Academic literature on the topic 'Forgotten realms (Imagihary place)'

Polish realms of memory in northern BosniaThis article presents the transformation in Bosnia and Herzegovina which began after the war during the years 1991-1995. The most important objective was the liberation and emancipation of the forgotten memory of minorities. These processes are also expressed in relation to the Polish minority which came into existence in the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the government takeover by Austria-Hungary and the announcement of the program of colonization. The changes described were significantly apparent in the reconstruction of Polish realms of memory: Polish shrines in Celinovac, Polish church in Cerovljani, Polish cemeteries: in Devetina and Novi Martinac and also in the Yugoslav-Polish partisan cemetery in Srbac. Of interest, the ‘time of memory’ which took place involved all social actors: the government of the Republic of Srpska and the municipalities of Srbac and Nowogrodziec, the Embassy of the Polish Republic in Sarajevo, representatives of local communities - Serbs and the Polish minority from Ćelinovac. Polskie miejsca pamięci w północnej BośniArtykuł prezentuje przemiany, które od czasu zakończenia wojny 1991–1995 roku dokonują się w granicach Bośni i Hercegowiny. Ich głównym celem jest wyzwalanie i emancypacja pamięci zapomnianych mniejszości narodowych. Procesy te dotyczą również polskiej mniejszości narodowej, która na terytorium Bośni i Hercegowiny pojawiła się pod koniec XIX i na początku XX wieku wraz z przejęciem administracji przez Austro-Węgry oraz ogłoszeniem programowej kolonizacji. Najsilniej ujawniają się w rekonstruowaniu polskich miejsc pamięci: polskiej kapliczki w Ćelinovacu, polskiego kościoła w Cerovljanach, cmentarzy polskich w Devetinie i Nowym Martyńcu oraz partyzanckiego jugosłowiańsko-polskiego w Srbacu. Co ciekawe, „czas pamięci“, który nastał, odcisnął swe piętno na działalności wszystkich aktorów społecznych: władz Republiki Serbskiej oraz gminnych, w tym wypadku gmin Srbac oraz Nowogrodziec, Ambasady Rzeczypospolitej w Sarajewie, przedstawicieli społeczności lokalnych – Serbów oraz polskiej mniejszości narodowej z Ćelinovaca.

The cognitive specificity of social pedagogy is its interest in the issues related to social conditionings of human development and, respectively, the specific social conditionings of the upbringing process. The notion has been developed in various directions since the very beginning of the discipline, yet the most clearly visible area seems to be the functioning of individuals, families and broader environment. Simultaneously, it is possible to observe that the issues have been entangled in certain socio-political conditions, the knowledge of which is substantial for the reconstruction and identification of the research heritage of social pedagogy. All these interrelationships allowed to distinguish particular stages of development of social pedagogy. Contemporarily, it is a discipline with descent scientific achievements which marks out and indicates new perspectives both in the field of educational practice and the theory of social activity. Social pedagogy, similarly to other areas (subdisciplines) of pedagogy, deals with the notion of upbringing in a certain aspect – in a certain problem inclination. It specializes in social and environmental conditionings of the upbringing process. It is the thread of the social context of upbringing what proves to be the crucial, basic and fundamental determinant of upbringing and, thus, decisive factor for human development. This notion was always present in the general pedagogical thought however, its organized and rationalized character surfaced only when the social pedagogy was distinguished as a separate, systematic area of pedagogy. It occurred in Poland only at the beginning of the 19th century. From the very beginning the creators and precursors of this subdiscipline pointed out its relatively wide range. It has been the notion of individual – social conditionings of human development, yet, social pedagogists were interested in human at every stage of their lives i.e. childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Another area of interest were the issues related to family as the most important “place” of human development and, in this respect, the issues connected with institutions undertaking various activities: help, care, support and animation. Finally, the scope of interest included issues related to the environment as the place where the upbringing process is supposed to realize and realizes. Since the very beginning of social pedagogy these have been the prominent threads for exploration. At the same time it ought to be stated that these threads have always been interwoven with various social-political conditions both with regards to their interpretation as well as possible and planned educational practice. Therefore social pedagogy and its findings must be always “read” in the context of social-political conditions which accompanied the creation of a given thought or realization of some educational practice. As these conditions have constantly been undergoing certain transformations one may clearly distinguish particular stages of development of social pedagogy. The stages reflect various approaches to exploring and describing the above-mentioned areas of this discipline. Following the assumptions regarding the chronology of social pedagogy development and the three distinguished stages of development, it seems worthwhile to study how the issues related to an individual, family and environment were shaped at these stages. The first stage when the social psychology was arising was mainly the time of Helena Radlińska’s activities as well as less popular and already forgotten Polish pedagogists – precursors of this discipline such as: Anna Chmielewska, Irena Jurgielewiczowa, Zofia Gulińska or Maria Korytowska. In that period social pedagogists mainly dealt with individuals, families and the functioning of environments in the context of educational activities aimed at arousing national identity and consciousness. However, their work did no focus on indicating the layers of threats and deficits in functioning of individuals, social groups or families but on the possibilities to stimulate their development and cultural life. Therefore social pedagogy of those times was not as strongly related to social work as it currently is but dealt mainly with educational work. The classic example of such approach in the research carried out in the social pedagogy of that time may be the early works by Helena Radlińska who undertook the narrow field of cultural-educational work targeted to all categories of people. The works described such issues as the organization of libraries, organizing extra-school education (H. Orsza, 1922, H. Orsza-Radlińska, 1925). It ought to be stated that this kind of work was regarded as public and educational work, whereas currently it exists under the name of social work. Frequently quoted works related to the issues of arising social pedagogy were also the works by Eustachy Nowicki e.g. “Extra-school education and its social-educational role in the contemporary Polish life” from 1923 or the works by Stefania Sempołowska, Jerzy Grodecki or Jadwiga Dziubińska. Such an approach and tendencies are clearly visible in a book from 1913 (a book which has been regarded by some pedagogists as the first synthetic presentation of social pedagogy). It is a group work entitled “Educational work – its tasks, methods and organization” (T. Bobrowski, Z. Daszyńska-Golińska, J. Dziubińska, Z. Gargasa, M. Heilperna, Z. Kruszewska, L. Krzywicki, M. Orsetti, H. Orsza, St. Posner, M. Stępkowski, T. Szydłowski, Wł. Weychert-Szymanowska, 1913). The problem of indicated and undertaken research areas and hence, the topics of works realized by the social pedagogists of that times changed immediately after regaining independence and before World War II. It was the time when the area of social pedagogists interests started to include the issues of social inequality, poverty and, subsequently, the possibility of helping (with regards to the practical character of social pedagogy). The research works undertaken by social pedagogists were clearly of diagnostic, practical and praxeological character. They were aimed at seeking the causes of these phenomena with simultaneous identification and exploration of certain environmental factors as their sources. A classic example of such a paper – created before the war – under the editorial management of H. Radlińska was the work entitled “Social causes of school successes and failures” from 1937 (H. Radlińska, 1937). Well known are also the pre-war works written by the students of H. Radlińska which revealed diagnostic character such as: “The harm of a child” by Maria Korytowska (1937) or “A child of Polish countryside” edited by M. Librachowa and published in Warsaw in 1934 (M. Librachowa, 1934). Worthwhile are also the works by Czesław Wroczyński from 1935 entitled “Care of an unmarried mother and struggle against abandoning infants in Warsaw” or the research papers by E. Hryniewicz, J. Ryngmanowa and J. Czarnecka which touched upon the problem of neglected urban and rural families and the situation of an urban and rural child – frequently an orphaned child. As it may be inferred, the issues of poverty, inefficient families, single-parent families remain current and valid also after the World War II. These phenomena where nothing but an outcome of various war events and became the main point of interest for researchers. Example works created in the circle of social pedagogists and dealing with these issues may be two books written in the closest scientific environment of Helena Radlińska – with her immense editorial impact. They are “Orphanage – scope and compensation” (H. Radlińska, J. Wojtyniak, 1964) and “Foster families in Łódź” (A. Majewska, 1948), both published immediately after the war. Following the chronological approach I adopted, the next years mark the beginning of a relative stagnation in the research undertaken in the field of social pedagogy. Especially the 50’s – the years of notably strong political indoctrination and the Marxist ideological offensive which involved building the so called socialist educational society – by definition free from socio-educational problems in public life. The creation and conduction of research in this period was also hindered due to organizational and institutional reasons. The effect of the mentioned policy was also the liquidation of the majority of social sciences including research facilities – institutes, departments and units. An interesting and characteristic description of the situation may be the statement given by Professor J. Auletner who described the period from the perspective of development of social policy and said that: “During the Stalinist years scientific cultivation of social policy was factually forbidden”. During the period of real socialism it becomes truly difficult to explore the science of social policy. The name became mainly the synonym of the current activity of the state and a manifestation of struggles aimed at maintaining the existing status quo. The state authorities clearly wanted to subdue the science of social activities of the state […]. During the real socialism neither the freedom for scientific criticism of the reality nor the freedom of research in the field of social sciences existed. It was impossible (yet deliberated) to carry out a review of poverty and other drastic social issues” (J. Auletner, 2000). The situation changes at the beginning of the 60’s (which marks the second stage of development of social pedagogy) when certain socio-political transformations – on the one hand abandoning the limitation of the Stalinist period (1953 – the death of Stalin and political thaw), on the other – reinforcement of the idea of socialist education in social sciences lead to resuming environmental research. It was simultaneously the period of revival of Polish social pedagogy with regards to its institutional dimension as well as its ideological self-determination (M. Cichosz, 2006, 2014). The issues of individuals, families and environments was at that time explored with regards to the functioning of educational environments and in the context of exploring the environmental conditionings of the upbringing process. Typical examples here may be the research by Helena Izdebska entitled “The functioning of a family and childcare tasks” (H. Izdebska, 1967) and “The causes of conflicts in a family” (H. Izdebska, 1975) or research conducted by Anna Przecławska on adolescents and their participation in culture: “Book, youth and cultural transformations” (A. Przecławska, 1967) or e.g. “Cultural diversity of adolescents against upbringing problems” (A. Przecławska, 1976). A very frequent notion undertaken at that time and remaining within the scope of the indicated areas were the issues connected with organization and use of free time. This may be observed through research by T. Wujek: “Homework and active leisure of a student” (T. Wujek, 1969). Another frequently explored area was the problem of looking after children mainly in the papers by Albin Kelm or Marian Balcerek. It is worthwhile that the research on individuals, families or environments were carried out as part of the current pedagogical concepts of that time like: parallel education, permanent education, lifelong learning or the education of adults, whereas, the places indicated as the areas of human social functioning in which the environmental education took place were: family, school, housing estate, workplace, social associations. It may be inferred that from a certain (ideological) perspective at that time we witnessed a kind of modeling of social reality as, on the one hand particular areas were diagnosed, on the other – a desired (expected) model was built (designed) (with respect to the pragmatic function of practical pedagogy). A group work entitled “Upbringing and environment” edited by B. Passini and T. Pilch (B. Passini, T. Pilch, 1979) published in 1979 was a perfect illustration of these research areas. It ought to be stated that in those years a certain model of social diagnosis proper for undertaken social-pedagogical research was reinforced (M. Deptuła, 2005). Example paper could be the work by I. Lepalczyk and J. Badura entitled: “Elements of pedagogical diagnostics” (I. Lepalczyk, J. Badura, 1987). Finally, the social turning point in the 80’s and 90’s brought new approaches to the research on individuals, families and environments which may be considered as the beginning of the third stage of the development of social pedagogy. Breaking off the idea of socialist education meant abandoning the specific approach to research on the educational environment previously carried out within a holistic system of socio-educational influences (A. Przecławska, w. Theiss, 1995). The issues which dominated in the 90’s and still dominate in social pedagogy with regards to the functioning of individuals, families and local environments have been the issues connected with social welfare and security as well as education of adults. Research papers related to such approach may be the work by Józefa Brągiel: “Upbringing in a single-parent family” from 1990; the work edited by Zofia Brańka “The subjects of care and upbringing” from 2002 or a previous paper written in 1998 by the same author in collaboration with Mirosław Szymański “Aggression and violence in modern world” published in 1999 as well as the work by Danuta Marzec “Childcare at the time of social transformations” from 1999 or numerous works by St. Kawula, A. Janke. Also a growing interest in social welfare and social work is visible in the papers by J. Brągiel and P. Sikora “Social work, multiplicity of perspectives, family – multiculturalism – education” from 2004, E. Kanwicz and A. Olubiński: “Social activity in social welfare at the threshold of 21st century” from 2004 or numerous works on this topic created by the circles gathered around the Social Pedagogy Faculty in Łódź under the management of E. Marynowicz-Hetka. Current researchers also undertake the issues related to childhood (B. Smolińska-Theiss, 2014, B. Matyjas, 2014) and the conditionings of the lives of seniors (A. Baranowska, E. Kościńska, 2013). Ultimately, among the presented, yet not exclusive, research areas related to particular activities undertaken in human life environment (individuals, families) and fulfilled within the field of caregiving, social welfare, adult education, socio-cultural animation or health education one may distinguish the following notions:  the functioning of extra-school education institutions, most frequently caregiving or providing help such as: orphanage, residential home, dormitory, community centre but also facilities aimed at animating culture like youth cultural centres, cultural centres, clubs etc.,  the functioning of school, the realization of its functions (especially educational care), fulfilling and conditioning roles of student/teacher, the functioning of peer groups, collaboration with other institutions,  the functioning (social conditionings) of family including various forms of families e.g. full families, single-parent families, separated families, families at risk (unemployment) and their functioning in the context of other institutions e.g. school,  social pathologies, the issues of violence and aggression, youth subcultures,  participation in culture, leisure time, the role of media,  the functioning of the seniors – animation of activities in this field,  various dimensions of social welfare, support, providing help, the conditionings of functioning of such jobs as the social welfare worker, culture animator, voluntary work. It might be concluded that the issues connected with individuals, families and environment have been the centre of interest of social pedagogy since the very beginning of this discipline. These were the planes on which social pedagogists most often identified and described social life – from the perspective of human participation. On the course of describing the lives of individuals, families and broader educational environments social pedagogists figured out and elaborated on particular methods and ways of diagnosing social life. Is it possible to determine any regularities or tendencies in this respect? Unquestionably, at the initial stage of existence of this discipline, aimed at stimulating national consciousness and subsequent popularization of cultural achievements through certain activities – social and educational work, social pedagogists built certain models of these undertakings which were focused on stimulating particular social activity and conscious participation in social life. The issues concerning social diagnosis, though not as significant as during other stages, served these purposes and hence were, to a certain extent, ideologically engaged. The situation changed significantly before and shortly after the World War II. Facing particular conditions of social life – increase in many unfavourable phenomena, social pedagogists attempted to diagnose and describe them. It seems to have been the period of clear shaping and consolidation of the accepted model of empirical research in this respect. The model was widely accepted as dominating and has been developed in Polish social pedagogy during the second and subsequent stages of developing of this discipline. Practical and praxeological character of social pedagogy became the main direction of this development. Consequently, social diagnosis realized and undertaken with regard to social pedagogy was associated with the idea of a holistic system of education and extra-school educational influences and related educational environments. Therefore, the more and more clearly emphasized goal of environmental research – forecasting, was associated with the idea of building holistic, uniform educational impacts. After the systemic transformation which occurred in Poland in the 90’s, i.e. the third stage of social pedagogy development, abandoning the previous ideological solutions, environmental research including diagnosis was reassociated with social life problems mainly regarding social welfare and security. Individuals, families and environment have been and still seem to be the subject of research in the field of social pedagogy in Poland. These research areas are structurally bound with its acquired paradigm – of a science describing transformations of social life and formulating a directive of practical conduct regarding these transformations. A question arouses about the development of social pedagogy as the one which charts the direction of transformations of practices within the undertaken research areas. If it may be considered as such, then it would be worthwhile to enquire about the directions of the accepted theoretical acknowledgments. On the one hand we may observe a relatively long tradition of specifically elaborated and developed concepts, on the other – there are still new challenges ahead. Observing the previous and current development of Polish social pedagogy it may be inferred that its achievements are not overextensive with regards to the described and acquired theoretical deliberations. Nevertheless, from the very beginning, it has generated certain, specific theoretical solutions attempting to describe and explain particular areas of social reality. Especially noteworthy is the first period of the existence of this discipline, the period of such social pedagogists like i.a. J.W. Dawid, A. Szycówna, I. Moszczeńska or Helena Radlińska. The variety of the reflections with typically philosophical background undertaken in their works (e.g. E. Abramowski) is stunning. Equally involving is the second stage of development of social pedagogy i.e. shortly after the World War II, when Polish social pedagogy did not fully break with the heritage of previous philosophical reflections (A. Kamiński, R. Wroczyński) yet was developed in the Marxist current. A question arouses whether the area of education and the projects of its functioning of that time were also specific with regards to theory (it seems to be the problem of the whole Socialist pedagogy realised in Poland at that time). The following years of development of this discipline, especially at the turn of 80’s and 90’s was the period of various social ideas existing in social pedagogy – the influences of various concepts and theories in this field. The extent to which they were creatively adapted and included in the current of specific interpretations still requires detailed analysis, yet remains clearly visible. Another important area is the field of confronting the theories with the existing and undertaken solutions in the world pedagogy. A. Radziewicz-Winnicki refers to the views of the representatives of European and world social thought: P. Bourdieu, U. Beck, J. Baudrillard, Z. Bauman and M. Foucault, and tries to identify possible connections and relationships between these ideas and social pedagogy: “the ideas undertaken by the mentioned sociologists undoubtedly account for a significant source of inspiration for practical reflection within social pedagogy. Therefore, it is worthwhile to suggest certain propositions of their application in the field of the mentioned subdiscipline of pedagogy” (Radziewicz-Winnicki 2008). The contemporary social pedagogy in Poland constantly faces numerous challenges. W. Theiss analysed the contemporary social pedagogy with regards to its deficiencies but also the challenges imposed by globalisation and wrote: “Modern social pedagogy focuses mainly on the narrow empirical research and narrow practical activity and neglects research in the field of theory functioning separately from the realms of the global (or globalising) world or pays insufficient attention to these problems. It leads to a certain self-marginalisation of our discipline which leaves us beyond the current of main socio-educational problems of modern times. In this respect, it seems worthwhile and necessary to carry out intensive conceptual and research work focused on e.g. the following issues:  metatheory of social pedagogy and its relationship with modern trends in social sciences;  the concepts of human and the world, the concepts of the hierarchy of values;  the theory of upbringing, the theory of socialization, the theory of educational environment;  a conceptual key of the modern reality; new terms and new meanings of classical concepts;  socio-educational activities with direct and indirect macro range e.g. balanced development and its programmes, global school, intercultural education, inclusive education, professional education of emigrants”. Considering the currently undertaken research in this field and the accepted theoretical perspectives it is possible to indicate specific and elaborated concepts. They fluctuate around structural spheres of social pedagogy on the axis: human – environment – environmental transformations. It accounts for an ontological sphere of the acknowledged concepts and theories. Below, I am enumerating the concepts which are most commonly discussed in social pedagogy with regards to the acquired and accepted model. Currently discussed theoretical perspectives (contexts) in social pedagogy and the concepts within. I. The context of social personal relationships  social participation, social presence;  social communication, interaction;  reciprocity. II. The context of social activities (the organization of environment)  institutionalisation;  modernization;  urbanization. III. The context of environment  space;  place;  locality. The socially conditioned process of human development is a process which constantly undergoes transformations. The pedagogical description of this process ought to include these transformations also at the stage of formulating directives of practical activities – the educational practice. It is a big challenge for social pedagogy to simultaneously do not undergo limitations imposed by current social policy and response to real social needs. It has been and remains a very important task for social pedagogy.

Thirteen years ago, Kenichi Ohmae proclaimed that the world had become “borderless,” and the nation-state nothing more than a “bit actor” in a globalised economy. Around the same time, “interdisciplinarity” appeared as the prime strategy for breaking down the rigid stratifications of traditional disciplines, promising an equivalently borderless academe. However, despite the rhetoric of globalisation and interdisciplinarity, territorial boundaries—both physical and conceptual—remain in evidence and under contention. We chose Christy Collis’s article, “Australia’s Antartic Turf,” as our feature article because it foregrounds what we were most interested in: the collaboration between the physical and representational aspects of territory in the creation of “turf.” Ironically, as Collis notes, the territory she maps out—the Australian Antarctic Territory—is, in a physical sense, a “turfless space,” though it is one that is legally claimed as Australian turf. In this space, once again, we can see the collapsing of the literal and conceptual aspects of turf. Collis’s “anatomy” of Australia’s Antarctican space is exciting reading for questions of territorial claims and territorial representations and their implications. She informs us about the often forgotten complex geopolitical and legal aspects involved in such territory-making, and shows how these aspects, together with certain cultural spatialising technologies, have transformed vast areas of Antarctica into Australian sovereign space. As Collis’s article shows, the territories these practices mark out are not neutral spaces, but highly politicised turfs, themselves fragmented by conflicting interests and agendas. Eric D. Mason’s article, “Border-Building: Cultural Turf and the Maintenance of Hybridity,” examines the way in which, in the context of international capitalism, the border-eliding practice of hybridity is, paradoxically, fostered through the “strategic reinforcement of national and cultural borders.” The problems of this paradox are exemplified in “the idealistic American view of culture as a ‘melting pot’” in which disparate cultural identities are subsumed into a “greater national identity.” However, as Mason argues, the 9/11 attacks have shattered this homogeneous hybridity and “prompted a host of culturally-focused turf disputes ranging from the bombing of mosques to the deliberate dumping of French champagne.” In “Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border,” Brian J. Norman also addresses changes to U.S. immigration and citizenship policies post-9/11, but from a rhetorical standpoint. He examines the way in which the Bush administration responded to the attacks “with vigorous efforts to shore up national borders within a language of terrorism, evildoers, and the dire need for domestic security.” The Oath of Allegiance, he argues, is one such example of how rhetoric creates new political realities. Norman’s article, in this way, rethinks the figure of the immigrant and questions of citizenship within the context of state procedures, and considers these shifts as a result of newly inflamed discourses of terrorism and national security. This theme of the production and circulation of nationalism through language continues to run through Terrence Maybury’s article, “The Literacy Control Complex.” This article examines the literate domain and some of the changes it has experienced throughout the new media communications revolution. Maybury ultimately relates questions of literacy and its control to the concepts of sovereignty, territoriality, and nationalism. New media technologies are among the most effective and pervasive means for circulating and maintaining such politicised turfs, and, in “Transformations: A Nation State Responds,” Tim Dwyer looks specifically at these technologies in an Australian context. Dwyer addresses issues of “turf” as part of national debates about the institutional reshaping of media regulation at times of rapid changes within communications media. Using debates in Australia about how to merge the functions of the Australian Communications Authority and the Australian Broadcasting Authority as an example, he discusses social, technological, and politico-economic dimensions of regulatory policies. From these more geo-political and mediatised aspects of turf, our articles take a turn towards academic questions of disciplinary turf. Fred Mason’s story of his personal experiences of the academic “turf protection” maintained by traditional disciplines offers thoughts about interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity—those much-touted new prime strategies in cultural research. For Zach Whalen, games studies is a new field of cultural research at the edges of academe that must deal with the issues surrounding interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity raised by Fred Mason. He poses the question as to whether “ludology is sufficiently robust as a hypothetical academic discipline” to firmly establish games studies within the confines of the traditional university. He argues that the study of video games has been the subject of “a quiet disciplinary turf war between scholars who attempt to bring games into existing academic discourse communities and scholars who see games as an entirely unique medium warranting independent academic infrastructures.” Whalen’s conclusion is that, at present, ludology may not be able to resolve this turf war and, instead, games studies may be better considered as a “melting pot” of competing methodologies. Laurie Taylor’s article on the spaces of video games can be considered a telling counterpoint to Whalen’s for two reasons. First, Taylor shifts the focus from the disciplinary turf war of games studies to the internal turf spaces and violent turf wars within video games themselves. Second, her article exemplifies the way in which new fields of study carve out ideological territories that delimit critical language, critical practice, and the object of study. Taylor maintains that what has been lacking in the debate over violence in video games is an awareness of the relationship between the virtual game space and the physical space of play. She argues that “the internal game space of a video game cannot be examined outside of the space of play because the space of play dictates how the game is played and how the game space is to be read.” In some way, each of these articles portrays a “turf war,” which, by definition, relies upon competing claims for cultural, spatial, or intellectual exclusivity. However, the word “turf” itself is intrinsically transcultural, sharing an Indo-European root with the Sanskrit darbha or “tuft of grass.” Moreover, in this sense of the word, turf can be carved up and exploited, burned for fuel; however, as a living network of roots and soil, it is also resilient and transplantable. It is this aspect of “turf” that Michelle Dicinoski’s poem “Golf” draws out. Dicinoski’s poem gives us a living image of one such cultural grafting as she opens the geopolitics of “turf” up to the everyday, the tangible, the local, and the familial. In her humorous and personal way, Dicinoski distils the genealogy of “culture” that Raymond Williams maps out in Keywords. In the same way, we need to cultivate an attentiveness to the spatial metaphors we (and these articles) use to talk about knowledge. Traditional epistemology has been consistently defined in geographical terms—knowledge is surveyed and divided into fields, topics (from topos, or place), provinces, domains, realms, and spheres. Implied in this subdivision of epistemological territory is a mastery or dominance over knowledge, as the terms “subject” and “discipline” make evident. An awareness of these metaphors alerts us to the fact that the language we use is not neutral, apolitical, or simply academic. Critical encounters with “turf” are not mere rhetoric: they at once establish, erase, or contest borders both of knowledge and physical territory. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mitchell, Peta & Buettner, Angi. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Mitchell, P. & Buettner, A. (2004, Mar17). Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/01-editorial.php>

"And then I ask the question, 'How long have you been doing this?' And it says, 'That knowledge isn't given to you.' And I say, 'Jesus Christ, will you answer a question for the love of God? How long have you been doing this, and stop with those stupid answers.' I'm so pissed off at it. And it sort of just smiles and doesn't answer. And I say, 'Have you been doing this forever?' I don't think it understands forever. And then I ask what it's doing. 'What are you doing?' It wants me to give it my mind, and then it will show me what it's doing. I say, 'No dice, I don't care that much. No thanks, I'm not interested.' It says, 'Why are you afraid? Why are you worried? Don't be afraid.' All the same bullshit that it always wants to give you." -- Abductee 'Karen Morgan', interviewed in David Jacobs's Secret Life "We should learn to live by learning how not to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, spectres, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet." -- Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx Hundreds of people from all around the world are reporting being abducted by apparently alien beings, taken aboard a UFO or into a profoundly unfamiliar environment, and subjected to bizarre reproductive procedures and quasi-medical examinations. It's usually called alien abduction, and it's becoming increasingly common in western society. Official culture (academics, government, scientific institutions, etc.) have been very slow to acknowledge that anything at all is happening, overlooking the clear implication that even if a lot of people aren't reporting actual experience, that a lot of people believe they are reporting actual experience. The source of this apparent lack of official interest may lie in the undesirability of transgressing the superficial sensationalism that belies the phenomenon's apparent complexity. But what seems unavoidable is the implication that alien abduction represents an unprecedented sociological and psychological phenomenon. Predominantly obfuscating investigation of alien abduction is the absence of a clear mode of approach. The most obvious (and common) place to begin is with the question "is alien abduction real?" -- which quickly proves unproductive, essentially because its premises aren't appropriate. Firstly, it assumes that current definitions of 'real' are both stable and applicable to a hypothetically alien phenomenon. Alien abduction is also commonly deemed impossible a priori; in other words, it's not happening because we 'know' it can't. (Note: this premise embarrassed many French astronomers who for decades, despite villagers' reports, maintained that 'rocks could not fall from the sky'. We now know, despite the astronomers' arrogance, that meteorites do exist.) This is an effect of the dominant ontology -- literally, a reality constructed and reinforced by a minority of powerful members of a culture. Phenomena which threaten the most basic ontological, epistemological and existential premises of this minority are marginalised as tabloid, suppressed, or simply ignored in its hegemonic efforts to maintain power. Secondly, asking if alien abduction is real bypasses the highly problematic trait that connects virtually all abduction cases: the bulk of evidence is in the form of abductees' memories. Roughly 30% of abductions are remembered without the use of hypnosis, and 70% are 'recovered' memories of 'missing time'. (McLeod et al. 156) Most abduction experiences seem to involve complete, or almost complete, erasure of memory of the event. (see Hopkins, Missing Time). Memory itself thus becomes heavily problematised, and no longer reliable. Abduction (if we take any notice of it) causes us to doubt the reality of events that our memories are capable of providing for our perusal, since abductees remember, often very clearly, events which as a culture we generally consider impossible. Conversely, and most provocatively, alien abduction causes us to question the assumed fantasy of events that our memories contain. Vivid dreams are potential abduction experiences. As a society we may stubbornly assume the role of the French astronomers and tell abductees that they are not remembering experience, that their memories are 'false' or have been implanted by hypnotists predisposed to the alien hypothesis. But the abductees, and their memories, do not go away. A conceptualisation of memory that is capable of dealing with alien abduction phenomena should begin by observing that the memorial is intimately linked with the imaginative. It is the retained impression of experience, which is a convergence of imagination (creative thought) and perception (reception of sensory stimuli). Without memory, without the ability to recognise patterns, 'experience' -- meaningful perception -- would not be possible. Experience then, upon which we rely totally to formulate reality, is not possible without memory and imagination. Reality does influence imagination, and vice versa. But imagination is more powerful at the end of the day, since it is always imagination that changes reality. Put simply, discovery is invention. The earth only orbits the sun because enough people imagine (or think or believe) that it does. It only became possible to imagine that the earth orbits the sun, as opposed to the sun orbiting the earth, because of changes that occurred within the culture. Knowledge, despite its claims of universality, is always cultural. The experiences that produce knowledge are always never more than what a culture will allow, can allow. Cultural practice, including the production of knowledge, is and inevitably must be, a restrictive practice. The emergence of postmodern thought is essentially what has allowed an alien abduction phenomenon to begin an existence. Conceptual boundaries which have traditionally precluded such a phenomenon are now being attacked and acknowledged as cultural and therefore subject to change. Postmodern society recognises and appreciates the plasticity and constant change of reality and knowledge, and stresses the priority of concrete experience over fixed abstract principles (Tarnas 395). At its deepest level, alien abduction exposes the arbitrary nature of the reality/non-reality duality, since abduction experiences seem to involve something from non-reality/immateriality (alien beings that walk through walls) entering reality/materiality (its aftereffects are observed in the physical world). Importantly, people are affected not so much by their experience of alien abduction (which are usually forgotten), but by their memories of alien abduction. John E. Mack suggests as a response to this that our use of familiar words like 'happening', 'occurred' and 'real' will themselves have to be thought of differently, and less literally (405). What would have once been interpreted as an inclination towards fantasy, realistic dreams or simply insanity now has the potential to become something more. The memories that so many people are now reporting are not seen as merely memories of dreams, memories of fantasies or memories of episodes of insanity. They are seen as memories of experiences that bridge an objective/subjective dichotomy. They are memories of events that persistently evade complete detection and leave only enough traces in the physical world -- the odd anomalous scar or lesion, and distraught abductees -- to imply that something is happening. But the aliens never land on the White House lawn. Most significantly of all, alien abduction particularly involves that ambiguous bridge between reality and non-reality, perception and imagination -- memory. Memory is the true realm of alien abduction, and we will be forever frustrated if we try to transfer it neatly into other conceptual realms such as 'reality' or 'non-reality', 'perception' or 'imagination'. Alien abduction, like memory, just won't fit into them. It is the hybrid of perception and imagination, the convergence of reality and non-reality, resulting from the privileging of imagination over perception in the formulation of experience. It is the ultimate postmodern myth. References Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge, 1994. Harpur, Patrick. Diamonic Reality: Understanding Otherwordly Encounters. London: Penguin, 1994. Hopkins, Budd. Missing Time. New York: Ballantine, 1981. Jacobs, David M. Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Mack, John E. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. London: Simon and Schuster, 1995. McLeod, Caroline C., Barbara Corbisier, and John E. Mack. "A More Parsimonious Explanation for UFO Abduction." Psychological Inquiry 7.2 (1996): 156-168. Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View. New York: Ballantine, 1991. Thompson, Keith. Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination. New York: 1993. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Adam Dodd. "'What Happened?' Deconstructing Memories of Alien Abduction." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/alien.php>. Chicago style: Adam Dodd, "'What Happened?' Deconstructing Memories of Alien Abduction," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/alien.php>. APA style: Adam Dodd. (1998) "What happened?" Deconstructing memories of alien abduction. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/alien.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionAccording to Sigmund Freud (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis 90), dreams can be seen as a “substitute for something else, unknown to the dreamer”. In Freud’s theory, dreams are regarded as a “depiction of the subconscious, a screen onto which the subconscious projects its suppressed desires and hallucinations about their fulfilment” (Khapaeva & Tweddle 6). It is likely due to these aspects that dreams and dreaming have become prevalent in contemporary literature, film and television, and an outlet for a greater examination of Freud’s work on the origins and nature of these "desires and hallucinations" (Eberwein). While considerable discussion exists on Freud’s psychoanalytical approach to dreams (Eberwein; Khapaeva & Tweddle; Moore Jr.), as well as the theoretical parallels between dreams and the mediums of storytelling, literature and film (Rheinschmiedt; Perlmutter; Khapeava & Tweddle), there has been limited research and representation of dreams in Gothic television. The Gothic is a “malleable notion” that is able to remould itself into various narrative forms and media (Piatti-Farnell & Brien 1), and is also “about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit” (Lloyd-Smith, 1). Given that in Freudian theory, dreams are generally regarded as a vehicle for the return of suppressed desires and the unconscious, dreams and nightmares themselves can be seen as inherently Gothic. Dreams and nightmares are often spaces where characters must confront the unfamiliar, the unknown, and the unseen future, and yet, these spaces also seem to contain aspects of the familiar, the known, and the previously seen past (Moore Jr.). Taking the inherent Gothic nature of dreams and nightmares into account, this article will critically examine the representation of dreams and nightmares in “Chapter Five: Dreams in a Witch House” in Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-present). At the end of the previous episode, “Chapter Four: Witch Academy”, Sabrina inadvertently frees the sleep demon, Batibat, from her prison. In Chapter five, Batibat, in an effort to force them to release her from the house, places Sabrina, Ambrose, Zelda and Hilda into a deep sleep curse where they are tortured in their dream-turned nightmares. The episode features a number of Gothic tropes and conventions, including the return of the repressed and the unconscious, the uncanny and the double, and the blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy. This article will primarily focus on Ambrose, whose dream sequence highlights how dreams in Gothic texts are often spaces where the boundaries between everyday reality and fantasy scenarios become blurred, producing uncanny interactions. This can be seen in Ambrose’s experience of a dream loop, where he is compelled to repeat his death over and over again; this repetition produces a blurring of the boundary between the past, present and future. Additionally, this article will discuss how the episode uses both the “aesthetics and the politics of horror and the Gothic” (Piatti-Farnell and Mercer 1), in order illustrate how the realisation of our deepest fears and anxieties in dreams and nightmares are both terrifying and horrifying. Uncanny Doubles and the Repressed Unconscious According to Royle, the uncanny is “concerned with the strange, weird, and mysterious, with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something supernatural” (1). The uncanny is a crisis of the proper as it entails a critical disturbance of what is proper (including names, places, people), and is concerned with the familiar becoming unfamiliar. Royle argues that the uncanny is described in terms of making things uncertain and the sense that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity, which often challenges rationality or logic. According to Wheatley (3), Gothic television narratives often involve a “proclivity towards the structures and images of the uncanny” including repetitions, déjà vu, doppelgangers and the double, and severed body parts. Ambrose’s dream, in particular, support’s Wheatley’s claim that Gothic television has a proclivity towards the images of the uncanny, as it includes a number of key features of the uncanny, including repetitions, the double, and severed body parts, are used to evoke the terror of Ambrose’s pain and death. At the start of Ambrose’s dream, he is in the Spellman Mortuary with Hilda opening a body bag – upon opening the bag, the corpse is revealed to be Ambrose’s body. This revelation produces an uncanny effect, as the double operates as a figure of displacement in that it characteristically appears out of place to displace its host (Webber). This displacement of both self and time can be seen with Ambrose’s reaction, who struggles too come to terms with seeing his double on the Mortuary table. According to Babicka, the doppelganger is perceived as both self and other, and the uncanny element is the fact that they are both familiar and strange. The encounter with other selves opens up possibilities for the uncanny, as any attempt at “a reflexive grasp of this mutual imbrication of self … involves a potential for precisely those uncanny figurations that people experience from the Gothic” (Collins & Jervis 6). After the body on the Mortuary table is revealed to be Ambrose’s double, Ambrose questions his aunt Hilda about the corpse, asking “doesn’t he remind you of someone, Auntie?” Collins and Jervis’s claim that the doppelganger is perceived as both self and other is supported by this interaction, as Ambrose’s question indicates that he recognises the corpse as himself, but given that the corpse appears to be his double, he also regards it as other. Furthermore, the uncanny resemblance between Ambrose and the corpse evokes a sense of terror and awe in him. Morris (307) argues that the uncanny "derives its terror not from something external, alien, or unknown but … something that is strangely familiar and defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it". Terror has the potential to freeze the mind and body, and derives from whatever evokes in us an apprehension of pain or death. This apprehension of pain and death can be seen with Ambrose, as open seeing the body, a close up shot of Ambrose reveals his shock and terror of his own mortality. Moreover, the existential threat of death which the double poses can be connected to a key theme within the Gothic and the uncanny – our compulsion to return to the repressed moment or act. According to Mishra (294), the double can be regarded as the uncanny harbinger of death, and "death is the always recurring or repeating presence that threatens the subject to which it compulsively returns". In Ambrose’s dream, while his double is a direct visualisation of his death, he cannot seem to remember or understand how is body came to be on the table, as its presence appears to avoid all rational logic. In his discussion of the Gothic and psychoanalysis, Punter (307) argues that we work "continuously to maintain a simulacrum of congruence between fantasy and reality". However, those boundaries frequently blur in the most routine of everyday events, such as daydreams or dissonance between what other people mean as opposed to what we want to hear. When we can’t fill in this gap in knowledge, Punter argues that this gap can call forth the uncanny which is produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced. This dissonance between reality and fantasy can be seen with Ambrose’s reaction, as although his double’s corpse is right in front of him, he struggles to understand the gravity of the situation, and how he died. Unlike Ambrose’s dream, where the return of the repressed, his corpse, is a symbol of his desire to be free of house arrest, the return of the repressed in Sabrina’s dream is more literal as Harvey remembers a memory he had previously forgotten. Botting (107) argues that the uncanny is “easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced and occurs when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression”. The uncanny is the recurrence or return of the repressed – something which is familiar and old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through processes of repression. The return of repressed memories can be seen in Sabrina’s dream, where she reveals to her then-boyfriend, Harvey, her identity as half-witch and half-mortal. This revelation causes a moment of déjà vu for Harvey who, in the dream, remembers when Sabrina had cast a spell causing Harvey to forget about Sabrina’s identity. According to Royle (173), déjà vu can be defined as the "peculiar feeling or sensation that we have, in certain moments of situations, of having had exactly the same experience once before, or of having once before been in the same place". However, Royle argues that despite our best efforts, we never succeed in clearly remembering the previous occasion, and therefore the feeling of déjà vu corresponds to the recollection of an unconscious phantasy – we can never consciously remember it because it has never been conscious. In response to Sabrina’s revelation, Harvey asks “why am I suddenly having a strange sense of déjà vu?” Sabrina answers: “because I told you once, in the woods, and then I made you forget”. Harvey reveals that, despite Sabrina’s memory spell “a part of me remembers, even when you made me forget”. This revelation produces another uncanny moment where a repressed or ‘forgotten’ memory comes back to haunt the past. In Freud’s understanding of the uncanny, everything that was intended to remain a secret comes into the open, and the uncanny manifests itself when the repressed aspects buried in our unconscious suddenly return. By revealing her secret, the past event, the memory spell, suddenly returns and this forgotten moment causes Harvey anguish as he struggles to recollect the past experience. Repetition and Dream LoopsThe episode is segmented to focus on how the individual characters come to realise they are dreaming, before it brings them together. When first centred on Ambrose, we see him performing an autopsy on his double; after performing the operation, Ambrose is paid a visit by his coven’s High Priest, Father Blackwood, who informs him that he is no longer under house arrest. In this way, his dream initially appears to mirror the Freudian theory of dreams as simply being wish fulfilment; throughout the first season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Ambrose’s key storyline is his desire to leave the Spellman house and be free of his imprisonment. However, Ambrose’s wish is never fully actualised, as he is ultimately murdered by Batibat, and after his death, the episode jumps to the same close up shot of Ambrose and Hilda opening the body bag, like at the start of his dream. It appears that Ambrose is stuck in a time loop or a repetition of his own death, unable to leave the house forever – his greatest wish has become his greatest fear. Although it appears that Ambrose is ‘fated’ to die in his dream on a continuous loop, it is never clear when the loop actually begins, as at the beginning of the dream, we already see Ambrose’s corpse. Juranovszky argues that Gothic temporal loops play a key part in endeavours to establish sites of trauma re-enactment, and the aim of temporal confusion is to “evoke a disturbing sense of backward-pointing progress” which “allows for a reconsideration as well as a resolution of the past” (para 12). The re-enactment of Ambrose’s trauma, in this case his death, is seen in his dream, as he is stuck in an endless cycle of discovering his own corpse to only then be killed himself again. The temporality in the dream is non-linear as time flows in a circled repetition where Ambrose is at the Mortuary, is killed, and then the cycle repeats itself. Given that that dream loop begins at the Mortuary table, after Ambrose’s death, time itself in the dream is unclear as there is a blurring of the past, present, and future. Despite his awareness of being stuck in a loop of his own death, Ambrose is compelled to repeat the same action again and again until he relents and frees Batibat from the Spellman residence. This instance of repetition, where characters are compelled to act in a certain way, is a hallmark of the Gothic, and is one of the central characteristics of the uncanny (Lloyd-Smith). Lloyd-Smith argues that Gothic characters are often shown struggling in a web of repetitions caused by their unawareness of their unconscious drives and motives. However, in this case, Ambrose is shown struggling with the repetition of his own death, yet he is compelled to repeat such actions. Furthermore, the sequence highlights how dreams are a space outside of time, where the past and present are blurred. According to Perlmutter, “something happens to the narrative” when dream sequences in film and television begin, as “characters leave behind rational external reality and … cross over into a ‘between’ world where reality and imagination converge into hypothetical realms that are scrambled” and achronological” (128). Because of this blurring between reality and imagination, dreams in Gothic texts are often spaces where the past and future are highly contested, and are an extreme form of solitude outside of time. Ambrose’s home has become an unfamiliar place of torture, as although he is surrounded by familiar people and surroundings, it appears that he is stuck in solitude with little hope of escape. It is Ambrose’s awareness of being trapped in a time loop that results in his own death, and the realisation that he is trapped in existential solitude, as well as his inability to distinguish between nightmare and reality that makes his dream so terrifying. According to Piatti-Farnell and Mercer, “in our contemporary moment”, Gothic horror and terror “tend to merge and intersect, often forming hybrid visions”, that shifts between the two modes. Conventionally, terror has been “linked to fear triggered by indeterminate agents” (Cavallaro vii), and to hold characters and readers in anxious suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity mostly out of sight or suggestions from a hidden past (Hogle). The claim that Gothic terror and horror often merge and intersect in contemporary texts can be supported by the revelation of the corpse on the Mortuary table. This revelation puts Ambrose in an anxious state, where he can only imagine the circumstances in which his double died. However, this terror of his mortality quickly shifts into horror when Ambrose realises that he is doomed to repeat his death in an endless cycle. Horror is usually triggered by “visible fear” (Cavallaro vii), and confronts characters “with the gross violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the assumed norms … of everyday life with wildly shocking, and even revolting, consequences” (Hogle 3).This visualisation of fear and gross violence is explicitly shown when Ambrose performs an autopsy on his double for the second time, as he pleads “no … no … no … Auntie, please don’t leave me…” As Ambrose has encountered his death and entrapment in the Spellman residence, his fear of death has been realised as nothing remains for his imagination. The close up shot of Ambrose cutting into his own body can be considered as an instance of body horror, which Reyes argues, occurs when a “text generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body, we might find ourselves in front of an instance of body horror” (1). Reyes’s claim that body horror generates fear from an abnormal state of corporeality can be seen with Ambrose, as he is compelled to cut into his own body, knowing regardless of his actions, he will be killed by Batibat continuously, unless he relents and frees the demon from her trap. This compulsion to act creates a sense of horror, dread, and revulsion, which can be seen in a close up shot of Ambrose’s face, where he has an extremely visceral reaction to being stuck in his time loop, and being abandoned in solitude with no one to help him. While dreams in Freudian theory were considered as wish fulfilment, they can also be seen as a space where repressed and unconscious desires and fears manifest themselves. As seen in Ambrose’s dream, the return of these unconscious and repressed desires produced a number of uncanny and horrifying interactions. Ambrose’s growing realisation of being trapped in a nightmare loop of his death illustrate how dreams are Gothic because they disturb the boundary between the material world and fantasy. The use of Gothic horror and terror techniques and conventions in Ambrose’s dream demonstrate the horrifying nature of nightmares, not because it featured a single disturbing moment, but because Ambrose’s dream morphed from wish fulfilment to a narrative of his repressed and unconscious desires and fears. The inherent Gothic nature of dreams means they are highly effective and popularly used in literature, film, and television to evoke a sense of terror and horror because of the visceral reaction the return of the unconscious and repressed produces. ReferencesBabicka, Joanna. "Postmodern and Gothic Hybridity in Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel." The Gothic: Studies in History, Identity and Space. Ed. Katarzyna Wieckowska. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012. 121-126.Botting, Fred. Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008.Cavallaro, Dani. The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear. London and New York: Continuum, 2002.“Chapter Four: Witch Academy.” The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Part One. Dir. Rob Seidenglanz. Netflix, 2018. “Chapter Five: Dreams in a Witch House.” The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Part One. Dir. Maggie Kiley. Netflix, 2018. Collins, Jo, and John Jervis. "Introduction." Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Eds. Jo Collins and John Jervis. New York: Macmillan Limited, 2008.Eberwein, Robert T. Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Trans. G. Stanley Hall. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Sandner. Westport, Connecticut, and London: Praeger, 2004.Hogle, Jerrold E. "Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture." The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.Juranovszky, Andrea. "Trauma Re-Enactment in the Gothic Loop: A Study on Structures of Circularity in Gothic Fiction." Inquiries Journal 6.5 (2014).Khapaeva, Dina, and Rosie Tweddle. Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project. Boston: Brill, 2012.Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.Mishra, Vijay. "The Gothic Sublime." A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. 288-306. Moore Jr., Richard W. "Dreaming Change, Changing Dreams in the British Gothic Novel, 1765-1818." New York: Fordham University, 2018.Morris, David B. “Gothic Sublimity.” New Literary History 12.2 (1985). 299-319. Perlmutter, Ruth. "Memories, Dreams, Screens." Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2005).Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Donna Lee Brien. "Introduction: The Gothic Compass." New Directions in 21st-Century Gothic: The Gothic Compass. Eds. Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien. Routledge, 2015. 1-10. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Erin Mercer. "Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture." M/C Journal 17.4 (2014): 4.Punter, David. "Introduction: The Ghost of a History." A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. 1-9. Rheinschmiedt, Otto, M. The Fictions of Dreams: Dreams, Literature, and Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2003.Webber, Andrew J. The Doppelganger: Double Visions in German Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Wheatley, Helen. Gothic Television. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2006.

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

The paper discusses mobility in the context of displacement. How is the mobile phone appropriated by refugees in immigration detention? What does the mobile phone, and indeed, mobility, signify in an Australian policy landscape of mandatory detention of asylum seekers and formerly prohibited access to mobile phones for detainees inside immigration detention centres? What does this intimate about the perceived dangers of “new” and mobile media? The author’s preliminary research with refugees in Australian immigration detention centres compares policy and practice. Firstly, it interrogates the unwritten policies regulating refugees’ access to media technologies when incarcerated in immigration detention. As there is no written policy on technology access and practices vary across immigration detention centres, the information in this paper has been given by detainees and has not been verified by the management of detention centres. The paper suggests that the utopian promises of mobile media echo those made about cyberspace in the 1990s. Furthermore, the residual effects of such rhetoric have infiltrated government policy in terms of perceiving mobile media as dangerous when adopted by marginalised groups such as refugees. Secondly, the research examines how and why the mobile phone has been adopted by immigration detainees despite their former prohibition. It explores the ways in which refugees practice an imagined mobility through media whilst in detention, and finds that this is critical to sustaining connection with their imagined communities. Why Refugees? In the context of increased forced migration of people due to circumstances such as political instability, war, natural disaster and famine; it is necessary to better understand how refugees mobilise and organise in situations of displacement. As new technologies encourage the capacity for borderlessness, such advantages also have to be contrasted with the potential dangers of spontaneous border crossings. The study of the behaviour and practices of refugees in relation to communication technologies offers an insight into the efficacy of immigration detention policy in filtering movement and interaction, both physical and virtual, between Australia and other countries. Although the study of refugees is a discipline in its own right, there has been minimal examination of how they appropriate technology, particularly that which facilitates and complements their mobility, to maintain connections with their diasporic networks while in situations of displacement. The studies that have been undertaken concentrate on the use of technology by refugees living in the wider community (see Glazebrook, McIver Jr. and Prokosch; Howard and Owens), rather than in the context of detention. In previous research of diasporas within the discipline of Cultural Studies, technology has been regarded as vital to subcultures and minority groups. Technology has been the tool by which such communities respond to their structural conditions (see Cunningham; Hall; Halleck). Such investigations have concentrated on the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity and how they inscribe meanings to specific technologies, which in turn, become intrinsic to the identities of the groups and communities. The research extends the work that has been done within Cultural Studies by similarly focusing on a marginalised group, refugees, and their participation in particular technologies. A review of literature across refugee studies, diaspora studies and technology studies has shown that: The study of technology use by refugees has had minimal investigation The study of diasporas has rarely included refugees The study of communities and communication practices which surround particular technologies has concentrated on groups other than refugees The escalation of issues of asylum and border control in public discourse warrant more knowledge about refugees and their networks of communication beyond the boundaries of detention and Australia The notion of “networks” refers to people, technologies, processes and practices that form the relationships between refugees in institutionalised immigration detention and the outside world. The Australian Immigration Detention Context Between 1992 and 1994, Australian law moved from permitting (but not enforcing) limited detention of asylum seekers, to a blanket policy of mandatory detention (HREOC) which, at one point, had up to 12,000 individuals in detention (Castan Centre for Human Rights Law). The detention context is particularly relevant to Australia, because its policy of mandatory detention means that refugees have restricted contact with the world outside of the detention centre. In 2005, the Migration Amendment (Detention Arrangements) Bill allowed detained families with children to live in community detention, that is, in residential accommodation outside of an immigration detention centre. Although community detention carries with it specific conditions, families are unaccompanied and have more freedom of movement. This paper discusses the author’s preliminary work with refugees in immigration detention, prior to the introduction of community detention. The research sought to investigate how asylum seekers use technology to sustain connections with their virtual communities in situations of displacement. Specifically, it explored how technology is appropriated to mediate communication in the context of institutionalised detention. The key research questions addressed by the research were: what kinds of technologies are available to refugees? How are these used? How are their benefits and limitations perceived? What, if any, kinds of social networks surround these technologies? How are relationships of power surrounding these technologies negotiated? Can technology assist refugees in sustaining connections with their communities of choice and reducing their sense of isolation? Can technology play a role in reducing the well-documented effects of this incarceration by providing mediated social interaction? What are the implications for policy, especially in relation to permitted technologies and surveillance of communication practices? Access to informants was gained by working with a refugee community advocacy group, which has established links with refugees in detention and experience in dealing with the management of detention centres. One such group is ChilOut, which organises visitor programs to immigration detention centres. This affiliation was important in gaining access to, and trust of, detainees who were willing to participate in the research. It presented opportunities to interact with detainees on a social basis. Semi-structured interviews with the research subjects were conducted to ascertain the strategies and resources currently utilised to counter the effects of mandatory detention. In 2005, detainees had access to a range of technology which can be broadly termed “old media”, while access to “new media” – such as the Internet and mobile phones – are prohibited. At the time of printing, detainees reported that mobile phones without cameras were only recently permitted. Detainees have access to pay phones inside the centre. Visitors are allowed to give detainees phone cards so they can use the pay phones without charge or the need for change. In addition to pay phones, detainees are provided with access to a fax and photocopier, which are generally used to liaise with and send relevant documentation to lawyers. There is distrust of using the fax machine at the detention centre because it is in a management office area and the detainees require permission to use it. It means the guards can read the faxes that are sent, as well as those that are received before notifying the detainees that they have received one. Detainees also have television, videos, DVDs and newspapers, so there is the possibility of feeling like part of an imagined community (Anderson) through these media. There are computers available, but no Internet access. Some of the children load computer games on them to play, others have Playstation in their rooms. It is noteworthy that the only technology to which detainees have access and which facilitates real-time person-to-person interaction is the telephone. The phone offers the opportunity for direct contact with the outside world without the visual and other sensory realities of detention. The telephone is able to mask the extent of imprisonment as it does not show the barbed razor wire surrounding the compound. Yet detainees were not permitted to have mobile phones for a long time. Thus, the key question remains: why were they deprived of access to mobile phones while allowed access to pay phones and landlines? What does this suggest about the perceived dangers of mobile media and the resonance of last century’s techno-utopian discourses? Given that detainees were only given access to “old media”, it seems that this tired but resolutely upbeat rhetoric about new technology which celebrates it as inherently liberating actually inflected policies determining the kinds of technologies to which detainees have access. It confirms the pessimistic assertions of media theorists such as Schiller and Mosco, that new technologies further alienate disadvantaged groups. As the Australian government attempts to regulate the physical movement of people across its borders, mantras of the dot.com era such as “everyone is a free agent” (Kumar 77) appear to undermine this agenda. The assumptions of liberty and democracy embedded in this “free agency” are implicit in policies that denied refugees access to “new media” such as the Internet and mobile phones. The “liberating” nature of such technology was regarded as unsafe in the hands of refugees, whose freedom of movement is institutionally contained by the Australian government through mandatory detention. The physical movement of refugees, as well as the agency and freedom with which they can claim asylum in a country, is actively discouraged through immigration detention policy and limitations on access to technology. The promise of self-expression afforded by mobile media seemed antithetical to the prejudicial administration of refugees, which is premised upon a distrust of their claims of identity and asylum. Subsequently, their use of mobile technology was also assumed to be suspect and therefore had to be restricted. Detained refugees serve as a reminder of the parameters of upbeat discourses about new technology. That is, the utopian possibilities of mobile media appear to be conditional such that its “power” can only be entrusted to certain groups. In policy terms, the mobile phone is a rich site of signification. Not only does the technology itself imply a way of being (that is free, mobile, always accessible and always able to access), but it also connotes an ideal type of user, one that is appropriate and deserving of such technology. It seems that refugees are not entitled to their mobility and, therefore, do not have rights to media that is considered to facilitate such mobility, in spite of their detention. Furthermore, there is a suggested dichotomy in the government’s classification of the technologies to which refugees have access. The fact of detention means refugees are surrounded by technology, held captive by it and are inevitably in close proximity to it. It is technology which is seen as antithetical to mobility and therefore could be described as “static”: phones, faxes, photocopiers, television, video – all of which may be characterised as “old media”. The binary opposite of such technology is that which can be regarded as mobile or new or interactive media; that which resonates with the residual effects of 1990s techno-utopian rhetoric; and could be considered as threatening in the hands of those who have physically made unauthorised border crossings. However, prior investigations of “mobile” technologies, demonstrates that such dualisms are flawed as the lowest technologies also have the capacity to facilitate mobility. Examples include Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic, which notes that books and records have been vital in carrying oppositional ideologies and philosophies across the black diaspora. Within Asian diasporas, the exchange of video letters and taped Bollywood movies have been interpreted as forms of localised challenges to the centralised power of the broadcast media industries (Ang; Gillespie). These economies of exchange as facilitated by older forms of mobile media have been studied in relation to issues of migration and marginalisation. Given that refugees are also affected by such issues, their mobile media practices are a sobering reminder that mobility is not necessarily hi-tech nor confined to the realms of the affluent, educated and socio-economically advantaged. Rather, mobility can be a tenuous state of being displaced and itinerant, with technology adopted to manage and adapt to its challenges. The Mobile Media Practices of Detained Refugees The initial findings from the fieldwork indicate that for refugees, the mobile phone is not a technology of choice but instead, a technology of necessity and survival. Every technology that is available to them is used to sustain connection to their localized and globalised networks. The restriction to their physical movement of detainees is compensated through use of technology which allows any sort of interaction and communication. Being part of a technologically-mediated community appears to minimise the marginalisation and isolation they experience. Such feelings of dislocation have been well-documented in studies of the impact of incarceration on the mental health of refugees (see Mares and Jureidini; RANZCP; Hodes). It seems that the telephone and fax are the mainstays of their communication networks. However, such technologies are closely monitored, as landline phone calls can be traced or even tapped, and faxes have to be sent from an office manned by guards. An experienced visitor to detention centres commented that “most” detainees had mobile phones and when they were contraband, guards knew about them but generally ignored their use by detainees. Only mobile phones offer the potential for communication to be free from the surveillance by detention centres staff. The ways in which mobile phones are used by detainees is decidedly lo-tech, for example, for communication with family where use of a landline is impractical. One of the detainees said that he speaks to his wife and children on the centre pay phone every few days. However, the call costs are expensive as his family only has a mobile phone, not a landline, at their place of residence. For them to call him is also expensive and awkward, because they have to call the pay phone and if somebody answers, they have then to locate him somewhere within the compound. Thus, the connections between the detainees and their loved ones are very fragile in that they are almost totally dependent on the phone to maintain these relationships. In this instance, the mobile phone offers another means for managing the tenuous nature of these ties. The mobile phone, particularly SMS technology, offers a suitable alternative as the detainee can communicate with his family cheaply and quickly. It compensates for the constraints of the pay phone. The informal interactions afforded by the mobile phone also extend beyond family members of detainees to their supporters and advocates. Likewise, the mobile phone complements the communication practices facilitated through permitted technologies. For example, when detainees are liaising with the Department of Immigration (DIMIA), they will ask advice from the regular visitors to the immigration detention centre who come from an array of organizations such as churches, refugee advocacy groups, law firms and health organizations. Visitors generally offer whatever assistance they can by obtaining necessary forms from the department, searching the Internet, undertaking letter writing campaigns, and lobbying government ministers. Something worked in amongst all the network activity that took place over the course of this week. As promised to the family, I scoured the DIMIA web site for a form for applying under Section 417. While there didn’t seem to be an official form, I used the opportunity to research the section of the Migration Act. Googling turned up a 12 page “guide to section 417 applications” written by a barrister, which I printed out and faxed to them. So as to ensure that the family received the fax, I SMS-ed them to let them know a fax was on its way and how many pages to expect. They responded to me by fax, saying that they had been notified that they too were going to be released into community detention in the coming weeks. (Extract from fieldwork diary) The mobile phone serves the function of anticipating and verifying communications which may potentially be surveilled by staff of detention centres. Where detainees may not trust that they are being given all the letters or faxes that have been sent to them, the mobile phone enables a degree of privacy so that they at least know what to expect from their correspondents. Furthermore, it provides the opportunity for detainees to speak about matters related to their case for asylum that are regarded as too sensitive to risk being discussed in a public place such as on the centre pay phone. Often this involves seeking assistance with their application for asylum. He rang T on the centre pay phone and said that he would like to speak with me, but did not have my number. He didn’t have a pen and paper to jot down my details at the time, so he gave T his mobile number and asked her to pass it onto me, so I could ring him on it. When I rang, he had returned to his room where he could talk freely. He told me about the visit from the Commonwealth Ombudsman, who undertook to look into his case over the next couple of weeks. We talked about what would assist the Ombudsman in reviewing the case. I said I would write a letter or email in the first instance, and if he wanted other letters of support, I could circulate details of his case on the ChilOut newsletter. He said he didn’t want publicity at this stage. I offered to fax him a copy of my email, but he preferred that I give it to him in person as the fax machine in the office was too public and any documents received could be read. Again, the mobile seems to be the most appropriate technology for coordinating and organising privately away from centre surveillance… (Extract from fieldwork diary) Fear of breaches of confidentiality form only part of detainees’ desire for privacy from detention centre staff. There is also a need for private space away from other detainees as their imprisonment necessitates the constant use of communal facilities such as the pay phone. In addition to being used for its capacity for private communication, the mobile phone was also exploited as a broadcast technology by detained refugees. Text messages proved an effective way of providing brief updates to family and friends about the status of their case: 20 September 200510:24:07 Hi Linda. I am fine thank u. not news yet, I think they’ll come to see me soon, if I got news, I’ll let u know. Wish u have a good time. 15 October 200516:31:49 HI Linda, I was interview by Ombudsman yesterday, we talked about one hour and a half, it sound good…Thank u for yr concern 25 December 200520:26:54 Hi Linda. I am still in [detention centre]. No any news from Ombudsman, may be early next year. I am fine here, thanks. Tuesday 17 October 200613:44:41 Hi Linda…I transferd to [community] housing. Its much better here. How a u? takecare ur health, thanks. Thursday 16 November 200618:46:23 HI There is a good news to let u know I got the decision from that I won the FC case. Thus, for detained refugees, the mobile phone has been adopted for simple, lo-tech use. None of the respondents indicated a desire for a camera function on their mobile phones. However, one detainee did suggest that she would like to use a webcam to see and hear her child in China, whom she has not seen in eight years. While she did use the Internet for this purpose when she was on the “outside”, now she can only rely on weekly telephone conversations made from inside the detention centre. Conclusion What happens when technology is placed in the hands of those for whom it was never meant? It makes explicit what is often implied in studies of adoption of new technology, that the “utopian promise” is confined to a narrow socio-economic demographic: the advantaged, the affluent and the educated. Those who fall outside these perimeters are perceived as undeserving and untrustworthy of such technology. This is exemplified in the Australian government’s policy to deny refugees access to “new” and mobile media whilst being compulsorily detained. The decision to withhold mobile technology from mobile communities who are not so materially privileged is not only ironic but unwarranted in light of the empirical data. This has since been acknowledged by allowing detainees use of mobile phones. The mobile phone practices of detained refugees show that it is being used as a complementary and alternative technology, that is, to compensate for the inadequacies of the communication media allowed by detention centres. The mobile phone is exploited for the functions that permitted technologies do not offer: firstly, the ability to communicate with friends and family more immediately and effectively; secondly, the capacity to communicate privately with less probability of surveillance; thirdly, the opportunity to broadcast content one to many. In such communications, use of the mobile phone is simple and lo-tech: it is deployed for straightforward (but improved) interaction with detainees’ imagined communities which would otherwise be possible anyway through the “old” media technologies provided in detention. In practice, there was no evidence of the use of the hi-tech functions of mobile phones; nor was there any indication, as implied by policy, of the possible dangers that may ensue if such features of mobile media were available to detained refugees. Potentially, the research can impact on immigration detention policy, particularly in terms of reviewing the conditions under which technology is made available to refugees in institutionalised detention contexts. However, further research is required, especially a comparison of the former prohibited use of mobile media in immigration detention centres with the permitted use of these in community immigration detention. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 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APA Style Leung, L. (Mar. 2007) "Mobility and Displacement: Refugees' Mobile Media Practices in Immigration Detention," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/10-leung.php>.