating in joint military operations abroad, viz. the duty to collect, document, record and secure evidence of serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights committed in armed conflicts. The point, simple as it seems, is that respect for justice and international humanitarian law requires that perpetrators of war crimes etc. be brought to justice. Yet prosecution and trial of these crimes cannot succeed without material proof and information that meet the standards for admission into evidence in criminal trials. However, judicial experience from international criminal trials suggests that much of the evidence produced in Court fails to meet this standard – and is therefore dismissed. The article highlights the need to secure evidence of these crimes and proposes five simple basic recommendations for military personnel who come across evidence of serious violations of international humanitarian law in armed conflicts: (1) be familiar with the elements of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression; (2) know the rules of the game regarding collection of evidence, including the duty to respect local norms and authorities and to follow any international rules or agreements, and the duty to comply with obligations to seek authorization for investigation from domestic authorities; (3) be careful in your registration and handling of evidence material; (4) be careful not to hurt yourself or others when you search for evidence; and (5) stay critical and impartial to all material and information you receive from others. Cet article aborde un problème que les forces armées des coalitions internationales rencontrent de plus en plus souvent lorsqu’elles participent à des opérations militaires conjointes à l’étranger: l’obligation de rassembler, de documenter, d’enregistrer et de garantir des preuves de violations graves du droit international humanitaire et des droits de l’homme lors de conflits armés. Aussi simple qu’il paraisse, le principe est le suivant: le respect de la justice et du droit international humanitaire implique que les auteurs de crimes de guerre et autres soient traduits en justice. Toutefois, les poursuites judiciaires et le procès qui s’ensuit ne peuvent aboutir sans preuves matérielles et informations qui répondent aux normes d’admission de la preuve dans les procès au pénal. L’expérience judiciaire de ces procès internationaux suggère néanmoins que bon nombre des preuves présentées au tribunal ne répondent pas à ces normes et sont dès lors rejetées. L’auteur insiste sur le besoin de fournir des preuves de ces crimes et propose cinq recommandations de base pour le personnel militaire qui aurait des preuves de violations graves du droit international humanitaire dans les conflits armés: (1) informez-vous sur les différents éléments qui composent le génocide, les crimes contre l’humanité, les crimes de guerre et les agressions; (2) connaissez les règles relatives au rassemblement de preuves, y compris le devoir de respecter les normes et autorités locales, de suivre les règles et accords internationaux, et de se conformer à l’obligation d’obtenir une autoris­ation des autorités nationales pour mener une enquête; (3) soyez prudents lorsque vous enregistrez et utilisez des éléments de preuve; (4) veillez à ne pas causer de tort aux autres ni à vous-même lorsque vous cherchez des preuves; et (5) restez critique et impartial lorsque vous recevez des informations d’autres personnes. Dit artikel bespreekt een kwestie die van toenemend belang is voor internationale coalitietroepen die deelnemen aan gezamenlijke militaire operaties in het buitenland, nl. de plicht om bewijs van ernstige schendingen van het internationaal humanitair recht (IHR) en van de mensenrechten in gewapende conflicten te verzamelen, te staven, vast te leggen en veilig te stellen. Het punt, hoe eenvoudig ook, is dat het respect voor de rechtspleging en het internationaal humanitair recht vereist dat de daders van oorlogsmisdaden enz. voor het gerecht worden gebracht. Toch kunnen deze misdaden niet succesvol vervolgd en berecht worden zonder materieel bewijs en informatie die voldoen aan de normen om als bewijs in strafprocessen te worden toegelaten. De ervaring uit internationale strafprocessen leert echter dat veel van het bewijsmateriaal dat in de rechtbank wordt aangedragen, niet aan deze norm voldoet – en daarom wordt verworpen. Het artikel benadrukt de noodzaak om het bewijs van deze misdaden veilig te stellen en stelt vijf eenvoudige basisaanbevelingen voor aan militairen die in gewapende conflicten bewijzen van ernstige schendingen van het internationaal humanitair recht aantreffen: (1) wees op de hoogte van de elementen van genocide, misdaden tegen de menselijkheid, oorlogsmisdaden en agressie; (2) ken de regels van het spel met betrekking tot het verzamelen van bewijs, met inbegrip van de plicht om de lokale normen en autoriteiten te respecteren en om alle internationale regels of overeenkomsten te volgen, evenals de plicht om te voldoen aan de verplichting dat aan binnenlandse autoriteiten toestemming moet worden gevraagd om een onderzoek in te stellen; (3) let op bij het registreren en behandelen van bewijsmateriaal; (4) zorg ervoor dat je jezelf of anderen geen schade berokkent wanneer je naar bewijs zoekt; en (5) blijf kritisch en onpartijdig ten opzichte van al het materiaal en de informatie die je van anderen ontvangt. El artículo aborda un problema que con el tiempo ha adquirido una importancia relevante para las fuerzas en coalición que participan en operaciones conjuntas en el exterior, tal cual es el deber de recoger, documentar, registrar y asegurar las pruebas de crímenes graves contra el Derecho Internacional Humanitario (DIH) y contra los derechos humanos cometidos en los conflictos armados. El asunto, tan simple como parece, es que el respeto por la justicia y el Derecho Internacional Humanitario exige que en definitiva los perpetradores de crímenes de guerra sean llevados ante la justicia. Sin embargo, la acusación y el enjuiciamiento de estos crímenes no pueden prosperar sin una prueba material e información que reúna los requisitos necesarios para ser admitida como prueba de cargo en juicios penales. Al hilo de esto, la experiencia judicial en procedimientos penales internacionales demuestra que muchas de estas pruebas presentadas ante un tribunal no cumplen con estos estándares y, por consiguiente, son rechazadas. El artículo resalta la necesidad de asegurar la prueba de estos crímenes y propone cinco recomendaciones básicas para el personal militar que deba requisar estas pruebas relativas a crímenes graves contra el Derecho Internacional Humanitario en conflictos armados: (1) Familiarizarse con los elementos constitutivos del crimen de genocidio, crímenes contra la humanidad, crímenes de guerra y crimen de agresión; (2) Conocer las reglas del juego relativas a la recogida de pruebas, incluido el deber de respetar las normas y a las autoridades locales y cualquier otra regla o acuerdo internacional, y el deber de cumplir con la obligación de solicitar autorización a las autoridades locales para llevar a cabo investigaciones; (3) Ser diligente en el registro y manejo de las pruebas materiales; (4) Tener cuidado de no dañarse o dañar a otros en la búsqueda de las pruebas; y (5) tener una actitud crítica e imparcial ante las pruebas e información que se reciba de otros. Questo articolo tratta di una questione che è diventata sempre più rilevante per le forze di coalizione internazionali che partecipano ad operazioni militari congiunte all’estero, vale a dire il dovere di raccogliere, documentare, registrare e mettere al sicuro le prove di gravi violazioni al diritto internazionale umanitario (IHL) e dei diritti umani commesse nei conflitti armati. Il punto, semplice come appare, è che il rispetto della giustizia e del diritto internazionale umanitario richiedono che gli autori di crimini di guerra etc. siano assicurati alla giustizia. Però l’azione penale e il processo per tali crimini non possono avere successo senza prove materiali e informazioni che soddisfino gli standard per l’ammissione come prova nei processi penali. Tuttavia, l’esperienza giudiziaria dei tribunali penali internazionali suggerisce che molte delle prove prodotte nei tribunali non soddisfano questi standard e perciò vengono respinte. Questo articolo evidenzia la necessità di garantire prove di questi crimini e propone cinque semplice raccomandazioni di base per il personale militare che si imbatte in prove di serie violazioni al diritto internazionale umanitario nei conflitti armati: (1) Conoscere gli elementi del genocidio, dei crimini contro l’umanità, dei crimini di guerra e dell’aggressione; (2) Conoscere le regole del gioco riguardo la raccolta delle prove, compreso il dovere di rispettare le norme e autorità locali e di seguire qualsiasi regola o accordo internazionale, e il dovere di rispettare gli obblighi di chiedere l’autorizzazione alle indagini alle autorità nazionali; (3) Fare attenzione nella registrazione e gestione del materiale probatorio; (4) Fare attenzione a non fare del male a se stessi od altri nella ricerca delle prove; e (5) Rimanere critici ed imparziali nei confronti di tutto il materiale e delle informazioni ricevute da altri. Dieser Artikel behandelt eine Angelegenheit, die für die Streitkräfte internationaler Koalitionen, die sich an gemeinsamen Militäreinsätzen im Ausland beteiligen, an Relevanz gewinnt, nämlich die Pflicht, Beweismittel schwerer Verletzungen des internationalen humanitären Rechts und internationaler Menschenrechte in bewaffneten Konflikten zu sammeln, zu dokumentieren, aufzuzeichnen und sicherzustellen. Der Kernpunkt, so einfach dieser scheinen mag, besteht darin, dass Respekt vor der Justiz und dem internationalen humanitären Recht erfordert, dass Täter von Kriegsverbrechen, usw. vor Gericht gebracht werden sollen. Dennoch können die Verfolgung und Ahndung dieser Verbrechen ohne materiellen Beweis und Informationen, die den Standards zur Zulassung als Beweismittel in Strafprozessen gerecht werden, nicht gelingen. Die gerichtliche Erfahrung internationaler Strafprozesse weist allerdings darauf hin, dass manche der dem Gericht unter­breiteten Beweise diesen Standards nicht gerecht werden, und somit abgewiesen werden. Der Autor unterstreicht, dass es notwendig ist, Beweise für diese Verbrechen sicher­zustellen, und schlägt fünf einfache Grundempfehlungen für Militärangehörige vor, die auf Beweise schwerer Verletzungen des internationalen humanitären Rechts in bewaffneten Konflikten stoßen: (1) Sorgen Sie dafür, dass Sie die Elemente des Genozids, der Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, Kriegsverbrechen und Aggressionen kennen; (2) seien Sie mit den Spielregeln hinsichtlich der Sammlung von Beweisen vertraut, und dies einschließlich der Pflicht, örtliche Normen und Autoritäten zu respektieren, irgendwelche internationale Regeln oder Abkommen zu befolgen und die Verpflichtungen zu erfüllen, um die Genehmigung zur Durchführung von Ermittlungen von den Behörden des betreffenden Landes einzuholen; (3) seien Sie vorsichtig bei Ihrer Erfassung von bzw. Ihrem Umgang mit Beweismaterial; (4) sorgen Sie dafür, dass Sie sich selbst oder anderen keinen Schaden zufügen, wenn Sie nach Beweisen suchen; und (5) bleiben Sie kritisch und unvoreingenommen in Bezug auf all das Material und alle Informationen, die Sie von anderen erhalten.

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.”1 1John Milton, Sonnet 19 The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought out most of the best (and some of the worst) in us. Much has been said, shared, even sung about health care workers as frontline heroes. Whether we indeed form the frontline, or man the last line of defense, due credit is being given to all “front-liners” – essential-service workers, drivers and delivery personnel, security guards, the military and police who literally serve in the trenches of this invisible war. Indeed, it is heartening to read the inspiring messages, hear the encouraging words, listen to the uplifting (sometimes funny) music and songs, witness the moving memes and cartoons, watch the refreshing dances and tributes, and receive the healing blessings and prayers on various media and social media platforms. Indeed, we are motivated to continue to work, so that others may safely stay home. Some of us have even been called upon to die, so that others may live. But so much less is and has been said about those who make our battle possible, who selflessly and silently took it upon themselves to clothe us with personal protective equipment, feed us, transport us, and even shelter us as we engage the unseen enemy. It is these heroes I wish to thank today. I certainly cannot thank them all, but I sincerely hope that those I do mention will represent the many others I cannot. Early on, my brother Elmer Lapeña and his Team Twilight group of “golfing enthusiasts and friends” (“company owners, executives, managers, engineers, technicians, entrepreneurs, and expats in the electronics, semiconductor, metalworking, automotive, aerospace, and packaging manufacturing industries”) responded to the call for better protection for frontliners with door-to-door deliveries of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to over 40 hospitals in the National Capitol Region, Rizal, Cavite, Laguna and Batangas including the Philippine General Hospital (PGH).2 On a personal note, Elmer and my sister-in-law Annette were closely monitoring our situation, going out of their way to obtain difficult-to-find PPEs for my wife Josie and myself, and our respective Departments of Family and Community Medicine (DFCM) and Otorhinolaryngology (ORL) at the PGH. For her part, our very dear friend Gigi Bautista Rapadas organized Project #HelpCovid19Warriors(HCW), to “go where the virus goes” and “help where help is needed and requested,” harnessing donations from ‘family, friends, and friends of friends” to procure PPE (as well as disinfectants, even canned goods) that were distributed “from Metro Manila to the provinces: Tuguegarao, Bataan, Bulacan, La Union, Nueva Vizcaya, Cavite,” moving from hospitals and health centers to correctional institutes.3 It is because of them that our PGH Department of ORL obtained very expensive but essential respirator hoods for added protection from aerosolized virus when conducting airway procedures, in addition to head-to-foot PPEs for use of the PGH DFCM in attending to PGH staff at the UP Health Service. Meanwhile, without fanfare, our dear friends Popot and Agnes (also my DLSU ’79 classmate) Lorenzana provided cooked meals for 1,000 persons daily. Working with on-the-ground social workers and with the 2KK Tulong sa Kapwa Kapatid Foundation, their Feeding Program “A thousand meals for poor communities” reached Payatas, Talayan, Pinyahan, Smokey Mountain, Maisan, Bagong Silang, Old Balara, Tatalon, Sta. Teresita, Sampaloc, and Sta. Ana, among more than 50 other communities. They generously responded to my wife’s request to provide meals for her community patients of the Canossa Health Center in Tondo. They have also provided meals for hospital staff of Amang Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center, the Medical City Hospital, Veterans Memorial Medical Center, Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital, Dr. Jose Rodriquez Memorial Hospital, Quezon City General Hospital, the San Lazaro Hospital, Valenzuela City Emergency and Lung Center of the Philippines. They continue this service which to date has provided for more than 32,000 meals, with corporate partners and private individuals joining the effort.4 Other De La Salle University (DLSU) College ‘79 batchmates who wish to remain anonymous obtained board approval of their endorsement to channel all the social development funds of their Maritime Multipurpose Cooperative for the next 3 years to the Philippine General Hospital. Adding their personal funds (and those solicited by their daughter and nephew), they took on the daunting task of sourcing and proving Powered Air Purifying Respirators (PAPRs) for our use. Another DLSU batchmate has been providing PPEs to various hospitals including PGH through their family corporation, Nobleland Ventures, Inc. Even their high school batch ’75 of Saint Jude Catholic School has donated boxes and boxes of PPEs to the PGH and other hospitals. Other DLSU ’79 classmates Bel and Bong Consing, and Timmy, Joy (and Tita Linda) Bautista have personally donated PPEs and funds for our COVID-19 operations, while classmate Fritz de Lange even sent over sweet mangoes for us to enjoy with our fellow frontliners. Generous donations also poured in from La Salle Green Hills (LSGH) High School ’76 friends Cris Ibarra, Norman Uy, Class 4E, and batchmates Tito and Pepper who wish to remain anonymous, as well as Menchit Borbon and her St. Theresa’s College Quezon City (STCQC) - Section 1 classmates. We even received overseas support from my LSGH 4B classmate Bingo Pantaleon from Yangon; my mom Libby, brother Bernie and Lilli, and friend Soyanto from Singapore, and sister Sabine from Germany. And how can we forget the regular frozen food deliveries of Jollibee chicken drumsticks and home-made Bulgogi and Tapa from our dear friends Ed and Aning Go? Perhaps the most touching gifts of all came from my eldest and youngest daughters Melay and Jica, who lovingly prepared and delivered much-appreciated meals to us, and middle child Ro-an, who with our son-in-law Reycay serenaded us with beautiful music that was appreciated by no less than Vice President Leni Robredo and featured by the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra.5 Their musical fund-raising campaign started with another haunting piece featuring my sister Nina and brother-in-law Kiko.6 As if that was not enough, Ro-an bakes cookies to raise funds for our ongoing COVID-19 operations at PGH, while Melay and Jica keep asking us what we want to eat next. These three count among those who have least, yet “put in everything ” from what little they have.7 These are but a few examples of those known personally to me- my family and friends. And there are many more. In the same way, every other doctor and front liner will have their own stories to tell, of friends, family even mere acquaintances who have come out of the shadows to help, to care, to share in whatever way they can, in fighting this battle with us. Let this be their tribute as well. Those of us who serve in the Philippine General Hospital have been called People Giving Hope.8,9 I believe that we do give hope because others give us hope in turn. I like to think that the inscription in the PGH lobby “They Also Serve Who Care and Share” honors these others in a special way who go over and beyond the call of duty. With apologies to John Milton, our heroes go way over and beyond “they also serve who only stand and wait.”

Epistemic injustice is a kind of injustice that arises when one’s capacity as an epistemic subject (eg, a knower, a reasoner) is wrongfully denied. In recent years it has been argued that psychiatric patients are often harmed in their capacity as knowers and suffer from various forms of epistemic injustice that they encounter in psychiatric services. Acknowledging that epistemic injustice is a multifaceted problem in psychiatry calls for an adequate response. In this paper I argue that, given that psychiatric patients deserve epistemic respect and have a certain epistemic privilege, healthcare professionals have a pro tanto epistemic duty to attend to and/or solicit reports of patients’ first-person experiences in order to prevent epistemic losses. I discuss the nature and scope of this epistemic duty and point to one interesting consequence. In order to prevent epistemic losses, healthcare professionals may need to provide some patients with resources and tools for expressing their experiences and first-person knowledge, such as those that have been developed within the phenomenological approach. I discuss the risk of secondary testimonial and hermeneutical injustice that the practice of relying on such external tools might pose and survey some ways to mitigate it.

Problem definition: When sourcing through a procurement service provider (PSP), the PSP often collects rebates from unethical manufacturers in developing countries (as referral fees) that are “hidden” from the retailers. Recognizing that a PSP has a strong incentive to solicit quotes from unethical manufacturers, we examine a situation in which the retailer insists on soliciting a quote from a manufacturer designated by the retailer and a separate quote from an unethical manufacturer selected by the PSP. However, when the designated manufacturer is ethical, the PSP has an incentive to inflate the quote from this ethical manufacturer in order to help the unethical manufacturer to win. Facing this situation, is there a mechanism for the retailer to control hidden rebates? Academic/practical relevance: The issue of hidden rebates is a “known secret” in global supply chain practice. Also, hidden rebates increase the customs duty for U.S. importers because of the first sales rule for customs valuation of U.S. imports. Therefore, there is a need to understand the implications of hidden rebates and to control this unethical practice. Methodology: To circumvent the issue of hidden rebates and quote inflations, we develop a deterministic, incentive-compatible mechanism that is based on a simple selection rule (for selecting a manufacturer) and a contingent service fee (as a reward for the service provided by the PSP). Results: Our optimal mechanism creates incentives to (1) deter the PSP from inflating the quote submitted from the ethical manufacturer, (2) reduce the incidence of hidden rebates, and (3) reduce the retailer’s procurement cost and the corresponding import tax significantly. More importantly, relative to the “lowest quote wins” selection rule, the optimal mechanism is Pareto-improving for the retailer and the service provider when the hidden rebate is below a certain threshold. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to the case in which (1) the retailer is not sure whether the designated manufacturer is ethical or not, (2) the retailer does not know the exact value of hidden rebate (but it follows a two-point distribution), and (3) the retailer may verify the quote with its designated manufacturer before a formal contract. We also explore the stochastic incentive-compatible mechanism for the cases in which the penalty is unenforceable or enforceable. Managerial implications: When law enforcement is inconsistent in developing countries, retailers should beware of the existence and implications of hidden rebates. We provide a simple mechanism that a retailer can consider as a practical way to deter the PSP from inflating certain quotes and put hidden rebates under control.

Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Page, John. “Common Property and the Age of Aquarius.” Griffith Law Review 19 (2010): 172-196. Page, John, Ann Brower, and Johannes Welsh. “The Curious Untidiness of Property and Ecosystem Services: A Hybrid Method of Measuring Place.” Pace Environmental Law Rev. 32 (2015): forthcoming. Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73 (1964): 733-787. Richmond River Historical Society Archives. “After Nimbin What?” Nimbin Aquarius file, flyer. Lismore, NSW. Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Rose, Carol M. “The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems.” Minnesota Law Rev. 83 (1998-1999): 129-182. Rose, Carol M. “Canons of Property Talk, or Blackstone’s Anxiety.” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 601-632. Sargisson, Lucy, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Sax, Joseph L. Defending the Environment: A Strategy for Citizen Action. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Singer, Joseph. “No Right to Exclude: Public Accommodations and Private Property.” Nw. U.L.Rev. 90 (1995): 1283-1481. Smith, Margaret, and David Crossley, eds. The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1975. Stone, Christopher. “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Southern Cal. L. Rev. 45 (1972): 450-501. Tribe, Laurence H. “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees: New Foundations for Environmental Law.” Yale Law Journal 83 (1973-1974): 1315-1348. Zablocki, Benjamin. Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes. New York: Free Press, 1980.

Introduction "Doesn't that wreck your records?" This is one of the first things I generally get asked when someone watches me at work in my home or while spinning at a party. It reminds me of a different but related question I once asked someone who worked at Rotate This!, a particularly popular Toronto DJ refuge, a few days after I had bought my first turntable: DJO: "How do you stop that popping and crackling sound your record gets when you scratch back and forth on the same spot for a while?" CLERK: "You buy two copies of everything, one you keep at home all wrapped-up nice and never use, and the other you mess with." My last $150 had just managed to pay for an old Dual direct drive record player. The precious few recently-released records I had were gifts. I nodded my head and made my way over to the rows of disks which I flipped through to make it look like I was maybe going to buy something. Lp cover after lp cover stared back at me all with names I had absolutely never heard of before, organised according to a hyper- hybridised classification scheme that completely escaped my dictionary-honed alphabetic expectations. Worst of all, there seemed to be only single copies of everything left! A sort of outsider's vertigo washed over me, and 3 minutes after walking into unfamiliar territory, I zipped back out onto the street. Thus was to begin my love/hate relationship with the source of all DJ sounds, surliness and misinformation--the independent record shop. My query had (without my planning) boldly pronounced my neophyte status. The response it solicited challenged my seriousness. How much was I willing to invest in order to ride "the wheels of steel"? Sequence 1 Will Straw describes the meteoric rise to prominence of the CD format, If the compact disk has emerged as one of the most dazzlingly effective of commodity forms, this has little to do with its technical superiority to the vinyl record (which we no longer remember to notice). Rather, the effectiveness has to do with its status as the perfect crossover consumer object. As a cutting-edge audiophile invention, it seduced the technophilic, connoisseurist males who typically buy new sound equipment and quickly build collections of recordings. At the same time, its visual refinement and high price rapidly rendered it legitimate as a gift. In this, the CD has found a wide audience among the population of casual record buyers.(61) Straw's point has to do with the fate of musical recordings within contemporary commodity culture. In the wake of a late 70's record industry slump, music labels turned their attention toward the recapturing of casual record sales (read: aging baby boomers). The general shape of this attempt revolved around a re-configuring of the record- shopping experience dedicated towards reducing "the intimidation seen as endemic to the environment of the record store."(59) The CD format, along with the development of super-sized, general interest (all-genre) record outlets has worked (according to Straw) to streamline record sales towards more-predictable patterns, all the while causing less "selection stress."(59) Re-issues and compilations, special-series trademarks, push-button listening stations, and maze-like display layouts, combined with department store-style service ("Can I help you find anything?") all work towards eliminating the need for familiarity with particular music "scenes" in order to make personally gratifying (and profit engendering) musical choices. Straw's analysis is exemplary in its dissatisfaction with treating the arena of personal musical choice as unaffected by any constraints apart from subjective matters of taste. Straw's evaluation also isolates the vinyl record as an object eminently ready (post-digital revolution) for subcultural appropriation. Its displacement by the CD as the dominant medium for collecting recorded music involved the recasting of the turntable as outdated and inferior, thereby relegating it to the dusty attic, basement or pawn shop (along with crates upon crates upon crates of records). These events set the stage for vinyl's spectacular rise from the ashes. The most prominent feature of this re-emergence has to do not simply with possession of the right kind of stuff (the cachet of having a music collection difficult for others to borrow aside), but with what vinyl and turntable technology can do. Bridge In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige claims that subcultures are, cultures of conspicuous consumption...and it is through the distinctive rituals of consumption, through style, that the subculture at once reveals its "secret identity" and communicates its forbidden meanings. It is basically the way in which commodities are used in subculture which mark the subculture off from more orthodox cultural formations.(103 Hebdige borrows the notion of bricolage from Levi Strauss in order to describe the particular kind of use subcultures make of the commodities they appropriate. Relationships of identity, difference and order are developed from out of the minds of those who make use of the objects in question and are not necessarily determined by particular qualities inherent to the objects themselves. Henceforth a safety pin more often used for purposes like replacing missing buttons or temporarily joining pieces of fabric can become a punk fashion statement once placed through the nose, ear or torn Sex Pistols tee-shirt. In the case of DJ culture, it is the practice of mixing which most obviously presents itself as definitive of subcultural participation. The objects of conspicuous consumption in this case--record tracks. If mixing can be understood as bricolage, then attempts "to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code"(18) by such a practice are not in vain. Granting mixing the power of meaning sets a formidable (semiotic) framework in place for investigating the practice's outwardly visible (spectacular) form and structure. Hebdige's description of bricolage as a particularly conspicuous and codified type of using, however, runs the risk of privileging an account of record collecting and mixing which interprets it entirely on the model of subjective expression.(1.) What is necessary is a means of access to the dialogue which takes place between a DJ and her records as such. The contents of a DJ's record bag (like Straw's CD shopping bag) are influenced by more that just her imagination, pocket book and exposure to different kinds of music. They are also determined in an important way by each other. Audio mixing is not one practice, it is many, and the choice to develop or use one sort of skill over another is intimately tied up with the type and nature of track one is working with. Sequence 2 The raw practice of DJing relies heavily on a slider integral to DJ mixers known as the _cross-fader_(ital). With the standard DJ set up, when the cross-fader is all the way to the left, the left turntable track plays through the system; vice versa when the fader is all the way to the right. In between is the "open" position which allows both inputs to be heard simultaneously. The most straightforward mixing technique, "cutting," involves using this toggle to quickly switch from one source to another--resulting in the abrupt end of one sound- flow followed by its instantaneous replacement. This technique can be used to achieve a variety of different effects--from the rather straightforward stringing together of the final beat of a four bar sequence from one track with a strong downbeat from something new in order to provide continuous, but sequential musical output, to the thoroughly difficult practice of "beat juggling," where short excerpts of otherwise self-contained tracks ("breaks") are isolated and then extended indefinitely through the use of two copies of the same record (while one record plays, the DJ spins the other back to the downbeat of the break in question, which is then released in rhythm). In both cases timing and rhythm are key. These features of the practice help to explain DJ predilections for tracks which make heavy, predictable use of their rhythm sections. "Blending" is a second technique which uses the open position on the cross-fader to mix two inputs into a live sonic collage. Tempo, rhythm and "density" of source material have an enormous impact on the end result. While any two tracks can be layered in this way, beats that are not synchronized are quick to create cacophony, and vocals also tend to clash dramatically. Melodic lines in general pose certain challenges here since these are in particular keys and have obvious starts and finishes. This is one reason why tracks produced specifically for DJing often have such long, minimal intros and exits. This makes it much easier to create "natural" sounding blends. Atmospheric sounds, low-frequency hums, speech samples and repetitive loops with indeterminate rhythm structures are often used for these segments in order to allow drawn-out, subtle transitions when moving between tracks. If an intro contains a fixed beat (as is the case often with genres constructed specifically for non-stop dancing like house, techno and to some extent drum and bass), then those who want seamless blends need to "beat match" if they want to maintain a dancer's groove. The roots of this technique go back to disco and demand fairly strict genre loyalty in order to insure that a set's worth of tracks all hover around the same tempo, defined in beats-per- minute, or BPMs. The basic procedure involves finding the downbeat of the track one wishes to mix through a set of headphones, releasing that beat in time with the other record while making fine tempo- adjustments via the turntable's pitch control to the point where the track coming through the earphones and the track being played over the system are in synch. The next step is "back-spinning" or "needle dropping" to the start of the track to be mixed, then releasing it again, this time with the cross-fader open. Volume levels can then be adjusted in order to allow the new track to slowly take prominence (the initial track being close to its end at this point) before the cross-fader is closed into the new position and the entire procedure is repeated. Scratching is perhaps the most notorious mixing technique and involves the most different types of manipulations. The practice is most highly developed in hip hop (and related genres like drum and bass) and is used both as an advanced cutting technique for moving between tracks as well as a sonic end-in-itself. It's genesis is attributed to a South Bronx DJ known as Grand Wizard Theodore who was the first (1977) to try to make creative use of the sound associated with moving a record needle back and forth over the same drumbeat, a phenomena familiar to DJs used to cueing-up downbeats through headphones. This trick is now referred to as the "baby scratch," and it along with an ever-increasing host of mutations and hybrids make- up the skills that pay the bills for hip hop DJs. In the case of many of these techniques, the cross-fader is once again used heavily in order to remove unwanted elements of particular scratches from the mix, as well as adding certain staccato and volume-fading effects. Isolated, "pure" sounds are easiest to scratch with and are therefore highly sought after by this sort of DJ--a pastime affectionately referred to as "digging in the crates." Sources of such sounds are extremely diverse, but inevitably revolve around genre's which use minimal orchestration (like movie-soundtracks), accentuated rhythms with frequent breakdowns (like funk or jazz), or which eschew musical form all together (like sound-effects, comedy and children's records). Exit To answer the question which started this investigation, in the end, how wrecked my records get depends a lot on what I'm using them for. To be sure, super-fast scratching patterns and tricks that use lots of back-spinning like beat-juggling will eventually "burn" static into spots on one's records. But with used records costing as little as $1 for three, and battle records (2.) widely available, the effect of this feature of the technology on the actual pursuit of the practice is negligible. And most techniques don't noticeably burn records at all, especially if a DJ's touch is light enough to allow for minimal tone-arm weight (a parameter which controls a turntable's groove-tracking ability). This is the kind of knowledge which comes from interaction with objects. It is also the source of a great part of the subcultural bricoleur's stylistic savvy. Herein lies the essence of the intimidating power of the indie record shop--its display of intimate, physical familiarity with the hidden particularities of the new vinyl experience. Investigators confronted with such familiarity need to find ways to go beyond analyses which stop at the level of acknowledgment of the visible logic displayed by spectacular subcultural practices if they wish to develop nuanced accounts of subcultural life. Such plumbing of the depths often requires listening in the place of observing--whether to first-hand accounts collected through ethnography or to the subtle voice of the objects themselves. (1.) An example of such an account: "DJ-ing is evangelism; a desire to share songs. A key skill is obviously not just to drop the popular, well-known songs at the right part of the night, but to pick the right new releases, track down the obscurer tunes and newest imports, get hold of next month's big tune this month; you gather this pile, this tinder, together, then you work the records, mix them, drop them, cut them, scratch them, melt them, beat them all together until they unite. Voilà; disco inferno." Dave Haslam, "DJ Culture," p. 169. (2.) Records specifically designed by and for scratch DJs and which consist of long strings of scratchable sounds. References Haslam, David. "DJ Culture." The Clubcultures Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1997 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Melvin and Co. Ltd.. 1979 Straw, Will. "Organized Disorder: The Changing Space of the Record Shop." The Clubcultures Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1997

IntroductionIn Britain, hunger is often hidden in the privacy of the home. Yet otherwise private hunger is currently being rendered public and visible in the growing queues at charity-run food banks, where emergency food parcels are distributed directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately (Downing et al.; Caplan). Food banks, in providing emergency relief to those in need, are responses to crisis moments, actualised through an embodied feeling of hunger that cannot be alleviated. The growing queues at food banks not only render hidden hunger visible, but also serve as reminders of the corporeal vulnerability of the human body to political and socio-economic shifts.A consideration of corporeality allows us to view the world through the lived experiences of the body. Human beings are “creatures of the flesh” who understand and reason, act and interact with their environments through the body (Johnson 81). The growing academic interest in corporeality signifies what Judith Butler calls a “new bodily ontology” (2). However, as Butler highlights, the body is also vulnerable to injury and suffering. An application of this ontology to hunger draws attention to eating as essential to life, so the denial of food poses an existential threat to health and ultimately to survival. The body’s response to threat is the physiological experience of hunger as a craving or longing that is the “most bodily experience of need […] a visceral desire locatable in a void” in which an empty stomach “initiates” a series of sounds and pangs that “call for action” in the form of eating (Anderson 27). Food bank queues serve as visible public reminders of this precariousness and of how social conditions can limit the ability of individuals to feed themselves, and so respond to an existential threat.Corporeal vulnerability made visible elicits responses that support societal interventions to feed the hungry, or that stigmatise hungry people by withdrawing or disparaging what limited support is available. Responses to vulnerability therefore evoke nurture and care or violence and abuse, and so in this sense are ambiguous (Butler; Cavarero). The responses are also normative, shaped by social and cultural understandings of what hunger is, what its causes are, and whether it is seen as originating in personal or societal failings. The stigmatising of individuals by blaming them for their hunger is closely allied to the feelings of shame that lie at the “irreducible absolutist core” of the idea of poverty (Sen 159). Shame is where the “internally felt inadequacies” of the impoverished individual and the “externally inflicted judgments” of society about the hungry body come together in a “co-construction of shame” (Walker et al. 5) that is a key part of the lived experience of hunger. The experience of shame, while common, is far from inevitable and is open to resistance (see Pickett; Foucault); shame can be subverted, turned from the hungry body and onto the society that allows hunger to happen. Who and what are deemed responsible are shaped by shifting ideas and contested understandings of hunger at a particular moment in time (Vernon).This exploration of corporeal vulnerability through food banks as a historically located response to hunger offers an alternative to studies which privilege representations, objectifying the body and “treating it as a discursive, textual, iconographic and metaphorical reality” while neglecting understandings derived from lived experiences and the responses that visible vulnerabilities elicit (Hamilakis 99). The argument made in this paper calls for a critical reconsideration of classic political economy approaches that view hunger in terms of a class struggle against the material conditions that give rise to it, and responses that ultimately led to the construction of the welfare state (Vernon). These political economy approaches, in focusing on the structures that lead to hunger and that respond to it, are more closed than Butler’s notion of ambiguous and constantly changing social responses to corporeal vulnerability. This paper also challenges the dominant tradition of nutrition science, which medicalises hunger. While nutrition science usefully draws attention to the physiological experiences and existential threat posed by acute hunger, the scientific focus on the “anatomical functioning” of the body and the optimising of survival problematically separates eating from the social contexts in which hunger is experienced (Lupton 11, 12; Abbots and Lavis). The focus in this article on the corporeal vulnerability of hunger interweaves contested representations of, and ideas about, hunger with the physiological experience of it, the material conditions that shape it, and the lived experiences of deprivation. Food banks offer a lens onto these experiences and their complexities.Food Banks: Deprivation Made VisibleSince the 1980s, food banks have become the fastest growing charitable organisations in the wealthiest countries of North America, Europe, and Australasia (Riches), but in Britain they are a recent phenomenon. The first opened in 2000, and by 2014, the largest operator, the Trussell Trust, had over 420 franchised food banks, and more recently was opening more than one per week (Lambie-Mumford et al.; Lambie-Mumford and Dowler). British food banks hand out emergency food relief directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately, and have become new sites where deprivation is materialised through a congregation of hungry people and the distribution of food parcels. The food relief parcels are intended as short-term immediate responses to crisis moments felt within the body when the individual cannot alleviate hunger through their own resources; they are for “emergency use only” to ameliorate individual crisis and acute vulnerability, and are not intended as long-term solutions to sustained, chronic poverty (Perry et al.). The need for food banks has emerged with the continued shrinkage of the welfare state, which for the past half century sought to mediate the impact of changing individual and social circumstances on those deemed to be most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. The proliferation of food banks since the 2009 financial crisis and the increased public discourse about them has normalised their presence and naturalised their role in alleviating acute food poverty (Perry et al.).Media images of food bank queues and stacks of tins waiting to be handed out (Glaze; Gore) evoke collective memories from the early twentieth century of hunger marches in protest at government inaction over poverty, long queues at soup kitchens, and the faces of gaunt, unemployed war veterans (Vernon). After the Second World War, the spectre of communism and the expansionist agenda of the Soviet Union meant such images of hunger could become tools in a propaganda war constructed around the failure of the British state to care for its citizens (Field; Clarke et al; Vernon). The 1945 Labour government, elected on a social democratic agenda of reform in an era of food rationing, responded with a “war on want” based on the normative premise that no one should be without food, medical care, shelter, warmth or work. Labour’s response was the construction of the modern welfare state.The welfare state signified a major shift in ideational understandings of hunger. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about hunger had been rooted in a moralistic account of divine punishment for individual failure (Vernon). Bodily experiences of hunger were seen as instruments for disciplining the indigent into a work ethic appropriate for a modern industrialised economy. The infamous workhouses, finally abolished in 1948, were key sites of deprivation where restrictions on how much food was distributed served to punish or discipline the hungry body into compliance with the dominant work ethic (Vernon; Foucault). However, these ideas shifted in the second half of the nineteenth century as the hungry citizen in Britain (if not in its colonies) was increasingly viewed as a victim of wider forces beyond the control of the individual, and the notion of disciplining the hungry body in workhouses was seen as reprehensible. A humanitarian treatment of hunger replaced a disciplinarian one as a more appropriate response to acute need (Shaw; Vernon). Charitable and reformist organisations proliferated with an agenda to feed, clothe, house, and campaign on behalf of those most deprived, and civil society largely assumed responsibility for those unable to feed themselves. By the early 1900s, ideas about hunger had begun to shift again, and after the Second World War ideational changes were formalised in the welfare state, premised on a view of hunger as due to structural rather than individual failure, hence the need for state intervention encapsulated in the “cradle to grave” mantra of the welfare state, i.e. of consistent care at the point of need for all citizens for their lifetime (see Clarke and Newman; Field; Powell). In this context, the suggestion that Britons could go to bed hungry because they could not afford to feed themselves would be seen as the failure of the “war on want” and of an advanced modern democracy to fulfil its responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens.Since the 1980s, there has been a retreat from these ideas. Successive governments have sought to rein in, reinvent or shrink what they have perceived as a “bloated” welfare state. In their view this has incentivised “dependency” by providing benefits so generous that the supposedly work-shy or “skivers” have no need to seek employment and can fund a diet of takeaways and luxury televisions (Howarth). These stigmatising ideas have, since the 2009 financial crisis and the 2010 election, become more entrenched as the Conservative-led government has sought to renew a neo-liberal agenda to shrink the welfare state, and legitimise a new mantra of austerity. This mantra is premised on the idea that the state can no longer afford the bloated welfare budget, that responsible government needs to “wean” people off benefits, and that sanctions imposed for not seeking work or for incorrectly filling in benefit claim forms serve to “encourage” people into work. Critics counter-argue that the punitive nature of sanctions has exacerbated deprivation and contributed to the growing use of food banks, a view the government disputes (Howarth; Caplan).Food Banks as Sites of Vulnerable CorporealityIn these shifting contexts, food banks have proliferated not only as sites of deprivation but also as sites of vulnerable corporeality, where people unable to draw on individual resources to respond to hunger congregate in search of social and material support. As growing numbers of people in Britain find themselves in this situation, the vulnerable corporeality of the hungry body becomes more pervasive and more visible. Hunger as a lived experience is laid bare in ever-longer food bank queues and also through the physiological, emotional and social consequences graphically described in personal blogs and in the testimonies of food bank users.Blogger Jack Monroe, for example, has recounted giving what little food she had to her child and going to bed hungry with a pot of ginger tea to “ease the stomach pains”; saying to her curious child “I’m not hungry,” while “the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar” (Monroe, Hunger Hurts). She has also written that her recourse to food banks started with the “terrifying and humiliating” admission that “you cannot afford to feed your child” and has expressed her reluctance to solicit the help of the food bank because “it feels like begging” (Monroe, Austerity Works?). Such blog accounts are corroborated in reports by food bank operators and a parliamentary enquiry which told stories of mothers not eating for days after being sanctioned under the benefit system; of children going to school hungry; of people leaving hospital after a major operation unable to feed themselves since their benefits have been cut; of the elderly having to make “hard choices” between “heat or eat” each winter; and of mixed feelings of relief and shame at receiving food bank parcels (All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry; Beattie; Cooper and Dumpleton; Caplan; Perry et al.). That is, two different visibilities have emerged: the shame of standing or being seen to stand in the food bank queue, and blogs that describe these feelings and the lived experience of hunger – both are vulnerable and visible, but in different ways and in different spaces: the physical or material, and the virtual.The response of doctors to the growing evidence of crisis was to warn that there were “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventative action,” that progress made against food poverty since the 1960s was being eroded (Ashton et al. 1631), and that the “robust last line of defence against hunger” provided by the welfare state was failing (Loopstra et al. n.p). Medical professionals thus sought to conscript the rhetorical resources of their professional credibility to highlight that this is a politically created public health crisis.This is not to suggest that acute hunger was absent for 50 years of the welfare state, but that with the closure of the last workhouses, the end of hunger marches, and the shutting of the soup kitchens by the 1950s, it became less visible. Over the past decade, hunger has become more visible in images of growing queues at food banks and stacked tins ready to be handed out by volunteers (Glaze; Gore) on production of a voucher provided on referral by professionals. Doctors, social workers or teachers are therefore tasked with discerning cases of need, deciding whose need is “genuine” and so worthy of food relief (see Downing et al.). The voucher system is regulated by professionals so that food banks are open only to those with a public identity constructed around bodily crisis. The sense of something as intimate as hunger being defined by others contrasts to making visible one’s own hunger through blogging. It suggests again how bodies become caught up in wider political struggles where not only is shame a co-construction of internal inadequacies and external judgements, but so too is hunger, albeit in different yet interweaving ways. New boundaries are being established between those who are deprived and those who are not, and also between those whose bodies are in short-term acute crisis, and those whose bodies are in long-term and chronic crisis, which is not deemed to be an emergency. It is in this context that food banks have also become sites of demarcation, shame, and contestation.Public debates about growing food bank queues highlight the ambiguous nature of societal responses to the vulnerability of hunger made visible. Government ministers have intensified internal shame in attributing growing food bank queues to individual inadequacies, failure to manage household budgets (Gove), and profligate spending on luxury (Johnston; Shipton). Civil society organisations have contested this account of hunger, turning shame away from the individual and onto the government. Austerity reforms have, they argue, “torn apart” the “basic safety net” of social responses to corporeal vulnerability put in place after the Second World War and intended to ensure that no-one was left hungry or destitute (Bingham), their vulnerability unattended to. Furthermore, the benefit sanctions impose punitive measures that leave families with “nothing” to live on for weeks. Hungry citizens, confronted with their own corporeal vulnerability and little choice but to seek relief from food banks, echo the Dickensian era of the workhouse (Cooper and Dumpleton) and indict the UK government response to poverty. Church leaders have called on the government to exercise “moral duty” and recognise the “acute moral imperative to act” to alleviate the suffering of the hungry body (Beattie; see also Bingham), and respond ethically to corporeal vulnerability with social policies that address unmet need for food. However, future cuts to welfare benefits mean the need for relief is likely to intensify.ConclusionThe aim of this paper was to explore the vulnerable corporeality of hunger through the lens of food banks, the twenty-first-century manifestations of charitable responses to acute need. Food banks have emerged in a gap between the renewal of a neo-liberal agenda of prudent government spending and the retreat of the welfare state, between struggles over resurgent ideas about individual responsibility and deep disquiet about wider social responsibilities. 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IntroductionAs the teaching staff working in a university postgraduate program—the Graduate Certificate of Creative Industries (Creative Practice) at Central Queensland University, Australia—an ongoing concern has been to ensure our students engage with the digital course content (delivered via the Moodle learning management system). This is an issue shared across the sector (La Pointe and Reisetter; Dargusch et al.) and, in our case, specifically in the area of students understanding how this online course content and tasks could benefit them in a program that is based around individual projects. As such, we are invested in enhancing student engagement both within the framework of this individual program and at an institution level. Like many institutions which now offer degrees which are either partially or fully online, the program in question offers a blended learning environment, with internal students also expected to engage with online materials (Rovai and Jordan; Colis and Moonen). The program was developed in 2011, first offered in 2012, and conducted two and sometimes three terms a year since then.Within the first year of delivery, low levels of student participation in online learning were identified as problematic. This issue was addressed using strategies that made use of characteristic strengths among our creative industries students, by developing and linking a peer-to-peer mentoring approach to our blended learning course design. Our challenge in this (as project facilitators and as teachers) has been to devise strategies to shift the students from reluctant to engaged online content users. A key strategy has evolved around introducing peer-mentoring as an intrinsic behaviour in the courses in the program. While not using a full case study approach, we do offer this singular instance for consideration as “much can be learned from a particular case” (Merriam 51). The below is based on our own observations, together with formal and informal student feedback gathered since 2012.Mentors and MentoringThe term mentor can have different meanings depending on the context in which the phrase is used. Ambrosetti and Dekkers note that “it is evident from the literature that there is no single definition for mentoring” (42). Drawing on an array of literature from a number of disciplines to qualify the definition of the term mentoring, Ambrosetti and Dekkers have identified a series of theorists whose definitions demonstrate the wide-ranging interpretation of what this act might be. Interestingly, they found that, even within the relatively narrow context of pre-service teacher research, words used to identify the term mentor varied from relatively collegial descriptors for the established teacher such as supporter, friend, collaborator, role model, and protector, to more formalised roles including trainer, teacher, assessor, and evaluator. The role to be played by a mentor—and how it is described—can also vary according to parameters around, and the purpose of, the mentoring relationship. That is, even though “mentoring, as described in literature, generally involves supporting and providing feedback to the mentee without judgment or criteria” (43), the dynamics of the mentor-mentee relationship may influence the perception and the nature of these roles. For example, the mentoring relationship between a teacher and pre-service teacher may be perceived as hierarchical whereby knowledge and feedback is “passed down” from mentor to mentee, that is, from a more authoritative, experienced figure to a less knowledgeable recipient. As such, this configuration implies a power imbalance between the roles.The relationships involved in peer-to-peer mentoring can be similarly defined. In fact, Colvin and Ashman describe the act of peer-mentoring as “a more experienced student helping a less experienced student improve overall academic performance”, and a relationship that “provides advice, support, and knowledge to the mentee” (122). Colvin and Ashman’s research also suggests that “if mentors and mentees do not have a clear sense of their roles and responsibilities, mentors will find it difficult to maintain any sort of self‐efficacy” (122)—a view that is held by others researchers in this field (see Hall et al.; Reid; Storrs, Putsche and Taylor). However, this collective view of peer-to-peer mentorship was not what we aimed to foster. Instead, we wanted our courses and program to both exhibit and inculcate practices and processes which we felt are more in line with our understanding of the creative industries, including a more organic, voluntary and non-hierarchical approach to peer-to-peer mentorship. This could use Ambrosetti and Dekker’s less hierarchical descriptors of supporter, friend, and collaborator listed above.Student CohortThe student cohort in this program regularly includes on-campus and distance education students in approximately equal ratios, with those studying by distance often geographically very widely dispersed across Australia, and sometimes internationally. The students in this program come from a diverse spectrum of creative industries’ art forms, including creative writing, digital media, film, music, and visual arts. Most enter the program with advanced skills, undergraduate or equivalent qualifications and/or considerable professional experience in their individual areas of creative practice and are seeking to add a postgraduate-level of understanding and scholarly extension to this practice (Kroll and Brien; Webb and Brien). Students also utilise a wide range of learning styles and approaches when developing and completing the creative works and research-informed reflective reports which comprise their assessment. All the students in the program’s courses utilise, and contribute to, a single online Moodle site each term. Some also wish to progress to research higher degree study in creative practice-led research projects (Barrett and Bolt) after completing the program.Applying Peer-to-Peer Mentoring in a Project-Based ProgramThe student cohort in this program is diverse, both geographically and in terms of the area of individual creative industries’ specialisation and the actual project that each student is working on. This diversity was a significant factor in the complexity of the challenge of how to make the course online site and its contents and tasks (required and optional) relevant and engaging for all students. We attempted to achieve this, in part, by always focusing on content and tasks directly related to the course learning outcomes and assessment tasks, so that their usefulness and authenticity in terms of the student learning journey was, we hoped, obvious to students. While this is a common practice in line with foundational conceptions of effective learning and teaching in higher education, we also proposed that we might be able to insure that course content was accessed and engaged with, and tasks completed, by linking the content and tasks in Moodle to the action of mentoring. In this, students were encouraged to discuss their projects in the online discussion forum throughout the term. This began with students offering brief descriptions of their projects as they worked through the project development stage, to reports on progress including challenges and problems as well as achievements. Staff input to these discussions offered guidance—both through example and (at times) gentle direction—on how students could also give collegial advice to other students on their projects. This was in terms of student knowledge and experience gained from previous work plus that learned during the program. In this, students reported on their own activities and how learning gained could potentially be used in other professional fields, as for example: “I specifically enjoyed the black out activity and found the online videos exceptional, inspiring and innovating. I really enjoyed this activity and it was something that I can take away and use within the classroom when educating” (‘Student 1’, week 8, Term 1 2015). Students also gave advice for others to follow: “I understand that this may not have been the original intended goal of Free Writing—but it is something I would highly recommend … students to try and see if it works for you” (‘Student 2’, week 5, Term 1 2015). As each term progressed, and trust built up—a key aspect of online collaboration (Holton) as well as a fruitful mentoring relationship (Allen and Poteet)—joint problem solving also began to take place in these discussions.As most of the students never interact face-to-face during the term, the relative impersonality of the online discussions in Moodle, although certainly not anonymous, seemed to provide a safe platform for peer-to-peer mentoring, even when this was offered by those who were also interacting in class as well. As facilitators of this process, we also sought to model best-practice interaction in this communication and ensure that any posts were responded to in an encouraging and timely manner (Aragon). As a result, the traffic within these forums generally increased each week so that, by the end of the term, every student (both external and internal) had contributed significantly to online discussions—even those who appeared to be more reluctant participants in the beginning weeks of the term. Strategies to Facilitate Peer-to-Peer MentoringSeeking to facilitate this process, we identified discrete points within the term’s course delivery at which we would encourage a greater level of engagement with the online resources and, through this, also encourage more discussion in the online discussion forum. One of the strategies we employed was to introduce specific interactions as compulsory components of the course but, at the same time, always ensuring that these mandated interactions related directly to assessment items. For example, a key assessment task requires students to write reflectively about their creative work and processes. We duly included information and examples of reflective writing as resources online. In order to further develop this skill for both internal and external students, we adopted an active and iterative learning approach to this task by asking students to write reflectively, each week, about the online resources provided to them. In asking students to do this, we reiterated that, at the end of term, a core part of the assessment item was that each student would be asked to describe, analyse and reflect on how they used these resources to facilitate their creative practice. At the end of the term, therefore, each student could collate his or her weekly responses, and use these as part of this assessment task. However, before this final reflection needed to be completed, these reflective musings were already being refined and extended as a result of the commentaries offered by other students responding to these weekly reflections. In this, these commenting students were, in fact, playing the role of peer-to-peer mentors, assisting each other to enhance their abilities in reflective thinking and writing.It should be stated that neither formal mentoring roles nor expectations of the process or its outcomes were pre-determined, defined or outlined to students by the teaching staff or communicated directly to them in any way (such as via the course materials). Instead, internal and distance students were encouraged to communicate with each other and offer guidance, help and support to each other (but which was never described as peer-to-peer mentorship) via their use of the Moodle learning managements system as both a group communication tool and a collaborative learning resource (Dixon, Dixon and Axmann). It is common for creative practitioners to collect data in the form of objects, resources, tools, and memories in order to progress their work and this habit has been termed that of the “bowerbird” (Brady). Knowing that it likely that many of our students are already proficient bowerbirds with many resources in their personal collections, we also facilitated a peer-to-peer mentoring activity in the form of an online competition. This competition asked students to post their favourite interactive resource onto the Moodle site, accompanied by a commentary explaining why and how it could be used. Many students engaged with these peer-posted resources and then, in turn, posted reflections on their usefulness, or not, for their own personal practice and learning. This, in turn, engendered more resources to be posted, shared, and discussed in terms of project problem-solving and, thus, became another ongoing activity that encouraged students to act as increasingly valued peer-mentors to each other.The Practical Application of Peer-to-Peer MentoringEach term, it is a course requirement that the student cohort, both internal and external, combine to create a group outcome—an exhibition of their creative work (Sturm, Beckton and Brien). For some students, the work exhibited is completed; for others, particularly part-time students, the work shown is frequently still in progress. Given that the work in the student exhibition regularly includes music and creative writing as well as visual art, this activity forces students to engage with their peers in ways that most of them have not previously encountered. This interaction includes communication across the internal and distance members of the cohort to determine what work will be included in the exhibition, and how work will be sent for display by external students, as well as liaising in relation to range of related considerations including: curatorial (what the exhibition will be named, and how work is to be displayed), cataloguing (how the works, and their contributors, are to be described), and the overall design of the catalogue and invitation (Sturm, Beckton and Brien). Students make these decisions, as a group, with guidance from staff mainly being offered in terms of practical information (such as what days and times the exhibition space can be accessed) and any limitations due to on-site health and safety considerations and other university-wide regulations.Student feedback has been very positive in relation to this aspect of the course (Sturm, Beckton and Brien), and its collective nature is often remarked on in both formal and informal feedback. We are also finding that some prospective students are applying to the program with a knowledge of this group exhibition and some information about how it is achieved. After graduation, students have reported that this experience of peer-to-peer working across the spectrum of creative industries’ art forms has given them a confidence that they were able to apply in real work situations and has, moreover been a factor that directly led to relevant employment. One student offered in unsolicited feedback: “It was a brilliant course that I gained a lot from. One year on, I have since released another single and work as an artist manager, independently running campaigns for other artists. The course also helped make me more employable as well, and I now work … as a casual admin and projects officer” (Student 3, 2015).Issues Arising from Peer-to-Peer MentoringAn intrinsic aspect of facilitating and encouraging this peer-to-peer mentoring was to allow a degree of latitude in relation to student online communication. The week-to-week reflection on the online resources was, for instance, the only mandated activity. Other participation was modeled and encouraged, but left to students as to how often and when they participated, as well as the length of their posts. In each term, we have found student involvement in discussions increased throughout the term, and tended to exceed our expectations in both quantity and quality of posts.We have also found that the level of intimate detail offered, and intimacy developed, in the communications was far greater than we had initially anticipated, and that there were occasions when students raised personal issues. Initially, we were apprehensive about this, particularly when one student discussed past mental health challenges. At the time, we discussed that the creative arts – whether in terms of its creation or appreciation – are highly personal practices (Sternberg), and that the tone taken by many of the creative individuals, theorists, and researchers whose materials we use as resources was often personally revealing (see, for example, Brien and Brady). By not interfering, other than ensuring that the tone students used with each other was always respectful and focused on the professional aspects of what was being discussed, we observed that this personal revelation translated into high levels of engagement in the discussions, and indeed, encouraged peer support and understanding. Thus, in terms of the student who revealed information about past health issues and who at one stage had considered withdrawing from the course, this student later related to staff—in an unsolicited communication—that these discussions led to him feeling well supported. This student has, moreover, continued to work on related creative practice projects after completing the program and, indeed, is now considering continuing onto Masters level studies.ConclusionIn relation to much of the literature of mentoring, this experience of student interaction with others through an online discussion board appears to offer a point of difference. While that literature reports on other examples of peer-to-peer mentoring, most of these follow the seemingly more usual vertical mentoring model (that is, one which is hierarchical), rather than what developed organically in our case as a more horizontal mode. This is, moreover, a mode which has many synergies with the community of practice and collaborative problem solving models which are central to the creative industries (Brien and Bruns).Collings, Swanson, and Watkins have reported on the positive impact of peer mentoring on student wellbeing, integration, and retention. In terms of effects and student outcomes, although we have not yet collected data on these aspects of this activity, our observations together with informal and University-solicited feedback suggests that this peer-to-peer mentoring was useful (in terms of their project work) and affirming and confidence-building (personally and professionally) for students who are both mentors and mentees. These peer-to-peer mentoring activities assisted in developing, and was encouraged by, an atmosphere in which students felt it was appropriate and safe to both offer support and critique of each others’ work and ideas, as well as encouragement when students felt discouraged or creatively blocked. Students, indeed, reported in class and online that this input assisted them in moving through their projects and, as program staff, we saw that that this online space created a place where collaborative problem-solving could be engaged in as the need arose—rather than in a more forced manner. As teachers, we also found these students became our post-graduate colleagues in the way more usually experienced in the doctoral supervisor-student relationship (Dibble and Loon).The above reports on a responsive learning and teaching strategy that grew out of our understanding of our students’ needs that was, moreover, in line with our institution’s imperatives. 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