Journal articles on the topic 'Graduated straight line'

On this work, a successful device, fully developed at the Marine Physics Lab of the Center for Marine Studies of the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil is presented. Beside the working principles. the bottom profile methodology, also developed for this particular instrument, is described. Some examples, showing results obtained by the use of such instrumented sleigh are , also depicted here. The system consists in un aluminum base, in a form of a snow sledge, equipped with a mini-STD, which is capable to measure at time rate of up to 1 measure each 1 or 5 seconds, water temperature and salinity. as well as the water column height. The pressure sensor has an accuracy of up to 1 cm. The device is deployed behind the breaking zone using a fisherman or small rubber boat, capable to depart from the beach. The device, measuring at its maximum rate, is then recovered using a long graduated and weighted rope. The recovering is performed, in a straight line, with intervals of 9 meters, stopping for a short period to obtain enough data in fixed points. When the device is still underwater, but near the beach, a leveling rod is located at the pressure sensor in order to reference the vertical profiles to a fixed land benchmark by using a precision topographic level. The topographic leveling is also performed over the beach. Pressure data are then filtered from wave action at lab, resulting in a full and complete topographic profile, from behind the breaking zone up to any reference point at the back of the sandy beach. The sledge format, the weighted rope and the filtering procedures ensured straight line profiling and an adequate elimination of the surface waves signal. The topographic profiles obtained and presented as examples, shown enough accuracy in depicting the effect of meteorological fronts over the sampled beaches.

Since the beginning of Oman’s “modern era” in 1970, English has assumed a central role in the country’s education system and has acted as a lingua franca across a variety of domains. However, despite this, graduates of Omani public schools are often reported as lacking the English-language linguistic and communicative abilities demanded by higher education institutions and the world of work. Consequently, most high school graduates entering tertiary education are required to enrol in foundation programs to improve their English language skills, while the employability of graduates seeking jobs straight from high school has also been reported as being negatively affected. Within this context, the current research explored the ways in which contextual factors relate to Omani school graduates’ development of English language skills. To achieve this, eight high school English language teaching supervisors responded to an on-line, open-ended question about the contextual factors they believed caused Omani school students to graduate with low English language proficiency. Results indicate that participants believed families, parents, and “Englishness” are the most important contextual factors contributing to this issue. The practical implications of these findings are discussed.

This article challenges some accepted binaries in literacy and technology research in order to explore the complex, multifaceted nature of literacy practices using a hypertextual multimedia study environment (MSE). Binary distinctions like literacy/illiteracy or online/offline are ‘wrinkled’ or complicated by introducing findings from an ethnographic study of the MSE in a graduate history of communication course.

This article reports on a study that explored what it means to be a mature-age Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander university graduate in the context of age, life-stage, history, culture, socioeconomic status, race and place. Using narrative interview data and fieldwork observation, we focus on the graduates’ workplace experiences and take a case study approach to amplify their voices. We argue that the data challenges the ideological construct of Australia as a ‘post-racial’ society and illustrates how interrelated variants of structural racism function to sanction, silence and control educated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, divide communities into quasi-hierarchies, and sustain white power and privilege. We show how these variants are expressed as low expectations, shadeism, culturism and privilege protectionism, and argue that their enactment can erect an invisible barrier to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander professional progression: a ‘white ceiling’ above which many graduates struggle to ascend.

ABSTRACT Background In 2013, milestone ratings became a reporting requirement for emergency medicine (EM) residency programs. Programs rate each resident in the fall and spring on 23 milestone subcompetencies. Objective This study examined the incidence of straight line scoring (SLS) for EM Milestone ratings, defined as a resident being assessed the same score across the milestone subcompetencies. Methods This descriptive analysis measured the frequencies of SLS for all Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)–accredited EM programs during the 2015–2016 academic year. Outcomes were the frequency of SLS in the fall and spring milestone assessments, changes in the number of SLS reports, and reporting trends. Chi-square analysis compared nominal variables. Results There were 6257 residents in the fall and 6588 in the spring. Milestone scores were reported for 6173 EM residents in the fall (99% of 6257) and spring (94% of 6588). In the fall, 93% (5753 residents) did not receive SLS ratings and 420 (7%) did, with no significant difference compared with the spring (5776 [94%] versus 397 [6%]). Subgroup analysis showed higher SLS results for residents' first ratings (183 of 2136 versus 237 of 4220, P < .0001) and for their final ratings (200 of 2019 versus 197 of 4354, P < .0001). Twenty percent of programs submitted 10% or more SLS ratings, and a small percentage submitted more than 50% of ratings as SLS. Conclusions Most programs did not submit SLS ratings. Because of the statistical improbability of SLS, any SLS ratings reduce the validity assertions of the milestone assessments.

Watching Deep Space Nine was an exercise in peering around corners and being unable to get a straight-on view of what I knew to be just beyond my field of vision. Not necessarily in terms of the greater world of the Star Trek universe – that I could see much more easily, as DS9 is still the only Star Trek series that took the time to consider what day-to-day life would be like in the greater world of the show outside of Federation starships thanks to it being set on a space station, boldly parking instead of going – but very specifically, in regards to Julian Bashir. The show’s primary medical character, a bright young doctor straight out of Starfleet Academy, who quickly learns there’s more to his mission than he thought while never losing any of his dedication or kindness.
 
 I’ve read about Alexander Siddig’s portrayal of Bashir, of his work turning him from someone deliberately unlikable into one of Star Trek’s beloved characters. I’m familiar with Bashir’s backstory and growth, his canonical developmental disorder and his transformation from fresh-faced graduate to hardened, mature officer. And throughout it all, I’ve always wondered, did they mean for him to sound like me?

Background: Backcare education administered in a group situation is one of the most effective and economic methods of treating back pain. It is based on available scientific knowledge of the physiology and mechanics of the spinal structures and their relationship to daily activities. It provides the patient with a better understanding of the problem, aiming primarily at helping the patient take responsibility for his or her back pain, while relieving pain and functional disability.Methods: This study was carried out on 100 patients of chronic low back pain, attending the OPD of Post Graduate Department of Orthopaedics, Government Medical College Jammu for a period of one year. Assessment was carried out before the treatment and after the treatment at four weeks, three months & six months post treatment. The following scales were used to measure the therapeutic response: the Modified Oswestry low back pain disability index, Visual analogue score (VAS), and clinical parameters like finger to floor distance and straight leg raising.Results: The patients showed significant improvement at 1 month, 3 months and 6 months post treatment when compared to base-line data (p<0.001).Conclusions: It was concluded that all chronic low back pain patients would benefit from a group program of back care education.

The first recorded Aboriginal person to graduate with an undergraduate qualification from any Australian university was Aboriginal woman Margaret Williams-Weir in 1959 ( Melbourne University, 2018 ). Williams-Weir graduated with a Diploma in Education. There have now been six decades of graduating Indigenous Australian women in the discipline of education, and many other disciplines. In this article, we explore Indigenous women’s presence in higher education through the narratives of our lives as Aboriginal women within education and the lives of other Indigenous women, noting their achievements and challenges. We acknowledge that while the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women participating in university study and becoming engaged in education as a discipline at undergraduate and postgraduate levels has increased, we are still significantly underrepresented. Similarly, while we have seen increases in Indigenous university staff within the education discipline, the employment of Indigenous academics has not reached parity with non-Indigenous academics levels and too few are employed in the professoriate and in senior management positions. We will show how we would not have been able to develop our education careers within higher education without the bridges built by those like Dr Williams-Weir and others who went before us. We will share how we have worked to establish the footings for those Indigenous women who will follow us and others. In this way, we work within the context that is for the now and the future.

This survey was the first one investigating opinions of veterinary students in Croatia towards companion animals and their welfare, with special reference to dogs and cats as the most popular companion animals in the European Union. The study included students of all six years of the integrated undergraduate and graduate veterinary medicine study programme in Croatia. First-year students were surveyed twice, before and after having attended the course on animal welfare. Student opinions were assessed on the basis of their mean responses to five-point Likert scale questions and frequency of responses to Yes/No/I do not know questions and ratio scale questions. Study results revealed students to have strongly positive opinions towards companion animals and their welfare. The majority of student statements did not differ significantly between the first and sixth study years or before and after having attended the animal welfare course in the first study year, mostly yielding a straight, non-fluctuating line. Students were not sure whether welfare of companion dogs and cats was compromised. Study results pointed to reliable and reasonable opinions of veterinary medicine students in Croatia towards companion animals and their welfare, as well as to the welfare issues these species may be facing nowadays.

In 2008, almost 40% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students enrolled in the Graduate Diploma in Indigenous Health Promotion at The University of Sydney failed to complete the course. Although this was not considered unusual when compared to previous years, the decision was made to investigate why so many students struggled to meet the expectations of a course that was pedagogically progressive, culturally affirming, taught by highly regarded academics and strongly supported by the university and its stakeholders. A qualitative study using in-depth semi-structured interviews was conducted, and many complex and interrelated issues were explored. One issue that was raised both unexpectedly and emphatically by almost half the study participants who completed the course was the unintentional stifling of individual student effort and achievement through the development of co-dependent relationships between academic staff and students. This article presents the data relevant to this particular issue, reflects on the findings, and outlines some of the strategies implemented since this study commenced that have contributed to a healthy completion rate of 98% over the past 3 years.

This research uses qualitative descriptive method by taking the results of the implementation of the data that has been unsettled outbound management training activities where researchers are also lecturers as Chairman of the Committee in the activities of outbound management training in aviation aviation high school jakarta, both using the method of the study of literature to support the data in the discussion. The results of this research: response to these conditions, AVIATION flight College help participate in back, straighten and encourage positive behavior through character education so that graduates into a human who has a soft skill and skill that is difficult. Character education for flight school students carried out off-campus in the open in the form of training that includes a variety of outbound activities management training by type of training provided is the emergency aircraft, the formation of water, the life craft, landing nets and hoist outbound Please. The purpose of education is to form character and cultivate good behaviour or attitude and value so that they can interact, communicate, and live together in accordance with the norms of the community. Tangible results seen from students who have undergone study. Through outbound training, it is expected that students can mentally ready, tenacious, confident, caring, helpful and accountable to God Almighty, self, community and nation that are implemented in real life everyday.

<p>Following the tradition of Indigenous and Korean elders with whom I have had the great privilege to work and learn from, I would like to start by sharing my gratitude for the land that we are on. In this way, we ground ourselves spiritually, emotionally, and physically by acknowledging the presence of our ancestors (current and past) in everything we do.</p><p> </p><p>I am a child immigrant from South Korea so I want to acknowledge that this is not the Indigenous land of my ancestors. I would like to point out the privilege of being a visitor who can work, play, and raise my family on unceded traditional Coast and Strait Salish territories. Back in the early 1990s, the First Nations House of Learning was opened while I was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia. At that time, I understood that it was important to acknowledge traditional territories. What I used to believe was basic protocol in the presence of Indigenous people and during ceremonies has now been transformed to an embodied way of living that guides me in my daily practice.</p><p> </p>

The Sunday school was an art form. Its classical age has been explored by T. W. Laqueur and its totality by P. B. Cliff. Like those of great art, its creative moments were the simultaneous issue of evolution, system, and individual genius. Those moments were intensest in their Nonconformist aspect, for Nonconformists, though often thwarted, were born educationists. Their buildings reflected this: theological colleges, for instance, which grew from overgrown houses to imitations of Oxford, and eventually to Oxford itself; or proprietory schools, strait-jacketed between the financial constraints and social aspirations of an enlarged middle class trying to reconcile Manchester’s values with those of Thomas Arnold. And there were the Sunday schools themselves, complexes of hall, parlour, and classroom, enfolding the chapel, reflecting the activity, mentality, and spirituality of a particular society, encompassing therefore a concept of the Church, and designed with considerable ingenuity to meet the needs of a rounded yet carefully graduated community. By the turn of the twentieth century they housed daily activities for all ages. Their influence reached far. Fuelled by the Word proclaimed from the pulpit, and empowered by the decisions of representative meetings taken in hall or vestry, the Sunday school broke chapel bounds to teach more people than could be met with in chapel pews.

The oil and gas industry is prone to skills shortages resulting from financial cycles, as is the case with many other industry sectors. Bridging the gap in indigenous employment is in part a solution to this problem and in the Northern Territory this has become easier due to innovative developments and smart partnerships. When smart partnerships are formed that involve like-minded organisations, successful employment outcomes are inevitable. Partnerships, involving APPEA, Industries Services Training Pty Ltd (IST), the Australian Government through the National Shills Shortage Strategy (NSSS), plus the Structured Training and Employment Program—Employment Related Services (STEP ERS), which are funded through the Department of Employment Education and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) and the Department of Education and Training (DET) in the Northern Territory, have provided funding for Indigenous pre—employment training programs that are leading to positive employment outcomes in the oil and gas Industry. The model developed and implemented in the Northern Territory by IST ensures Indigenous employment outcomes follow the delivery of the Indigenous pre-employment training programs. Key factors include: Indigenous mentors; culturally appropriate trainers; Monitoring employment activities; and, Specialist project management from APPEA and IST. Methodologies and strategies employed by various partners ensure employment outcomes through the cooperation of principal subcontractors who require staff and who can service contracts let by major APPEA members. Of the 18 Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander participants who commenced the eight-week program in 2008, 16 graduates received their nationally recognised Statements of Attainment at the graduation ceremony held at the Darwin Convention Centre in October 2008. There were six female graduates of the program. Competencies included first aid, dogging, safe working at heights and OHS including risk and hazard analysis training. You may ask yourself why these courses were so successful when many others have failed. The presentation will outline difficulties; successful methodologies and strategies used by IST to ensure employment outcomes are achieved. These strategies include full-time Indigenous mentors throughout the course plus culturally appropriate trainers, smart recruitment strategies, dedicated employment service brokers soliciting employment opportunities, industry site visits, industry guest speakers and the commitment of Governments and APPEA. As a result of the successes to date, the relevant government departments have committed to further courses throughout 2009.

Offshore wind farming is a growing presence in the renewable energy landscape but these ambitious projects rely on precise assessments of the hard to observe underwater landscape they will occupy before construction can even begin.<br/>Many governments around the world are moving toward renewable energy sources to meet their countries energy demands. The reasons behind this are many, ranging from reducing emissions to the safety of nuclear reactors and waste. For countries lying on or near fault lines, such as Taiwan, the latter becomes an even greater concern. When the earth shakes nuclear power plants, in particular, are highly sensitive and susceptible pieces of infrastructure. To avoid potential catastrophe and achieve greener energy sources the current government in Taiwan is aiming to phase out nuclear power in the coming years and they have chosen wind power as the technology to replace a large portion of the energy supply.<br/> In Taiwan the plan to phase of nuclear power and replace it with wind power has one extra challenge. The plan is not to build on land, like the majority of wind turbine projects, but rather to head out to sea. Offshore wind farms (OWF) are becoming a larger part of the wind power market and European countries have mostly been the early adopters. The waters off Taiwan, in the Taiwan Strait, are attractive for offshore wind farming development due to the favourable wind patterns that occur there. This has drawn major interest from European companies and others around the world to place bids on the growing number of wind farming projects. However, before any of these projects can take place an extensive effort to understand more about the environments below the surface must first be completed.<br/>Fortunately for those individuals who are curious as to the make-up and appearance of the ocean floor, such as engineers who plan to construct permanent structures in the depths, many techniques to map the seabed have been developed. Dr Gwo-Shyh Song, from The Institute of Oceanography at The National Taiwan University, in Taipei, is one local researcher who is very familiar with these methods. "I have been working on seafloor mapping around the Taiwan Island for last 20 years," points out Song. "This includes geophysical surveys, reservoir siltation surveys, cable and pipeline route surveys using a variety of techniques like multi-beam sounders and side-scan sonar as well as chirp sub-bottom profilers." When the offshore wind farming initiative needed experienced local researchers, he was one of a few people with the prerequisite expertise and technical skill required. "In 2012, when the OWF project was set into action and promoted by the Taiwanese Government, myself and my graduated students now employed within Global Aqua Survey Ltd started to become involved with many related investigatory projects," he explains.

regency. The majority of the population are farmers. If viewed from the geographical situation, then this village is located near the Madura Sea. Where the weather conditions of Segoro Tambak village tend to be hot and dry, with access roads leading to the village quite easily even though the streets are still much damaged and dusty. The position of the village on a macro lane road to the direction of the Airport and City District and City Province. This condition gives an indication that the regional concession (sub-district) of Segorotambak Village has strategic function and role. While seen from the boundaries of the administrative area of Segorotambak Village are: North side: Tambakoso Village / Sungai Buntung, East: Madura Strait, South side: Banjar Kemuning Village and Juanda Airport, West: Pranti Village and Tambak Sawah Village. The problem is access to technology in this village is still lacking with the lack of facilities such as cafe, hotspot, place of printing and others. In addition, the majority of the villagers' education is only graduated from elementary school, where they prefer to work after graduating from primary school and do not continue to the higher level. This can be understood because the village of Segoro Tambak is a village where the daily livelihood of the population is to manage the fishponds, no wonder if their children are involved to help sustain the family economy with the majority of the population is farmers, the level of education also affect the lives of citizens , because hereditary have the same life with their parents, and very few who get higher education. In addition, if continuing higher education, more choose social sciences - humanities than the science of technology, whereas the development of the world of electronics in the sense of the development of information and communication technology is growing rapidly. As an evaluation, we lecturers from the Department of Electrical Engineering, FTI, ITATS held a community service activity as a form of dharma of three universities, packaged in real work college activities (KKN) - community empowerment learning (PPM) to Karang Taruna as the target audience community by holding "Services To The Community, Knowledge Based Electrical And Computer Engineering".The final result shows that the villagers of Segoro Tambak who are not familiar with the basic electronics knowledge of the participants of Karang Taruna have started to be trained and develop skills in basic electronics. In the field of computer through this training, they are able to understand and operate Microsoft Excel and Microsft Word, properly and correctly. In the knowledge dissemination of electric power installations, Segoro Tambak villagers have had the awareness to apply and pay attention to the safety, safety in installation and usage of electricity in their own homes. Residents are expected to install the correct electrical halcyon for safety.

Viktor Antonovich Gavrilyuk (21.01.1928–26.11.2005) was a specialist in biology of plants of the Far North, by the will of the fate, devoted the most of his life to teaching activities. Saved personal diaries show how forming of an extraordinary personality occurred, overcoming the difficulties of life and study in the difficult war and post-war years, in Shadrinsk Agricultural Technical School, Kurgan Agricultural Institute at first, and then at Uman Agricultural Institute. The teachers of V. A. were competent people, devoted to their work: Vera Platonovna Kushnirenko, Nikolai Mikhailovich Voskresensky, Valentin Fedo­rovich Nikolaev, Simon Samoylovich Rubin and many other specialists who managed to inspire the young man with the sciences about nature. Entering post graduate school of the Komarov Botanical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (BIN) led a young talented researcher to Chukotka, where he conducted stationary field works in 1956–1958 under the guidance by Boris Anatolyevich Tikhomirov, the Professor. V. A. Gavrilyuk studied the flora of the environs of Providence Bay, Chaplinskie hot springs, islands of Arakamchechen, Mechigmen Bay, Senyavin Strait, Senyavin and Lorino hot springs. Scrupulous field research in harsh conditions of the north-east of the Chukotka Peninsula, laboratory processing of extensive personal herbarium collections (used subsequently for the fundamental edition «Arctic flora of the USSR» allowed V. A. Gavrilyuk to defend successfully his dissertation for the degree of the Candidate of Biological Sciences in 1962 (Gavrilyuk,1962). V. A., being one of the stuff of the Laboratory of Vegetation of the Far North (BIN), took part in botanical researches of the Koryak highland not far from the villages of Kultushnoye and Tilichiki, as well as in the Korfa Bay in the Koryaksky National District of Kamchatka territory in 1960. In 1961, he conducted phenological and eco-biomorphological studies at the Biological Station “Sivaya Maska” and visited the Rayiz mountain in the Polar Ural. Besides the observation kept in field diaries and herbarium, V. A. left watercolour pictures depicting amazing plants, some of which, made on Ladoga station of Leningrad State University, have been saved (Chorna et al., 2017, 2018). After moving to Uman, more than forty years V. A. worked at first as a teacher and as an Assistant Professor and at last as the Head of the Department of Botany of Uman Agricultural Institute. He took over the leadership of the collection botanical nursery from his former teacher V. F. Nikolaev. Plans of the botanical nursery of 1964–1982, lists of seeds prepared for exchange (Index seminum) (Gavrilyuk, Romanshchak, 1978) indicated about a rich collection. In fact, the floristical nursery was a regional botanical garden cooperated with Moscow, Leningrad, Tallinn, Tartus, Nikitsky, Yerevan botanical gardens, he sent plant seeds to amateur growers. Working in Uman city, V. A. continued extensive correspondence beginning in the Leningrad period. There were letters and cards of famous scientists addressed to him: Viktor Viktorovich Mazing, Alf Erling Porsild (Porsild, 1957), Doris Benta Maria and Askell Löve, Lawrence and Gweneth Bliss, Nora Korli. V. A. published, by modern standards, not so many works, but they continue to be cited after a half of century. The fact that Chukotka is floristically one of the most studied region of the world is also a part of his activity. Published diaries of the young scientist can serve as a test for the applicability of beginning researchers of the nature: are they ready for the kind of devotion that was characteristic for V. A. Gavrilyuk.

Subject area Operations management. Study level/applicability This case can be used in a core course in production and operation management; process management and courses like design and planning of operations at the graduate level, preferably during or after the basic operations module of the course. The case focuses on the use of a process analysis that decomposes the problem into a number of easily solvable sub-problems, each of which could be distinctly analyzed and solved. The case can also be effectively utilized in elective courses on process reengineering, concurrent engineering/management, process management, capacity planning, etc. Ideally, this case can be discussed for 75 to 90 minutes. Case overview The case describes the situation facing the operations supervisor, Sunil Mehta, of A-CAT Corp. in Vidarbha Region, Maharashtra, India. A-CAT Corp. was a mid-sized manufacturer and distributor of domestic electrical appliances, largely catering to the price-sensitive rural population. The firm operated two medium-sized facilities in one of the remote districts in Vidarbha, and these manufacturing units had been in operation since 1986. A-CAT manufactured a relatively wide range of electrical appliances for household use. Typical products from its stable included TV signal boosters, transformers, FM radio kits, electronic ballasts, battery chargers, voltage regulators, etc. The voltage regulators manufactured by A-CAT were used for many different purposes, although the focus was on its flagship product, VR500. The issue at hand for Sunil Mehta, operations supervisor at A-CAT, was to get data and act right; more often than not, this boiled down to critical information which everyone in the firm kept collecting but were too busy to use and utilize. The challenge was to select the right kind of data needed from the data-deluge that the company had in their databases. The eluding objective was to use it for the betterment of the firm. The challenge was to utilize the data that the workers and other operators kept logging in and, in the process of doing so, came up with some solutions to the problems faced on the operational front. Expected learning outcomes The case teaching and learning objectives are as following: to grasp the basics of process and process parameters; to understand the interrelationship between capacity, utilization, efficiency and productivity of a process; and to carry out process capacity analysis in assessing the performance of the firm on different metric drivers. The case also provides a very good foundation for understanding process parameters in a simple and lucid manner. To make right computations and not to use the terms and terminology in “cook book” or “strait jacketed” manner, students need to realize the parameters and their understanding changes from situation to situation. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS 9: Operations and Logistics.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> In 1853, the United States sent Commodore Perry with 4 warships to Japan, and urged opening the country to the world. Since then, Japan had entered into treaties of commerce with Western nations, and opened the ports for these nations. However, Japan was in military disadvantage with other nations having charting knowledge of Japan and it surroundings. As a result, a decision was made to establish chart production capabilities in Japan in the view of the national security. Soon after, the Japanese chief military commander opened two naval officer training facilities in Nagasaki (1855) and Tsukiji (1857). Surveying was also one of the subjects of taught at these training organizations.</p><p>Japan Hydrographic Department (JHD, currently Japan Hydrographic & Oceanographic Department) was established as the organization for chart production under the navy in 1871, and graduates of the above naval officer training facilities led the activities of JHD in its early stage. The first Chief Hydrographer YANAGI Narayoshi was one of them. JHD published its first navigational chart “KAMAISHI BAY of RIKUCHU” in 1872, the next year of its establishment, and expanded its chart series after that.</p><p>As Japan experienced several wars and expanded its national jurisdiction by 1945, JHD expanded its chart series. Most of these charts were open to the merchant ships, but some of them were not open to public as military secrets at that time. Furthermore, JHD, as one of the organizations under the navy, made aeronautical charts for naval airplanes. These charts have been stored in archives, but some were lost in fires. Not all of charts ever published by JHD exist now. The existing charts published by 1945 are kept in the Hydrographic & Oceanographic Museum.</p><p>After World War II, JHD was restructured as one of the organizations of Japan Coast Guard under the Ministry of Transport (currently the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport). The chart production of Japan in post war days has received big influences by the economic situation of Japan and the world, frameworks of international societies and developments of the technologies.</p><p>In the viewpoint of the economic situation, the number of chart publication increased due to the large number of the constructions of domestic harbours in the periods of the post war reconstruction and the following high economic growth of Japan, but it has decreased little by little since 1970’s by the influences of such as depressions of domestic economy, and decrease of ships registered in Japan and Japanese mariners. On the other hand, JHOD has published navigational charts written only in English in recent years for foreign mariners which number increases like supplementing a decrease of Japanese mariners. Moreover, JHOD has published basic maps of the sea as basic material of use, development, environmental preservation and the natural disaster prevention etc. of the ocean.</p><p>In the viewpoint of the frameworks of the international societies, JHOD has published fishery charts which show the fishery areas on the agreements between neighbouring countries, and also writes the straight baselines and limits of the territorial sea on the navigational charts according to United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.</p><p>In the viewpoint of the developments of the technologies, innovations of positioning technology and improvement of the computer ability influenced largely in chart production. JHOD used to publish Decca charts and Loran charts in the age of radio navigation. Because satellite navigation became common in recent years, the difference between WGS84 and Tokyo-datum (nearly 500 m) was put in questions. Corresponding to it, JHOD temporarily published some Tokyo-datum charts on which latitude and longitude lines based on WGS84 in green were added, and since 2000, JHOD has published navigational charts based on WGS84 and no more on Tokyo-datum. Furthermore, with the growth of computer ability, JHOD has shifted its chart compilation from full manually to by using computer assisted partly, and in 1996, JHOD established chart compilation process under fully computer assisted. In addition, JHOD published the first electronic navigational chart (ENC) in the world in 1995.</p><p>JHOD as the responsible organization of Japan for chart production will continue to produce charts in the future adjusting to the environment that surrounds charts and navigations.</p></p>

When Dr. Jorge asked me to write something about Professor Egon, given that we are close friends, my first reaction was to feel very honored by the request. I thought it would be easy to talk about our Professor, but it didn’t quite turn out that way.
 Professor Egon was highly praised at our Congress in Gramado recently, for his work and his legacy of training resident students in Orthopedics at our HC – and previously at the Santa Casa – and in the Traumatology Unit of the HPS, where he was a doctor until his retirement. What’s more, he received the greatest of all homages that anybody could wish for; that of his own son, who literally, followed in his footsteps.
 It was then that, thinking again, I decided to speak about Prof. Egon and my special relationship with him.
 I met the Master during the 4th year of my medical course, when he was Chair of General Surgery, Orthopedics discipline, on ward 33 at the Santa Casa de Porto Alegre.
 It was a theory class, on a Friday morning, which was the curricular time slot for theoretical activities of the Chair on that ward. He had come straight from a night on duty at the Emergency Room of the hospital to the scientific activity, without showing any signs of tiredness. This was the first time I had heard his teachings on the “hallux valgus”, and on its anatomy and physiopathology. His marvelous capacity for description and his teaching methods, which are characteristic to him, seemed to set my very neurons on fire, and I am certain it was then that I, already with a propensity for traumatology, was bitten by the “ambition bug”.
 I followed him for the rest of the course, whenever I got the chance.
 In the fifth year, here in Porto Alegre, we took the internship at the HPS for the entire year. In our various shifts between the departments of the Hospital and the days of the week, I found myself, in the second semester, in the Traumatology unit on Thursdays. There, my observation of the Professor’s conduct, both medical and personal, was what most attracted my attention. And care of the traumatological patient demands close attention. He was a good listener, and he was “hands on”, as they say, not only transferring practical skills to the intern students, but also teaching how to do, by doing, and speaking, and explaining the pathology and its course.
 And so time passed for all of us.
 We never grew apart. On the contrary, we strengthened family ties, always with a great deal of pride and honor. We were together at most of the Congresses here in the South and those of the ABTPé. We often dined together, and we were always together in the relaxation areas of the Congresses. By together, I mean with our families.
 When I finally decided on Foot Surgery, at Dr. Mauro’s Congress in Curitiba, in 1992, I joined the SBMCP, with Prof. Egon’s signature as my referee. I have already commented about that time, in one of our Bulletins. Dr. Marcio Benevento, when he received my enrolment form, opened his eyes wide and said: “with this signature here (pointing to the signature), you’re already in! Congratulations!”
 Unforgettable.
 We continued to meet at the outpatient clinic of the HC, where I had now graduated from the internship in the IOT in São Paulo. We restarted the Foot Committee in Rio Grande do Sul. We traveled around the state with the whole Committee, presenting themes to update doctor’s knowledge. And amidst all this “youthful” thirst for information and action, there he was, sitting in a van, travelling for three or four hours, from one city to the next, giving his lessons, accompanying everything until the end of the dinners that we were offered, always being searched out, and asked questions about conducts in all types of clinical cases brought by colleagues from the interior of the country.
 That was the Teacher.
 He has always been a Teacher.
 On one of these occasions, I heard him utter a phrase that, at least for me, was one that defines him: “if they invite me to a celebration, I’ll think about it, but if they invite me to a class, a conference or a surgery, I’m ready to go”.
 I learned that conservative treatment exists, and should be used to its full extent, and that only then should surgery be considered. I also learned that when we go into the theater to perform an operation, the surgery is the most important thing of all; we don’t go into surgery to get it over and done, we go in to perform surgery. And while he was operating, that is exactly what you saw: clean, anatomical surgery, carried out methodically, step-by-step; he was never in a hurry, and he was always talking, explaining and teaching.
 And that’s what Professor Egon is like, even now.
 A teacher.
 A father.
 An intellectual father to us all.

Supplemental Instruction (SI) has been a successful implementation into institutions worldwide. It serves as a means of reducing attrition and increasing the overall learning of course material. The City College of New York (CCNY) has recently implemented SI to General Chemistry I courses to examine whether or not SI would help students succeed in the course and understand and grasp the course material better. SI was made available several times a week during flexible times to students who are struggling in the course. Our method of data collection is a Likert-type and open-ended questionnaire that was distributed at the end of each of the semesters to SI participants in an anonymous fashion. Furthermore, we compared the grades and performance of students participating in SI with those who did not. The collected data enabled us to examine the impact of implementing Supplemental Instruction (SI) in General Chemistry I at CCNY. Our data show that SI was beneficial, contributed to improving students’ understanding of course material, and increased their success rate. About 80 percent of students who failed the first exam and participated in SI obtained a passing grade compared to 11 percent of those who did not.Keywords: supplemental instruction, chemistry education research, student learningINTRODUCTION Supplemental instruction is derived from the term developmental education and stems from a branch of Learning Assistance Centers or LACS [1]. To better understand the origins of Supplemental Instruction, we must first understand the framework that set up this type of education. Developmental education originates in the 1600s and focuses mainly on the assumption that each student has multifaceted talents that can be developed academically, opposed to focusing on the deficits of a student [1]. The main goal was to naturally adapt the students’ population to higher education through means of social and academic domains allowing the students to grow in multiple dimensions in their academic skills [1].Developmental education later paved the way for academic programs such as Learning Assistance Centers (LACs). It was viewed as an extension of the classroom and did not discriminate between faculty and students, and within the student population did not discriminate between students who performed to standard and those who performed below par. LACs were for everyone who wanted to be academically enriched [1]. As a new program, LACs had six main objectives: “higher course grades for participating students; central location for students to receive tutorial assistance; a referral source to other helping agencies; a comprehensive library of basic study aids; a training agency for paraprofessionals, peer counselors, and tutors; and a center for faculty development.” [1]. These goals made it very clear that this service was not to be mislabeled as remedial, which was a main topic of interest when it comes to implementing new services, like this one, in schools. LACs are essentially a tool used to attain higher education, not provide a remedial course. Another important reason as to why LACs were adopted into other higher education institutions is to increase student retention [1]. LACs jump-started improved learning across campuses not only in the United States but across the world.In the 1990’s developmental or remedial courses were not allowed to be offered at public four-year universities, thus making supplemental instruction a very attractive candidate to solving the issue with students’ academic integrity and attrition [1]. College faculty members were drawn to SI due to its minute fiscal commitment and that it strongly promoted individual self-learning for the students, this meant less time spent teaching for instructors [1].SI or supplemental instruction is as it states - supplemental instruction offered to the students enrolled in a course. SI gives the students the opportunity to work in a cooperative setting on problems and is supported by peer instructors [2]. SI works to increase academic performance and retention but utilizing both collaborative studying in addition to independent studying and analysis of study strategies. SI sessions are offered for traditionally difficult high risk course; ‘historically difficult’ courses are also identified by analyzing the grade distribution of courses throughout each academic division, “courses in which 30% or more of the students receive D or F grades or withdraw, become targets” [3]. One of the main factors that attribute to the individuality of SI programs is that it focuses on historically difficult courses [4] and large classes where students have little opportunity for interaction with the professor or other students [5]. Labeling a course as historically difficult allows you to categorize the class as challenging without placing blame on the professor or the students.SI sessions are scheduled on a weekly basis and all students enrolled in the course are encouraged to join. SI sessions act as a continuation of the lesson learned during in-class lecture with the instructor. Being that SI sessions are not tied down to class time, students can attend whenever and however many times they wish without the restriction of a required course preventing them. Constant feedback will be given based on the student’s grasp of the material taught in class, thus giving them ample time and motivation to alter their study methods to adapt, if need be. Research on SI suggests that problem-solving skills and study strategies learned in SI courses are transferable to other courses which leads to improved performance [6]. Supplemental instruction sessions are typically led by an SI leader, who would be a former student that succeeded in the same course, however it is not uncommon for a professor to join an SI session for a course. SI may improve students’ retention and graduation because it offers the students the opportunity to network socially which speeds up the acclimatization to the college experience [7].SI provides a way to combine “how do I teach myself this” with “what do I need to know”. While SI helps students gain a more thorough understanding of the material, it also helps students to condition themselves and alters their thinking to accommodate for the type of information they are processing. SI differs from a remedial tutoring course because it is created based on the course versus the students [1]. This potentially makes attending SI sessions more attractive to students who are afraid or shy to ask for help.SI is not a remedial course, it is considered a mediator connecting the gap between the new information presented to students and the students current knowledge and practices, “SI bridges the gap between the current knowledge base and the acquisition of new knowledge by focusing on the refinement of the learning skills indispensable for acquiring new knowledge” [8]. Successfully implemented SI programs were able to track those students who attended and the impact it made towards their grade, for data that was collected institutionally [9]. SI can be effectively used to develop study skills, increase motivation and improve performance in participants [10].According to Wolfe, “…there appear to be benefits of SI in courses where students are being newly introduced to chemical concepts and methods, but these benefits seem to drop off when students are more experienced with the material.” [5]. The results further go on to conclude that SI is most beneficial to entry level science courses such as, General Chemistry I and Organic Chemistry I. It seems as though SI is a great addition into institutions to overall help attrition rates and more generally help students improve within their courses. More research has been done to give us a wider range of knowledge on SI within Chemistry courses [9]. SI can be used to address the continuous decline of fundamental chemical knowledge noticed in recent college graduates [11].In large lecture classes, there is a disconnect between the lecturer and the student. Supplemental Instruction (SI) is often offered in a more intimate setting where the SI instructors can have one-on-one time with students to individually hone in on their specific problems, whether it is conceptual or problem-solving. As for learning environment, SI is usually held in a smaller more accommodating room where it is a less intimidating more inviting space. This setting provides a social interaction component in which usual Chemistry lectures don’t provide. In addition to the more personal tutoring time available, students are also encouraged to interact in a common social setting. This allows for an opportunity of collaborative learning and may help foster a sense of community [12].The attraction to SI in a college setting is due to its short and long-term effects. The short-term effects of SI sessions are to instill a deeper understanding of the coursework within students. Whereas the long-term goals are two-fold, the academic goal is to change the way students learn, study, and understand information so that the knowledge stays with them. Students who participate in SI earn higher grades not only the course but in subsequent semesters, which is due to improved study habits and is considered a long-term positive outcome of SI [13]. The second long-term goal is to develop better social interaction skills within these students.Many public institutions have implemented SI and thus have uncovered several significant findings. Findings that were previously mentioned pertaining to the outcomes of SI includes achieving higher percentages of passing grades [1, 14]. Some studies also found higher graduation rates among participants [1]. Despite their better performance, SI takers often score lower on academic success predictors such as the SAT and ACT exams [14]; increases in performance, therefore, appear to not occur because stronger students use SI. SI helps promote problem-solving skills because it involves the learner in the construction of knowledge and information processing based on their prior experiences which could contribute to cognitive development [15-16]. Furthermore, SI has been shown to improve motivation and enhance study habits and understanding difficult concepts [17]. Participants in SI have been found to have better control on their achievement, self-esteem, and confidence [18]. SI has also been found to higher academic self-efficacy and grades [19]. Studies have reported that students who participated in SI in introductory courses in Biology or Chemistry courses tended to continue onto upper level courses in the field; SI has a positive effect on students’ enrollment in upper level courses [20-21]. We should note that Rabitoy and co-authors reported that SI enhanced students’ achievement in STEM fields and this was greater for females and students of color [22]. METHODS While researching the topic of SI as a whole, we were able to uncover many studies that were in favor of this new implementation in institutions. Our research study is unique because it targets only at risk students and provides an added value to the curriculum. SI was implemented into The City College of New York (CCNY) as a test run in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The CCNY is an urban minority serving institute that offers a diverse selection of classes, which vary from the arts to the sciences and everything in between. We wanted to try implementing SI into the sciences to see if at risk science students can benefit from it. Grasping the S in stem, our main goal is to use the successful methods of SI to see what benefits it can bring to general science courses.Beginning during the Spring semester of 2018, SI was implemented at The CCNY’s General Chemistry I course which is composed of lecture, lab, and Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) workshop. PLTL is implemented as an integrated part of the course [23]. In the General Chemistry course, after exam one was distributed and grades were given back, an announcement was made introducing SI. The lecture professor would encourage students who received a failing grade, classified as a grade below a 65 out of 100 on exam one, to attend SI as means of improving in the course. This makes our study unique since we are only targeting students who are struggling the course and are not likely to earn a passing grade. It is noteworthy that PLTL offers a collaborative learning experience for all students. SI instructors targeted weaknesses in study habits, socialization, conceptual-understanding, and problem-solving skills.SI was made available for five days a week and on those days, SI was scheduled around classes times which makes it easier for students with busy schedules involving work and class to attend. During SI sessions there are instructors that have been hand-picked by instructors from a cohort of recitation leaders and who have successfully completed the course and have received a grade of A in the course. SI attendance was not mandatory.Throughout the first session available after the Supplemental Instruction announcement was made to the lecture class, those who chose to attend, because SI was not mandatory and it was strongly recommended for struggling students. Students brought their first exam with them to be discussed. This initial discussion is a one-on-one between the student and instructor, which serves as a more social component to learning whereas that isn’t available during class time. The first exam was then discussed so that the instructor can now sift through the student’s strengths and weaknesses to later target them in the weeks to come. The overall composition of our Supplementary Instruction sessions was influenced by the previous studies done and researched, hand-picking methods that seemed to work and leaving off ones that were less successful. SI sessions included cooperative learning activities, and addressed students’ misconceptions and difficulties, explored difficult concepts in depth, and enhanced problem-solving skills [24].Every week during Supplementary Instruction sessions students were encouraged to come back to further work through their weaknesses. During this trial specifically, it was noticed by the SI instructors that a lot of students actually struggle with basic problem-solving skills and reasoning. To help combat this, worksheets were made each week based on the lecture topics covered in class, based on problem-solving to help build their skills. Aside from doing the worksheets, students were encouraged to bring in topics or questions they have on the material so the SI instructors can further clarify and explain. Furthermore, students came to SI with questions that they were struggling with. Students provided questions for the SI instructor to explain which created a mutually beneficial relationship [11, 25].Our research question is: How does Supplemental Instruction in General Chemistry I impact students’ learning, conceptual understanding, retention, and attitudes?In order to properly assess how beneficial SI is to the way students learn Chemistry, data were collected at the end of the Spring and Fall of 2018 semesters, as well as Spring 2019. We used a combination Likert-type and open-ended questionnaire, as well as, grade comparisons. The Likert-type section included a five-point scale, where (1) Strongly Disagree, (2) Disagree, (3) Neutral, (4) Agree, (5) Strongly Agree. For each question, the average was taken which helps make sense of the data. For the open ended questions, questions 1 through 3, we created and used a rubric to score the questions on a scale from 1 to 5 similar to what was mentioned above. For question 4, we compiled the answers and created pie charts based on the type and number of responses.As previously stated, at the end of the semester surveys were printed and distributed to each SI session. Students that attended SI were all encouraged to participate in this survey. A total of 44 out of 60 students were available and willing to participate in the optional survey.RESULT AND DISCUSSION Graphical depictions of each Likert-type question along with average responses are shown in Figure 1. FIGURE 1. Averages for the answers for each of the Likert-type questionnaire. Our data clearly shows that students overall had a positive learning experience with SI. The students agree that SI improved their basic problem-solving skills, understanding of concepts covered, and attaining a better grade in the course. Furthermore, SI participation encouraged students to practice problems and tackle their weaknesses in the course. SI participants believe that the SI instructors targeted their weak areas and helped them improve. Finally, students felt that SI was worth the time and effort they put into it and that it was beneficial and contributed to improvements in grades.FIGURE 2. Averages of the short-answer responses were numerically scaled using a rubric.Figure 2 shows that students overall had a positive learning experience with SI and that it helped them better understand the concepts. Furthermore, the participants would enthusiastically would recommend SI to other Chemistry students.FIGURE 3. The pie chart above shows the beneficial components of SI to studentsFigure 3 shows the parts of SI that students found beneficial. Overall, there were many useful features of the SI program that facilitated students’ learning and succeeding in the course. The students appreciated the time spent on problem-solving, the flexibility of the offerings – refers to the times and days, the individualized learning experience, and the one-on-one support, guidance, and tutoring. From the Likert-type questions given in part one of the survey, responses were broken down for each given question in order to visualize the impact of SI for the students/participants. The average of the responses can be seen above and was about 4.8. The corresponding results can be viewed above as shown in Figure 1. To turn our attention to Figure 1 ‘SI has helped me to improve my basic problem solving skills’, upon meeting with the SI instructor team at The CCNY we were made aware that students have trouble with basic problem-solving which leads to the disconnect in understanding how to build upon this knowledge. When students lack this basic skill, it is difficult for them to move on and build upon this skill as the course progresses, which ultimately leads to their failure to meet the level of understanding for each lecture exam. From the responses, we can see that majority of the students feel as though their problem solving skills have developed as a result of participating in SI. Questions 6-8 deal with an overall belief about the experience of SI participation. Based on Figure 1, SI helped students better understand the course material, and had an overall positive response as 100% of students felt like they did have a better understanding of the course material after attending SI. Students overwhelmingly agree that SI is very beneficial to the way they learn Chemistry. Our data show that SI is well received by the participants which is consistent with other researchers [11]. Short answer questions 1-3 were made in order to have a more in-depth understanding of the student experience with SI this past semester. These questions were formed as short answer so students were more inclined to share their opinions of SI. The collected data shows that the students strongly agree that SI has been very beneficial for ways unique to each student. Some students enjoyed the SI instructors and their way of teaching and helping the students understand the material. While others enjoyed how personal the experience was. It wasn’t a ‘one size fits all’ experience but an experience that was personalized to each student’s needs, strengths, and weaknesses. Short answers for question 4 also had very personalized responses. Question 4 in particular – ‘What features of SI did you find to be most beneficial to you?’ was very helpful in understanding what students appreciate most about SI, and served as a standard to which should be upheld. Responses ranged from the flexible times SI was offered to the small class setting which is extremely different than the lecture, and more comfortable. Students also enjoyed and benefited from the one-on-one attention they received in SI session. For that reason, students would make time to attend the SI section of their ‘favorite instructor’. Furthermore, the individualized learning experience was appealing to SI participants. The overall goal is to get each student to understand complex concepts and if one instructor can better help someone to reach this goal; SI is a success. The overall responses show that SI is very beneficial and contributed a great deal to the way that students learn Chemistry. One main issue we have encountered during this initial phase of implementation is low number of students who self-select to participate in SI. Only about 10 percent of students who failed the first exam, participated in SI. One reason could be that students might not buy into the philosophy of SI. A second reason might be that students do not think that SI would help them better understand the content and succeed on the course. A third reason could be due to lack of motivation in these students. Another reason could be attributed to the lack of maturity in students who are taking General Chemistry I. We use the term ‘lack of maturity’ loosely in this sense to mean the lack of knowledge of how to conduct oneself in a college setting [26]. Most commonly, freshman students come straight from high school where they have not yet acquired good study techniques or methods which work best for them. These reasons combined with the hardship required to understand such complex concepts that they’re learning for the very first time can deter students. Our data show that students who participated in SI after failing the first exam achieved a success rate of about 80%. Students who failed the first exam and did not participate in SI had an 11% chance of passing the course. This data is consistent with several research in the field indicating that students who participate in SI have a higher chance of successfully completing the course with a passing grade [14, 27]. We feel these data make powerful statement for the added value of SI in General Chemistry courses and its impact on students learning and attitudes.CONCLUSION In conclusion, our research study on SI provided valuable data into students’ learning and conceptual understanding of content in General Chemistry. Furthermore, our findings provide insights into students’ attitudes about SI implementation and its benefits to the participants. Our research data supports the introduction of SI into General Chemistry courses and provides students with learning skills, socialization competencies, problem-solving skills, and the knowledge required to successfully complete the course. We believe that our data supports the notion that SI had a significantly affected the participants grades in a positive manner and it should be noted that that majority of SI participants earned a passing grade in the course. Our results and data on the implementation of SI in General Chemistry courses improved students’ attitudes towards the subject matter, learning, socialization, and study habits. We are confident we can reach a larger population and improve our recruitment so more students can experience SI and increase their chances of successful completion of the course. As an implication for curriculum, we would recommend supplemental instruction for all introductory courses STEM fields. ACKNOWLEDGMENT We also would like to thank the Department of Psychology at the CCNY and CUNY Coordinated Undergraduate Education (CUE) for funding our Supplemental Instruction program.

In the last decade, the Australian higher education sector has championed the inclusion of cultural competence (CC) as a key graduate quality. Diverse disciplinary learning and teaching approaches requiring careful consideration about how best to achieve the end goal of supporting graduates on their individual, life-long pathways to engage with CC. Science can be viewed as an inflexible and immovable discipline. This perception seems particularly prevalent with respect to scientists acknowledging epistemes outside of a western cultural frame. It follows that eliciting curriculum reform with respect to CC broadly, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives more specifically, was perceived to be a significant challenge. Through interviews with eleven non-Indigenous academics across the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, we uncovered several strategies for including multiple knowledges in science, with academics traversing these new horizons by building on the work of and collaborating with Indigenous Elders and academics to create enriched learning spaces. Alongside these strategies are staff reflections on their CC journey, which indicate that this endeavour entails necessary and vital discomforts that ultimately enable transformation. This process while guided by CC, led to experiences of cultural humility and a conviction in the role of cultural accountability.

We Break Up, I Publish: Theorising and Emotional Processing like Taylor Swift In 2007 after the rather painful end of my first long-term same-sex relationship I asked myself two questions (and like a good graduate student wrote a paper about it that was subsequently published): (1) what is love; (2) and if love exists, are queer and straight love somehow different. I asked myself the second question because, unlike my previous “straight” breakups (back when I honestly thought I was straight), this one was different, was far more messy, and seemed to have a lot to do with the fact that my then fresh ex-boyfriend and I had dramatically different ideas about how the relationship should look, work, be codified, or if it should or could be codified. It was an eye-opening experience since the truth that these different ideas existed—basically his point of view—really only “came out” in my mind through the act and learning involved in that breakup. Until then, from a Queer Theory perspective, you could have described me as a “man who had sex with men,” called himself homosexual, but was so homonormative that if you’d approached me with even a light version of Michel Foucault’s thoughts on “Friendship as a Way of Life” I’d have looked at you as queerly, and cluelessly, as possible. Mainstream Queer Theory would have put the end of the relationship down to the difference and conflict between what is pejoratively called the “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser,” represented by me, and the “radical-Queer(ness)-of-difference” represented by my ex-boyfriend, although like a lot of theory, that misses the personal (which I recall being political...), and a whole host of non-theoretical problems that plagued that relationship. Basically I thought Queer/Homosexual/Lesbian/Transgendered and the rest of the alphabet soup was exactly the same as Straight folks both with respect to a subjective understanding of the self, social relations and formations, and how you acted or enacted yourself in public and private except in the bedroom.. I thought, since Canada had legalised same-sex marriage, all was well and equal (other than the occasional hate-crime which would then be justly punished). Of course I understood that at that point Canada was the exception and not the rule with respect to same-sex rights and same-sex marriage, so it followed in my mind that most of our time collectively should be spent supporting those south of the border or overseas who still faced restrictions on these basic rights, or out-and-out violence, persecution and even state-sanctioned death for just being who they are and/or trying to express it. And now, five years on, stating that Canada is the exception as opposed to the rule with respect to the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the codification of same-sex rights in law has the potential to be outdated as the recent successes of social movements, court rulings and the tenor of political debate and voting has shifted internationally with rapid speed. But it was only because of that breakup that these theoretical and practical issues had come out of my queer closet and for the first time I started to question some necessary link between love and codification (marriage), and how the queer in Queer relationships does or potentially can disrupt this link. And not just for Queers, but for Straight folk too, which is the primary point that should be underlined now and is addressed at the end of this paper. Because, embittered as I was at the time, I still basically agree with the theoretical position that I came to in that paper on love—based on a queering of the terms of Alain Badiou—where I affirmed that love resisted codification, especially in its queer form, because it is fidelity to an act and truth between two or more partners which resists the rigid walls of State-based codification (Potts, Love Hurts; Badiou, Ethics and Saint Paul). But as one of the peer reviewers for this paper rightly pointed out, the above distinctions between my ex and myself implicitly rely upon a State-centric model of rights and freedoms, which I attacked in the first paper, but which I freely admit I am guilty of utilising and arguing in favour of here. But that is because I am interested, here, not in talking about love as an abstract concept towards which we should work in our personal relationships, but as the state of things, and specifically the state of same-sex marriage and the discourse and images which surrounds it, which means that the State does matter. This is specifically so given the lack of meaningful challenges to the State System in Canada and the US. I maintain, following Butler, that it is through power, and our response to the representatives of power “hailing us,” that we become bodies that matter and subjects (Bodies That Matter; The Psychic Life of Power; and Giving An Account of Oneself). While her re-reading of Althusser in these texts argues that we should come to a philosophical and political position which challenges this State-based form of subject creation and power, she also notes that politically and philosophically we have yet to articulate such a position clearly, and I’d say that this is especially the case for what is covered and argued in the mainstream (media) debate on same-sex marriage. So apropos what is arguably Foucault’s most mature analysis of “power,” and while agreeing that my State-based argument for inclusion and rights does indeed strengthen the “biopolitical” (The History of Sexuality 140 and 145) control over, in this case, Queer populations, I argue that this is nonetheless the political reality with which we are working in and analyzing, and that is my concern here. Despite a personal desire that this not be the case, the State or state sanctioned institutions do continue to hold a monopoly of power in conferring subjecthood and rights. To take a page from Jeremy Bentham, I would say that arguing from a position which does not start from or seriously consider the State as the current basis for rights and subjecthood, though potentially less ethically problematic and more in line with my personal politics, is tantamount to talking and arguing about “nonsense on stilts.” “Caught in a Bad Romance?” Comparing Homonationalist Trajectories and the Appeal of Militarist Discourse to LGBT Grassroots Organisations In comparing the discourses and enframings of the debate over same-sex marriage between Canada in the mid 1990s and early 2000s and in the US today, one might presume that how it came to say “I do” in Canada and how it might or might not get “left at the altar” in the US, is the result of very different national cultures. But this would just subscribe to one of a number of “cultural explanations” for perceived differences between Canada and the US that are usually built upon straw-man comparisons which then pillorise the US for something or other. And in doing so it would continue an obscuration that Canada, unlike the US, is unproblematically open and accepting when it comes to multicultural, multiracial and multisexual diversity and inclusion. Which Canada isn’t nor has it ever been. When you look at the current discourse in both countries—by their key political representatives on the international stage—you find the opposite. In the US, you have President Barack Obama, the first sitting President to come out in favour of same-sex marriage, and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, setting same-sex rights at home and abroad as key policy planks (Gay Rights are Human Rights). Meanwhile, in Canada, you have Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in office since 2006, openly support his Conservative Party’s “traditional marriage” policy which is thankfully made difficult to implement because of the courts, and John Baird, the badly closeted Minister of Foreign Affairs, who doesn’t mention same-sex rights at home or with respect to foreign relations—unless it is used as supplementary evidence to further other foreign policy goals (c.f. Seguin)—only showing off his sexuality outside of the press-gallery to drum up gay-conservative votes or gay-conservative fundraising at LGBTQ community events which his government is then apt to pull funding for (c.f. Bradshaw). Of course my point is not to just reverse the stereotypes, painting an idyllic picture of the US and a grim one of Canada. What I want to problematise is the supposed national cultural distinctions which are naturalised when arguments are made through them as to why same-sex marriage was legalised in Canada, while the Defense of Marriage Act still stands in the US. To follow and extend Jasbir Puar’s argument from Terrorist Assemblages, what we see in both same-sex marriage debates and discourses is really the same phenomenon, but, so far, with different outcomes and having different manifestations. Puar contends that same-sex rights, like most equalising rights for minority groups, are only granted when all three of the following conditions prevail: (1) in a state or narrative of exception, where the nation grants a minority group equal rights because “the nation” feels threatened from without; (2) only on the condition that normalisation (or homonormalisation in the case of the Queer community) occurs, with those who don’t conform pushed further from a place in the national-subject; (3) and that the price of admission into being the “allowed Queer” is an ultra-patriotic identification with the Nation. In Canada, the state or narrative of exception was an “attack” from within which resulted in the third criterion being downplayed (although it is still present). Court challenges in a number of provinces led in each case to a successful ruling in favour of legalising same-sex marriage. Appeals to these rulings made their way to the Supreme Court, who likewise ruled in favour of the legalisation of same-sex marriage. This ruling came with an order to the Canadian Parliament that it had to change the existing marriage laws and definition of marriage to make it inclusive of same-sex marriage. This “attack” was performed by the judiciary who have traditionally (c.f. Makin) been much less partisan in appointment or ruling than their counterparts in the US. When new marriage laws were proposed to take account of the direction made by the courts, the governing Liberal Party and then Prime Minister Paul Martin made it a “free vote” so members of his own party could vote against it if they chose. Although granted with only lacklustre support by the governing party, the Canadian LGBTQ community rejoiced and became less politically active, because we’d won, right? International Queers flocked to Canada—one in four same-sex weddings since legalisation in Canada have been to out of country residents (Postmedia News)—as long as they had the proper socioeconomic profile (which is also a racialised profile) to afford the trip and wedding. This caused a budding same-sex marriage tourism and queer love normalisation industry to be built around the Canada Queer experience because especially at the time of legalisation Canada was still one of the few countries to allow for same-sex marriages. What this all means is that homonationalism in Canada is much less charged. It manifests itself as fitting in and not just keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to things like community engagement and Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings, but trying to do them one better (although only by a bit so as not to offend). In essence, the comparatively bland process in the 1990s by which Canada slowly underwent a state of exception by a non-politically charged and non-radical professional judiciary simply interpreting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the provincial and then the federal level is mirrored in the rather bland and non-radical homonationalism which resulted. So unlike the US, the rhetoric of the LGBT community stays subdued unless there’s a hint that the right to same-sex divorce might get hit by Conservative Party guns, in which case all hell breaks loose (c.f. Ha). While the US is subject to the same set of logics for the currently in-progress enactment of legalising same-sex marriage, the state of exception is dramatically different. Puar argues it is the never-ending War on Terror. This also means that the enframings and debate in the US are exceptionally charged and political, leading to a very different type of homonationalism and homonationalist subject than is found in Canada. American homonationalism has not radically changed from Puar’s description, but due to leadership from the top (Obama, Clinton and Lady Gaga) the intensity and thereby structured confinement of what is an acceptable Queer-American subject has become increasingly rigid. What is included and given rights is the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier, the defender of the nation. And what reinforces the rigidity of what amounts to a new “glass closet” for queers is that grassroots organisations have bought into the same rhetoric, logic, and direction as to how to achieve equality as the Homecoming advertisement from the Equal Love Campaign in Britain shows. For the other long-leading nation engaged in the War on Terror narrative, Homecoming provides the imagery of a gay member of the armed services draped in the flag proposing to his partner at the end of duty overseas that ends with the following text: “All men can be heroes. All men can be husbands. End discrimination.” Can’t get more patriotic—and heteronormative with the use of the term “husbands”—than that. Well, unless you’re Lady Gaga. Now Lady Gaga stands out as a public figure whom has taken an explicitly pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance from the outset of her career. And I do not want to diminish the fact that she has been admirably effective in her campaigning and consistent pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance. While above I characterised her input above as leadership from the top, she also, in effect, by standing outside of State Power unlike Obama and Clinton, and being able to be critical of it, is able to push the State in a more progressive direction. This was most obviously evidenced in her very public criticism of the Democratic Party and President Obama for not moving quickly enough to adopt a more pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance after the 2008 election where such promises were made. So Lady Gaga plays a doubled role whereby she also acts as a spokesperson for the grassroots—some would call this co-opting, but that is not the charge made here as she has more accurately given her pre-existing spotlight and Twitter and Facebook presence over to progressive campaigns—and, given her large mainstream media appeal and willingness to use this space to argue for queer and LGBT rights, performs the function of a grassroots organisation by herself as far as the general public is concerned. And in her recent queer activism we see the same sort of discourse and images utilised as in Homecoming. Her work over the first term of Obama’s Presidency—what I’m going to call “The Lady Gaga Offensive”—is indicative: she literally and metaphorically wrapped herself in the American flag, screaming “Obama, ARE YOU LISTENING!!! Repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and [have the homophobic soldiers] go home, go home, go home!” (Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). And presumably to the same home of otherness that is occupied by the terrorist or anything that falls under the blanket of “anti-American” in Puar’s critique of this approach to political activism. This speech was modelled on her highly successful one at the National Equality March in 2009, which she ended with “Bless God and Bless the Gays.” When the highly watched speeches are taken together you literally can’t top them for Americanness, unless it is by a piece of old-fashioned American apple-pie bought at a National Rifle Association (NRA) bake-sale. And is likely why, after Obama’s same-sex “evolution,” the pre-election ads put out by the Democratic Party this year focused so heavily on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the queer patriotic soldier or veteran’s obligation to or previous service in bearing arms for the country. Now if the goal is to get formal and legal equality quickly, then as a political strategy, to get people onside with same-sex marriage, and from that place to same-sex rights and equal social recognition and respect, this might be a good idea. Before, that is, moving on to a strategy that actually gets to the roots of social inequality and doesn’t rely on “hate of ‘the other’” which Puar’s analysis points out is both a byproduct of and rooted in the base of any nationalist based appeal for minoritarian rights. And I want to underline that I am here talking about what strategy seems to be appealing to people, as opposed to arguing an ethically unproblematic and PC position on equality that is completely inclusive of all forms of love. Because Lady Gaga’s flag-covered and pro-military scream was answered by Obama with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the extension of some benefits to same-sex couples, and has Obama referring to Gaga as “your leader” in the pre-election ads and elsewhere. So it isn’t really surprising to find mainstream LGBT organisations adopting the same discourse and images to get same-sex rights including marriage. One can also take recent poll numbers from Canada as indicative as well. While only 10 percent of Canadians have trust in political parties, and 17 and 16 percent have trust in Parliament and Prime Minister Harper respectively, a whopping 53 percent have trust in the Canadian Forces (Leblanc). One aspect that undergirds Puar’s argument is that especially at a "time of war," more than average levels of affection or trust is shown for those institutions that defend “us,” so that if the face of that institution is reinscribed to the look of the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier (by advertising of the Homecoming sort which is produced not by the State but by grassroots LGBT organisations), then it looks like these groups seem to be banking that support for Gays and Lesbians in general, and same-sex marriage in specific, will further rise if LGBT and Queer become substantively linked in the imagination of the general public with the armed forces. But as 1980s Rockers Heart Asked: “But There’s Something That You Forgot. What about Love?” What these two homonationalist trajectories and rhetorics on same-sex marriage entirely skip over is how exactly you can codify “love.” Because isn’t that the purpose of marriage? Saying you can codify it is like grasping at a perfectly measured and exact cubic foot of air and telling it to stay put in the middle of a hurricane. So to return to how I ended my earlier exploration of love and if it could or should be codified: it means that as I affirm love, and as I remain in fidelity to it, I subject myself in my fundamental weakness constantly to the "not-known;" to constant heartbreak; to affirmations which I cannot betray as it would be a betrayal of the truth process itself. It's as if at the very moment the Beatles say the words 'All you need is love' they were subjected to wrenching heartbreak and still went on: 'All you need is love...' (Love Hurts) Which is really depressing when I look back at it now. But it was a bad breakup, and I can tend to the morose in word choice and cultural references when depressed. But it also remains essentially my position. If you impose “till death or divorce do us part” on to love you’re really only just participating in the chimera of static love and giving second wind to a patriarchal institution which has had a crappy record when it comes to equality. It also has the potential to preserve asymmetrical roles “traditional marriage” contains from when the institution was only extended to straight couples. And isn’t equality the underlying philosophical principle and political position that we’re supposedly fighting for if we’re arguing for an equal right to get married? Again, it’s important to try and codify the same rights for everyone through the State at the present time because I honestly don’t see major changes confronting the nation state system in Canada or the US in the near future. We remain the play-children of a digitally entrenched form of Foucaultian biopower that is State and Capital directed. Because while the Occupy Wall Street movements got a lot of hay in the press, I’ve yet to see any substantive or mainstreamed political change come out of them—if someone can direct me to their substantive contribution to the recent US election I’d be happy to revise my position—which is likely to our long term detriment. So this is a pragmatic analysis, one of locating one node in the matrices of power relations, of seeing how mainstream LGBT political organisations and Lady Gaga are applying the “theoretical tool kits” given to us by Foucault and Puar, and seeing how these organisations and Gaga are applying them, but in this case in a way that is likely counter to authorial intention(s) and personal politics (Power/Knowledge 145, 193; Terrorist Assemblages). So what this means is that we’re likely to continue to see, in mainstream images of same-sex couples put out by grassroots LGBT organisations, a homonationalism and ideological construction that grows more and more out of touch with Queer realities—the “upper-class house-holding PTA Gay”; although on a positive note I should point out that the Democratic Party in the US seems to be at least including both white and non-white faces in their pre-election same-sex marriage ads—and one that most Queers don’t or can’t fit themselves into especially when it comes down to the economic aspect of that picture, which is contradictory and problematic (c.f. Christopher). It also means that in the US the homonationalism on the horizon looks the same as in Canada except with a healthy dose of paranoia of outsiders and “the other” and a flag draped membership in the NRA, that is, for when the queer super-soldier is not in uniform. It’s a straightjacket for a closet that is becoming smaller because it seeks, through the images projected, inclusion for only a smaller and smaller social sub-set of the Lesbian and Gay community and leaves out more and more of the Queer community than it was five years ago when Puar described it. So instead of trying to dunk the queer into the institution of patriarchy, why not, by showing how so many Queers, their relationships, and their loving styles don’t fit into these archetypes help give everyone, including my “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser” former self a little “queer eye, for all eyes.” To look at and see modern straight marriage through the lenses and reasons LGBT and Queer communities (by-and-large) fought for years for access to it: as the codification and breakdown of some rights and responsibilities (i.e. taking care of children); as an act which gives you straightforward access to health benefits and hospital visitation rights; as an easy social signifier for others of a commitment to another person that doesn’t use diluted language like “special friend;” and because when it comes down to it that “in sickness and in health” part of the vow—in the language of a queered Badiou, a vow can be read as the affirmation of a universal and disinterested truth (love) and a moment which can’t be erased retrospectively, say, by divorce—seems like a sincere way to value at least one of those you really care for in the world. And hopefully it, as a side-benefit, it acts as a reminder but is not the actuality of that first fuzzy feeling which (hopefully) doesn’t go away. But I learned my lesson the first time and know that the fuzzy feeling might disappear as it often does. It doesn’t matter how far we try and cram it into any variety of homonationalist closets, since it’ll always find a way to not be there, no matter how tight you thought you’d locked the door to keep it in for good if it wants out. Because you can’t keep emotions by contract: so at the end of the day the logical, ethical and theoretically sound position is to argue for the abolition of marriage as an institution. However, Plato and others have been making that argument for thousands of years, and it still doesn’t seem to have gained popular traction. And we also need to realise, contrary to the opinion of my former self and The Beatles, that you really do need more than love as fidelity to an event of you and your partner’s making when you are being denied your partners health benefits just because you are a same-sex couple, especially when those health benefits could be saving your life. And if same-sex marriage codification is a quick fix for that and similar issues for those who can fit into the State sanctioned same-sex marriage walls, which admittedly leaves some members of the Queer community who don’t overlap out, as part of an overall and more inclusive strategy that does include them then I’m in favour of it. That is, till the time comes that Straight and Queer can, over time and with a lot of mutual social learning, explore how to recognise and give equal rights with or without State based codification to the multiple queer and sometimes polyamorous relationship models that already populate the Gay and Straight worlds right now. So in the meantime continue to count me down as a “marriage-chasing-Gay.” But just pragmatically, not to normalise, as one of a diversity of political strategies for equality and just for now. References Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. New York: Verso, 2001. ———. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Bradshaw, James. “Pride Toronto Denied Federal Funding.” The Globe and Mail. 7 May. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/pride-toronto-denied-federal-funding/article1211065/›. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,1990. ———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. ———. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Christopher, Nathaniel. “Openly Gay Men Make Less money, Survey Shows.” Xtra! .5 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/Openly_gay_men_make_less_money_survey_shows-12756.aspx›. Clinton, Hillary. “Gay Rights Are Human Rights, And Human Rights Are Gay Rights.” United Nations General Assembly. 26 Dec. 2011 ‹http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/12/06/383003/sec-clinton-to-un-gay-rights-are-human-rights-and-human-rights-are-gay-rights/?mobile=nc›. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. New York: Random House,1980. —. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Toronto: Random House, 1977. —. The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Heart. “What About Love.” Heart. Capitol Records, 1985. CD. Ha, Tu Thanh. “Dan Savage: ‘I Had Been Divorced Overnight’.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/dan-savage-i-had-been-divorced-overnight/article1358211/›. “Homecoming.” Equal Love Campaign. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a54UBWFXsF4›. Leblanc, Daniel. “Harper Among Least Trusted Leaders, Poll Shows.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-among-least-trusted-leaders-poll-shows/article5187774/#›. Makin, Kirk. “The Coming Conservative Court: Harper to Reshape Judiciary.” The Globe and Mail. 24 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/the-coming-conservative-court-harper-to-reshape-judiciary/article595398/›. “Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in Portland, Maine.” 9 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4rGla6OzGc›. “Lady Gaga Speaks at Gay Rights Rally in Washington DC as Part of the National Equality March.” 11 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jepWXu-Z38›. “Obama’s Stirring New Gay Rights Ad.” Newzar.com. 24 May. 2012 ‹http://newzar.com/obamas-stirring-new-gay-rights-ad/›. Postmedia News. “Same-sex Marriage in Canada will not be Revisited, Harper Says.” 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/12/same-sex-marriage-in-canada-will-not-be-revisited-harper-says/›. Potts, Graham. “‘Love Hurts’: Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade and St. Paul Queer Alain Badiou’s Truth and Fidelity.” CTheory. rt002: 2009 ‹http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=606›. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke UP, 2007. Seguin, Rheal. “Baird Calls Out Iran on Human Rights Violations.” The Globe and Mail. 22 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/baird-calls-out-iran-on-human-rights-violations/article4628968/›.

The popular view of the geography of urban employment is that the great bulk of jobs – and certainly virtually all "good" jobs[1] – is located in the CBD. This is an understandable view given the spatial distribution of employment density in Melbourne shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Density of employment in one km wide circular bands by distance from CBD, 2006 (jobs/km2) It shows the density of jobs in the Central Business District (CBD) of Melbourne – the first one km radius ring around the town hall[2] – is an order of magnitude higher than anywhere else in the metropolitan area. It closely aligns with the cluster of high rise office buildings that define the CBD in the popular imagination. This purpose of this paper is to ask if this is an adequate representation of the geography of employment in Australia’s larger cities. Using Melbourne as a case study, the paper examines how jobs are distributed spatially and what implications that has for policy. Figure 2 highlights that density is not the same as the number of jobs. It shows how employment is really distributed within Melbourne. The CBD is easily the largest single concentration of employment, but it nevertheless has only 15% of all metropolitan jobs. In fact only 28% of metropolitan jobs are located in the inner city – i.e. lie within a 5 km radius of the town hall – and 50% are located within 13 km radius. Figure 2: Share of metropolitan employment in one km wide circular bands by distance from CBD, 2006 (%)This dispersed pattern is not recent. Melbourne was compact and dense up until the end of the nineteenth century when the appearance of mechanised transport – primarily trams and trains – enabled middle class residents to escape the crowding and congestion of the centre for the space and amenity of the suburbs[3]. This trend was boosted dramatically after WW2 when increasingly widespread car ownership democratised access to affordable land on the urban fringe. Firms followed a similar pattern. Initially, manufacturing and distribution firms moved to the outer suburbs so they could escape congestion in the inner city, exploit space-intensive horizontal production methods, and be closer to the suburbanising workforce. The suburban population generated increasing numbers of jobs to service its consumption needs, amplified by the increasing level of outsourcing from the home. More recently, some higher order activities have moved from the CBD to near-CBD and inner city locations and some back office functions have moved to the suburbs. By 1981, only 35% of Melbourne’s jobs were located within 5 km of the centre. Figure 3 shows the "average job"[4] was 12.4 km from the centre and the "centre of mass"[5] of employment was 5.9 km away. The trend to the suburbs was very strong over the succeeding 25 years. By 2006 just 28% of jobs were within 5 km radius and the ‘average job’ was now 15.6 km from the centre. The centre of mass had moved 2 km further outwards to the vicinity of Tooronga, 7.9 km from the CBD. Figure 3: Distance of employment from CBD, 1981 and 2006 (km) Figure 4 shows that this pattern of dispersal held for all industry sectors with one significant exception. While over 80% of Retail and Manufacturing jobs were located more than 5 km from the centre, Commercial Services jobs were split roughly 50/50 between the inner city and the suburbs. This sector consists mainly of finance, insurance, business services and property services jobs. Those located in the CBD and inner city include major financial institutions and-high level producer services jobs servicing corporate clients. Those in the suburbs however tend to service the resident population, for example, real estate agents and personal financial advisers[6]. Figure 4: Proportion of jobs in each industry sector located in suburbs vs inner city, 2006 (%)The net result, as Figure 5 illustrates, is that the industry composition of the suburbs and the inner city are quite different. While they have much the same proportions of Community Services jobs, the suburbs have a significantly higher proportion of Manufacturing & Transport and Retail jobs. The inner city, on the other hand, is dominated by the Commercial Services sector – it accounts for nearly half of all jobs.Figure 5: Sectoral composition of jobs in inner city vs suburbs, 2006 (%)It may surprise, but Figure 6 shows that most high human capital jobs – that is jobs filled by a worker with a Bachelor’s Degree or higher – are located in the suburbs. The inner city has a higher density of graduate jobs, but the sheer size of the suburban job market means that in absolute terms it has more jobs filled by graduates. These high human capital jobs are located in suburban hospitals, universities, schools, local government administration and increasingly, in manufacturing and warehousing. Commercial Services is the exception – two thirds of the high skilled workers in this sector work in the inner city. Figure 6: Proportion of jobs in inner city vs suburbs occupied by a graduate or higher, 2006 (%) With 28% of all metropolitan employment in 2006, the inner city was an important job market for residents living in the central municipalities of Melbourne, Yarra and Port Phillip. However the inner city accounted for less than 10% of the metropolitan population, with the other 90% living in the suburbs. Figure 7 shows only around 25% of workers who lived in the middle suburbs commuted to the inner city. It also shows that less than 10% of outer suburban workers commuted to the inner city. Clearly, the great bulk of workers in Melbourne work in the suburbs. Figure 7: Share of commuters by metropolitan sub region who work in the inner city, 2006 (%)After a period of long decline, job numbers started to grow vigorously in absolute terms in the CBD and inner city from around the middle of the 1990s. Averaged over the period 1996 to 2006, inner city jobs grew at much the same pace as suburban jobs, meaning that the relative share of metropolitan jobs claimed by the inner city and suburbs did not change. While the great bulk of Melbourne’s jobs are in the suburbs, most of them are dispersed rather than located within major centres. Figure 8 shows there were 31 major activity centres[7] in Melbourne’s suburbs in 2006, which collectively accounted for only 20% of all suburban jobs. Some of these centres cover a substantial geographical area – they are spread out "blobs" of moderate density rather than sharp "points" with a small footprint and high density. Figure 8: Major suburban centres defined by number of jobs and density of jobs, 2006 None of the centres approach the CBD in either size or density. It can be seen from Figure 9 that apart from the top four – which together account for more than half of all jobs in suburban centres – most are in fact relatively small. The smallest centre has around 2,500 jobs. Figure 9: Suburban activity centres by size (proportion of all jobs in suburban centres), 2006 (%) Of the 31 major activity centres, 30 are specialised in at least one industry sector and many have multiple specialisations. Commercial Services is the only sector in which no suburban centre specialises – that is the domain of the inner city and especially the CBD. Specialisation suggests that firms seek to avoid the burden of size and/or density associated with diverse centres, instead preferring lower cost centres with the sorts of firms with which they do business. This brief review of the geography of employment in Melbourne provides insights that are relevant to policy. It is clear that most jobs are in the suburbs and so are most industry sectors. Moreover most of Melbourne’s high human capital jobs are also now located in the suburbs. Most suburban jobs aren’t located in major activity centres, rather they’re at low densities in smaller centres or in stand-alone developments. Suburban centres are themselves relatively low density areas when compared to the CBD. Finally, centres tend to specialise in a limited number of industries because most suburban firms incur higher costs but no benefit from locating with unrelated firms. Thus the suburbs are the major job arena in Melbourne. This is also true of other Australian cities like Sydney although there are local variations between cities (e.g. Parolin and Kamara). Density is not a strong locational driver of most suburban firms. This is partly because motorised transport enables firms in a suburban setting to enjoy the benefits of agglomeration without high density. It is also partly because many suburban firms serve consumers directly (rather than other firms as is more likely the case in the CBD) and thus prefer relatively small centres which are easily accessible to their customers. The key challenge for policy suggested by this analysis is how to provide efficient and sustainable mobility for workers and businesses in a low density environment. The suburban geography favours private transport over public transport. Priority in transport policy therefore needs to be given to making private vehicles more efficient and sustainable. This suggests policies like pricing road space and pricing carbon.ReferencesB.P. Parolin and S. Kamara. “Spatial Patterns and Functions of Employment Centres in Metropolitan Sydney, 1981-1996.” Presented at the State of Australian Cities National Conference, 2003. [1] The data on employment in this paper is drawn from the 1981 and 2006 Census [2] The location of jobs in 1981 and 2006 is captured in 1,000 traffic zones [3] The suburbs are defined as that part of Melbourne lying more than 5 km radius from the CBD. The inner city is that area lying within 5 km radius [4] The ‘average job’ is estimated by weighting the straight line distance of each of 1,000 traffic zones by the number of jobs in each zone [5] The ‘centre of mass’ is estimated by weighting the coordinates of each of 1,000 traffic zones by the number of jobs in each zone [6] Legend for tables is: CML – Commercial Services; HOS – Hospitality; CMY – Community Services; RET – Retail, WHL – Wholesale; MAN – Manufacturing & Transport; OTH – Other. [7] Centres are defined by their absolute level of employment and job density, based on 1,950 traffic zones. The thresholds for each zone are Z Scores of zero for both employment and density. Contiguous zones are aggregated to form a single centre

It seems clear that people who are deaf ... struggle continually against the meanings that others impose on their experience, and the way that this separates them from others. They struggle for acknowledgement of the way they see their lives and wish to live them, and aspire to connection?with other people, to share and belong. (David Moorhead. Knowing Who I Am. 1995. 85.) Nga Tapuwae and Before I am deaf but, before that part of my life started, I was hearing and worked for many years as a librarian in New Zealand. My first job was in a public library located within a secondary school Nga Tapuwae Secondary College in South Auckland. Its placement was a 1970’s social experiment to see if a public library could work within the grounds of a community college (and the answer was no, it could not). The experience was a great introduction for me to the Maori and Polynesian cultures that I had not previously encountered. Until then, I was wary of both groups, and so it was a revelation to realise that although there were many social problems in the area including low literacy, many of the children and teenagers were bright, talented individuals. They simply did not connect to the Anglo-Saxon reading materials we offered. Years later, my interest in the social dynamics of literacy led to my enrolment in a post-graduate literacy degree in Melbourne. This action may have saved my life because at the end of this course, a minor ailment resulted in a visit to the university doctor who diagnosed me with the life-threatening medical condition, Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF 2). NF2 is a late onset genetic condition in which one’s body grows tumours, always on both hearing nerves, sometimes elsewhere as well. The tumours usually cause deafness and can cause death. I was told I needed to have my tumours removed and would probably become fully deaf as a result. This is how my life as I knew it changed direction and I started the long journey towards becoming deaf. Diagnosis and Change Predictably, once diagnosed, friends and colleagues rallied to comfort me. I was told things probably weren’t as bad as they sounded. Helen Keller was mentioned several times as an example of someone who had succeeded despite being deaf and blind. ‘Really,’ my friends asked, ‘how bad can it be? ‘Inside myself however, it couldn’t have been worse. A day later the enormity of it all hit me and I became inconsolable. A friend drove me back to the doctor and she did two things that were to change my life. She referred me to the University’s counselling services where, happily, I was counselled by Elizabeth Hastings who later went on to become Australia’s first Disability Services Commissioner. Secondly, the doctor organised for me to visit the HEAR Service at the Victorian Deaf Society (VDS). Again by happy accident, my friend and I stumbled into the ‘wrong building’ where I ended up meeting John Lovett, who was Deaf and the CEO there, via an interpreter. When I met John Lovett I was distraught but, unlike other people, he made no attempt to stop me crying. He simply listened carefully until I realised he understood what I was saying and stopped crying myself. He said my fears that I could end up alone and lonely were valid and he suggested the best thing I could do for myself was to join the ‘Deaf community’; a community. I had never heard of. He explained it was made up of people like him who used Australian sign language (Auslan) to communicate. He was so engaging and supportive that this plan sounded fine to me. By the time we finished talking and he walked me over to the HEAR Service, I was so in his thrall that I had enrolled for a Deaf awareness workshop, an Auslan class, and had plans to join the Deaf community. Had I stayed on and learned Auslan, my life may well have followed a different path, but this was not to be at that time. Becoming Hearing Impaired (HI) Across at the HEAR service, an alternate view of my potential future was put to me. Instead of moving away from everything familiar and joining the Deaf community, I could learn to lip-read and hopefully use it to stay in the workforce and amongst my hearing friends. I had a cousin and aunt who were late deafened; my cousin in particular was doing well communicating with lip-reading. I discussed this with friends and the idea of staying with the people I already knew sounded far less confronting than joining the Deaf community and so I chose this path. My surgeon was also optimistic. He was confident he could save some of my hearing. Suddenly learning Auslan seemed superfluous. I phoned John Lovett to explain, and his response was that I should do what suited me, but he asked me to remember one thing: that it was me who decided to leave the Deaf Community, not that the Deaf community had not wanted me. He told me that, if I changed my mind, I could always go back because the door to the Deaf community would always be open and he would be still be there. It would be a decade before I decided that I wanted to go back through that door, and around that time this great man passed away, but I never forgot my promise to remember our conversation. It, and a few other exchanges I had with him in the following years, stayed at the back of my mind, especially as my residual hearing sank over the years, and the prospect of total deafness hung over me. When I had the surgery, my surgeon’s optimism proved unfounded. He could not save any hearing on my left side and my facial and balance nerves were damaged as well. The hospital then decided not to operate again, and would only attempt to remove the second tumour if it grew and threatened my health again. Consequently, for close to a decade, my life was on hold in many ways. I feared deafness—for me it signalled that my life as I knew it would end and I would be isolated. Every hearing test was a tense time for me as I watched my remaining hearing decline in a slow, relentless downward path on the graph. It was like watching the tide go out knowing it was never going to come in as fully again. My thinking started to change too. Within a week of my diagnosis I experienced discrimination for the first time. A library school that had offered me a place in its post graduate librarianship course the following year made it clear that they no longer wanted me. In the end it did not matter as I was accepted at another institution but it was my first experience of being treated less favourably in the community and it was a shock. After the surgery my life settled down again. I found work in public libraries again, rekindled an old relationship and in 1994 had a baby boy. However, living with a hearing loss is hard work. Everything seemed tiring, especially lip-reading. My ears rejected my hearing aid and became itchy and inflamed. I became aware that my continual hearing problems were sometimes seen as a nuisance in work situations. Socialising lost a lot of its appeal so my social world also contracted. Around this time something else started happening. Outside work, people started expressing admiration for me—words like ‘role model’ and ‘inspiring’ started entering the conversation. Any other time I might have enjoyed it but for me, struggling to adapt to my new situation, it felt odd. The whole thing reminded me of being encouraged to be like Helen Keller; as if there is a right way to behave when one is deaf in which you are an inspiration, and a wrong way in which one is seen as being in need of a role model. I discussed this with Elizabeth Hastings who had helped me prepare mentally for the surgery and afterwards. I explained I felt vulnerable and needy in my new situation and she gave me some useful advice. She thought feeling needy was a good thing as realising one needs people keeps one humble. She observed that, after years of intellectualising, educated people sometimes started believing they could use intellectualisation as a way to avoid painful emotions such as sadness. This behaviour then cut them off from support and from understanding that none of us can do it alone. She believed that, in always having to ask for help, people with disabilities are kept aware of the simple truth that all people depend on others to survive. She said I could regard becoming deaf as a disability, or I could choose to regard it as a privilege. Over the years the truth of her words became increasingly more evident to me as I waded through all the jargon and intellectualisation that surrounds discussion of both deafness and the disability arena, compared to the often raw emotion expressed by those on the receiving end of it. At a personal level I have found that talking about emotions helps especially in the face of the ubiquitous ‘positive thinking’ brigade who would have us all believe that successful people do not feel negative emotions regardless of what is happening. The Lie Elizabeth had initially sympathised with my sadness about my impending deafness. One day however she asked why, having expressed positive sentiments both about deaf people and people with disabilities, I was saying I would probably be better off dead than deaf? Up until that conversation I was unaware of the contradictions between what I felt and what I was saying. I came to realise I was living a lie because I did not believe what I was telling myself; namely, that deaf people and people with disabilities are as good as other people. Far from believing this, what I really thought was that being deaf, or having a disability, did lessen one’s worth. It was an uncomfortable admission, particularly sharing it with someone sitting in a wheelchair, and especially as up until then I had always seen myself as a liberal thinker. Now, faced with the reality of becoming deaf, I had been hoist by my own petard, as I could not come to terms with the idea of myself as a deaf person. The Christian idea of looking after the ‘less fortunate’ was one I had been exposed to, but I had not realised the flip side of it, which is that the ‘less fortunate’ are also perceived as a ‘burden’ for those looking after them. It reminded me of my initial experiences years earlier at Nga Tapuwae when I came face to face with cultures I thought I had understood but did not. In both cases it was only when I got to know people that I began to question my own attitudes and assumptions and broadened my thinking. Unfortunately for deaf people, and people with disabilities, I have not been the only person lying to myself. These days it is not common for people to express their fears about deaf people or people with disabilities. People just press on without fully communicating or understanding the other person’s attitude or perspectives. When things then do not work out, these failures reinforce the misconceptions and these attitudes persist. I believe it is one of the main reasons why true community inclusion for deaf and people with disabilities is moving so slowly. Paying for access is another manifestation of this. Everyone is supportive of access in principle but there is continuous complaint about paying for things such as interpreting. The never-ending discussions between deaf people and the wealthy movie industry about providing more than token access to captioned cinema demonstrate that the inclusion lie is alive and well. Until it can be effectively addressed through genuine dialogue, deaf people, hard of hearing people and people with disabilities will always be largely relegated to life outside the mainstream. Collectively we will also continue to have to endure this double message that we are of equal value to the community while simultaneously being considered a financial burden if we try to access it in ways that are meaningful to us. Becoming Deaf In 2002 however all this thinking still lay ahead of me. I still had some hearing and was back living in New Zealand to be close to my family. My relationship had ended and I was a solo mother. My workplace had approved leave of absence, and so I still had my job to go back to in Melbourne if I wanted it. However, I suspected that I would soon need the second tumour removed because I was getting shooting pains down my face. When my fears were confirmed I could not decide whether to move back to Melbourne or let the job go, and risk having trouble finding one if I went back later. I initially chose to stay longer as my father was sick but eventually I decided Melbourne was where I wanted to be especially if I was deaf. I returned, found temporary employment, and right up to the second surgery I was able to work as I could make good use of the small amount of hearing I still had. I thought that I would still be able to cope when I was made fully deaf as a result of the surgery. It was, after all, only one notch down on the audiogram and I was already ‘profoundly deaf’ and still working. When I woke up after the surgery completely deaf, it felt anti-climactic. The world seemed exactly the same, just silent. At home where I was surrounded by my close family and friends everything initially seemed possible. However, when my family left, it was just my seven-year-old son and myself again, and on venturing back into the community, it quickly became clear to me that at some level my status had changed. Without any cues, I struggled to follow speech and few people wanted to write things down. Although my son was only seven, people communicated with him in preference to me. I felt as if we had changed roles: I was now the child and he was the adult. Worse was soon to follow when I tried to re-enter the workforce. When I had the surgery, the hospital had installed a gadget called an auditory brainstem implant, (ABI) which they said would help me hear. An ABI is similar to a cochlear implant but it is attached to the brainstem instead of the cochlear nerve. My cochlear nerve was removed. I hoped my ABI would enable me to hear enough to find work but, aside from clinical conditions in which there was no background noise and the staff knew how to assist, it did not work. My most humiliating moment with it came when it broke down mid job interview and I spent half the time left trying to get it going again in full view of the embarrassed interview panel, and the other half trying to maintain my composure whilst trying to lip-read the questions. The most crushing blow came from the library where I had happily worked for seven years at middle management level. This library was collaborating with another institution to set up a new library and they needed new staff. I hopefully applied for a job at the same level I had worked at prior to becoming deaf but was unsuccessful. When I asked for feedback, I was told that I was not seen as having the skills to work at that level. My lowest point came when I was refused a job unpacking boxes of books. I was told I did not have experience in this area even though, as any librarian will attest, unpacking boxes is part of any librarian’s work. When I could not find unskilled work, it occurred to me that possibly I would never work again. While this was unfolding, my young son and I went from being comfortable financially to impoverished. My ex-partner also decided he would now make childcare arrangements directly with my son as he was annoyed at being expected to write things down for me. My relationship with him, some family members, and my friends were all under strain at that time. I was lost. It also became clear that my son was not coping. Although he knew the rudiments of Auslan, it was not enough for us to communicate sufficiently. His behaviour at school deteriorated and one night he became so frustrated trying to talk to me that he started to pull out his own hair. I calmed him and asked him to write down for me what he was feeling and he wrote down ‘It is like you died. It is like I don’t have a Mum now’. It was now clear to me that although I still had my friends, nobody including myself knew what to do. I realised I had to find someone who could understand my situation and I knew now it had to be a Deaf person. Fortunately, by this stage I was back learning Auslan again at La Trobe University. The week after the conversation with my son, I told my Auslan teacher what had happened. To my relief she understood my situation immediately. She told me to bring my son to class, at no cost, and she would teach him herself. I did and my life started to turn around. My son took to Auslan with such speed and application that he was able to not only converse with her in one month but immediately started using Auslan with me at home to get the things he wanted. We were able to re-establish the mother/son relationship that we both needed. I was also able to help my son talk through and deal with all the changes that me becoming deaf had foisted upon him. He still uses Auslan to talk to me and supplements it using speech, copious finger spelling, notes and diagrams. More than anything else, this relationship has kept me anchored to my long-term goal of becoming a clear signer. Encouraged by my son’s success, I put all my energy into learning Auslan and enrolled in a full time TAFE Auslan course. I also joined a chat group called ‘Here to Hear’ (H2H). The perspectives in the group ranged from strongly oral to strongly Deaf but for me, trying to find a place to fit in any of it, it was invaluable. Almost daily I chatted with the group, asking questions and invariably someone responded. The group acted as a safety net and sounding board for me as I worked out the practicalities of living life deaf. The day of my fateful interview and the ABI humiliation, I came home so shaken that I used the Irish remedy of a couple of swigs of whisky, and then went online and posted an account of it all. I can still remember the collective indignation of the group and, as I read the responses, beginning to see the funny side of it . . . something I could not have done alone. I also made use of easy access to Deaf teachers at TAFE and used that to listen to them and ask advice on situations. I found out for example, that if I instructed my son to stand behind me when people in shops insisted on addressing him, they had no alternative but to talk to me; it was a good clear message to all concerned that my son was the child in this relationship. About this time, I discovered the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) that Elizabeth Hastings had worked so hard on, filed my first DDA complaint, and received my first apology at the mediation session that followed. My personal life also improved, relationship by relationship as everyone adjusted. Slowly the ice melted in most of my relationships; some relationships faded and were replaced with new ones with signing people, and eventually hearing people again. My life moved forward. Through a member of ‘Here to Hear’, I was invited to apply for my first post deaf job—covering holiday leave at a Deaf sports organisation. I practically finger-spelt my way through the interview but not only did they offer me the job, they were delighted to have me. I was able to buy a few things with the money I earned, and suddenly it felt as if everything was possible again. This acceptance of me by Deaf people had a profound impact on me. I mixed with people more, and it was not too long before I was able to use my basic signing skills to use Auslan interpreters and re-enter the workplace. I have discovered over time that living in silence also has advantages—no more noisy parties or rubbish trucks clanging at dawn and in its place a vastly heightened visual awareness that I enjoy. Before I was deaf I thought it would be lonely in the silence but in fact many of life’s best moments—watching rain hit and then run down a window, swimming in the sea, cooking and being with good friends—do not rely upon sound at all; they feel the same way they always did. Sometimes I have felt somewhat of an outsider in the Deaf community. I have sometimes been taken aback by people’s abruptness but I have learned over time that being succinct is valued in Auslan, and some people like to come straight to the point. At crisis points, such as when I asked for help at the Victorian Deaf Society and my Auslan class, it has been a huge relief to talk to Deaf people and know immediately that they understand just from reading their eyes. Having access to an additional world of deaf people has made my life more enjoyable. I feel privileged to be associated with the Deaf community. I can recall a couple of Christmases ago making dinner for some signing friends and suddenly realising that, without noticing, everything had become alright in my world again. Everyone was signing really fast – something I still struggle with; but every now and then someone would stop and summarise so I felt included. It was really relaxed and simply felt like old times, just old times without the sound thrown in. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, two ethnographers, have this to say about why people communicate the ways they do: The individual ... creates for himself the patterns of his linguistic behaviour so as to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he wishes to be identified, or so as to be unlike those from whom he wishes to be distinguished ... . We see speech acts as acts of projection; the speaker is projecting his inner universe, implicitly with the invitation to others to share it ... he is seeking to reinforce his models of the world, and hopes for solidarity from those with whom he wishes to identify. (181) This quote neatly sums up why I choose to communicate the ways I do. I use Auslan and speech in different situations because I am connected to people in both groups and I want them in my life. I do not feel hugely different from anyone these days. If it is accepted that I have as much to contribute to the community as anyone else, becoming deaf has also meant for me that I expect to see other people treated well and accepted. For me that means contributing my time and thoughts, and advocating. It also means expecting a good level of access to interpreters, to some thought provoking captioned movies in English, and affordable assistive technologies so I can participate. I see this right to participate and engage in genuine dialogue with the rest of the community as central to the aspirations and identity of us all, regardless of who we are or where others think we belong. References Le Page, R.B., and Andree Tabouret-Keller. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Moorhead, D. “Knowing Who I Am.” In S. Gregory, ed., Deaf Futures Revisited. Block 3, Unit 10, D251 Issues in Deafness. Open University, 1995.

Teichman notes in her study of illegitimacy that “the point of the legitimate/illegitimate distinction is not to cause suffering; rather, it has to do with certain widespread human aims connected with the regulation of sexual activities and of population” (4). She also writes that, until relatively recently, “the shame of being an unmarried mother was the worst possible shame a woman could suffer” (119). Hence the secrecy, silences, and lies that used to be so common around the issue of an illegitimate birth and adoption.I was adopted at birth in the mid-1960s in New Zealand because my mother was a long way from family in England and had no support. She and my father had fallen in love, and planned to marry, but it all fell apart, and my mother was left with decisions to make. It was indeed a difficult time for unwed mothers, and that issue of shame and respectability was in force. The couple who adopted me were in their late forties and had been married for twenty-five years. My adoptive father had served in World War Two in the Royal Air Force before being invalided out for health problems associated with physical and psychological injuries. He was working in the same organisation as my mother and approached her when he learned of her situation. My adoptive mother loved England as her Home all of her life, despite living in Australia permanently from 1974 until her death in 2001. I did not know of my adoption until 1988, when I was twenty-three years old. The reasons for this were at least partly to do with my adoptive parents’ fear that I would leave them to search for my birth parents. My feelings about this long-held secret are complex and mixed. My adoptive mother never once mentioned my adoption, not on the day I was told by my adoptive father, nor at any point afterwards. My adoptive father only mentioned it again in the last two years of his life, after a long estrangement from me, and it made him weep. Even in the nursing home he did not want me to tell anyone that I had been adopted. It was impossible for me to obey this request, for my sense of self and my own identity, and for the recognition of the years of pain that I had endured as his daughter. He wanted to keep so much a secret; I could not, and would not, hold anything back anymore.And so I found myself telling anyone who would listen that I was adopted, and had only found out as an adult. This did not transmogrify into actively seeking out my birth parents, at least not immediately. It took some years before I obtained my original birth certificate, and then a long while again before I searched for, and found, my birth mother. It was not until my adoptive mother died that I launched into the search, probably because I did not want to cause her pain, though I did not consciously think of it that way. I did not tell my adoptive father of the search or the discovery. This was not an easy decision, as my birth mother would have liked to see him again and thank him, but I knew that his feelings were quite different and I did not want to risk further hurt to either my birth mother or my adoptive father. My own pain endures.I also found myself writing about my family. Other late discovery adoptees, as we are known, have written of their experiences, but not many. Maureen Watson records her shock at being told by her estranged husband when she was 40 years old; Judith Lucy, the comedian, was told in her mid-twenties by her sister-in-law after a tumultuous Christmas day; the Canadian author Wayson Choy was in his late fifties when he received a mysterious phone call from a woman about seeing his “other” mother on the street.I started with fiction, making up fairy tales or science fiction scenarios, or one act plays, or poetry, or short stories. I filled notebooks with these words of confusion and anger and wonder. Eventually, I realised I needed to write about my adoptive life in fuller form, and in life story mode. The secrecy and silences that had dominated my family life needed to be written out on the page and given voice and legitimacy by me. For years I had thought my father’s mental disturbance and destructive behaviour was my fault, as he often told me it was, and I was an only child isolated from other family and other people generally. My adoptive mother seemed to take the role of the shadow in the background, only occasionally stepping forward to curb my father’s disturbing and paranoid reactions to life.The distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy may not have been created and enforced to cause suffering, but that, of course, is what it did for many caught in its circle of grief and exclusion. For me, I did not feel the direct effect of being illegitimate at birth, because I did not “know”. (What gathered in my unconscious over the years was another thing altogether.) This was different for my birth mother, who suffered greatly during the time she was pregnant, hoping something would happen that would enable her to keep me, but finally having to give me up. She does not speak of shame, only heartache. My adoptive father, however, felt the shame of having to adopt a child; I know this because he told me in his own words at the end of his life. Although I did not know of my adoption until I was an adult, I picked up his fear of my inadequacy for many years beforehand. I realise now that he feared that I was “soiled” or “tainted”, that the behaviour of my mother would be revisited in me, and that I needed to be monitored. He read my letters, opened my diaries, controlled my phone calls, and told me he had spies watching me when I was out of his range. I read in Teichman’s work that the word “bastard”, the colloquial term for an illegitimate child or person, comes from the Old French ba(s)t meaning baggage or luggage or pack-saddle, something that could be slept on by the traveller (1). Being illegitimate could feel like carrying heavy baggage, but someone else’s, not yours. And being adopted was supposed to render you legitimate by giving you the name of a father. For me, it added even more heavy baggage. Writing is one way of casting it off, refusing it, chipping it away, reducing its power. The secrecy of my adoption can be broken open. I can shout out the silence of all those years.The first chapter of the memoir, “A Shark in the Garden”, has the title “Revelation”, and concerns the day I learned of my adoptive status. RevelationI sat on my bed, formed fists in my lap, got up again. In the mirror there was my reflection, but all I saw was fear. I sat down, thought of what I was going to say, stood again. If I didn’t force myself out through my bedroom door, all would be lost. I had rung the student quarters at the hospital, there was a room ready. I had spoken to Dr P. It was time for me to go. The words were formed in my mouth, I had only to speak them. Three days before, I had come home to find my father in a state of heightened anxiety, asking me where the hell I had been. He’d rung my friend C because I had told him, falsely, that I would be going over to her place for a fitting of the bridesmaid dresses. I lied to him because the other bridesmaid was someone he disliked intensely, and did not approve of me seeing her. I had to tell him the true identity of the other bridesmaid, which of course meant that I’d lied twice, that I’d lied for a prolonged period of time. My father accused me of abusing my mother’s good nature because she was helping me make my bridesmaid’s dress. I was not a good seamstress, whereas my mother made most of her clothes, and ours, so in reality she was the one making the dress. When you’ve lied to your parents it is difficult to maintain the high ground, or any ground at all. But I did try to tell him that if he didn’t dislike so many of my friends, I wouldn’t have to lie to him in order to shield them and have a life outside home. If I knew that he wasn’t going to blaspheme the other bridesmaid every time I said her name, then I could have been upfront. What resulted was a dark silence. I was completing a supplementary exam in obstetrics and gynaecology. Once passed, I would graduate with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree, and be able to work as an intern in a hospital. I hated obstetrics and gynaecology. It was about bodies like my own and their special functions, and seemed like an invasion of privacy. Women were set apart as specimens, as flawed creatures, as beings whose wombs were always going wrong, a difficult separate species. Men were the predominant teachers of wisdom about these bodies, and I found this repugnant. One obstetrician in a regional hospital asked my friend and me once if we had regular Pap smears, and if our menstrual blood contained clots. We answered him, but it was none of his business, and I wished I hadn’t. I can see him now, the small eyes, the bitchiness about other doctors, the smarminess. But somehow I had to get through it. I had to get up each morning and go into the hospital and do the ward rounds and see patients. I had to study the books. I had to pass that exam. It had become something other than just an exam to me. It was an enemy against which I must fight.My friend C was getting married on the 19th of December, and somehow I had to negotiate my father as well. He sometimes threatened to confiscate the keys to the car, so that I couldn’t use it. But he couldn’t do that now, because I had to get to the hospital, and it was too far away by public transport. Every morning I woke up and wondered what mood my father would be in, and whether it would have something to do with me. Was I the good daughter today, or the bad one? This happened every day. It was worse because of the fight over the wedding. It was a relief to close my bedroom door at night and be alone, away from him. But my mother too. I felt as if I was betraying her, by not being cooperative with my father. It would have been easier to have done everything he said, and keep the household peaceful. But the cost of doing that would have been much higher: I would have given my life over to him, and disappeared as a person.I could wake up and forget for a few seconds where I was and what had happened the day before. But then I remembered and the fear exploded in my stomach. I lived in dread of what my father would say, and in dread of his silence.That morning I woke up and instantly thought of what I had to do. After the last fight, I realised I did not want to live with such pain and fear anymore. I did not want to cause it, or to live with it, or to kill myself, or to subsume my spirit in the pathology of my father’s thinking. I wanted to live.Now I knew I had to walk into the living room and speak those words to my parents.My mother was sitting in her spot, at one end of the speckled and striped grey and brown sofa, doing a crossword. My father was in his armchair, head on his hand. I walked around the end of the sofa and stood by ‘my’ armchair next to my mother.“Mum and Dad, I need to talk with you about something.”I sat down as I said this, and looked at each of them in turn. Their faces were mildly expectant, my father’s with a dark edge.“I know we haven’t been getting on very well lately, and I think it might be best if I leave home and go to live in the students’ quarters at the hospital. I’m twenty-three now. I think it might be good for us to spend some time apart.” This sounded too brusque, but I’d said it. It was out in the atmosphere, and I could only wait. And whatever they said, I was going. I was leaving. My father kept looking at me for a moment, then straightened in his chair, and cleared his throat.“You sound as if you’ve worked this all out. Well, I have something to say. I suppose you know you were adopted.”There was an enormous movement in my head. Adopted. I suppose you know you were adopted. Age of my parents at my birth: 47 and 48. How long have you and Dad been married, Mum? Oooh, that’s a tricky one. School principal’s wife, eyes flicking from me to Mum and back again, You don’t look much like each other, do you? People referring to me as my Mum’s friend, not her daughter. I must have got that trait from you Oh no I know where you got that from. My father not wanting me to marry or have children. Not wanting me to go back to England. Moving from place to place. No contact with relatives. This all came to me in a flash of memory, a psychological click and shift that I was certain was audible outside my mind. I did not move, and I did not speak. My father continued. He was talking about my biological mother. The woman who, until a few seconds before, I had not known existed.“We were walking on the beach one day with you, and she came towards us. She didn’t look one way or another, just kept her eyes straight ahead. Didn’t acknowledge us, or you. She said not to tell you about your adoption unless you fell in with a bad lot.”I cannot remember what else my father said. At one point my mother said to me, “You aren’t going to leave before Christmas are you?”All of her hopes and desires were in that question. I was not a good daughter, and yet I knew that I was breaking her heart by leaving. And before Christmas too. Even a bad daughter is better than no daughter at all. And there nearly was no daughter at all. I suppose you know you were adopted.But did my mother understand nothing of the turmoil that lived within me? Did it really not matter to her that I was leaving, as long as I didn’t do it before Christmas? Did she understand why I was leaving, did she even want to know? Did she understand more than I knew? I did not ask any of these questions. Instead, at some point I got out of the chair and walked into my bedroom and pulled out the suitcase I had already packed the night before. I threw other things into other bags. I called for a taxi, in a voice supernaturally calm. When the taxi came, I humped the suitcase down the stairs and out of the garage and into the boot, then went back upstairs and got the other bags and humped them down as well. And while I did this, I was shouting at my father and he was shouting at me. I seem to remember seeing him out of the corner of my eye, following me down the stairs, then back up again. Following me to my bedroom door, then down the stairs to the taxi. But I don’t think he went out that far. I don’t remember what my mother was doing.The only words I remember my father saying at the end are, “You’ll end up in the gutter.”The only words I remember saying are, “At least I’ll get out of this poisonous household.”And then the taxi was at the hospital, and I was in a room, high up in a nondescript, grey and brown building. I unpacked some of my stuff, put my clothes in the narrow wardrobe, my shoes in a line on the floor, my books on the desk. I imagine I took out my toothbrush and lotions and hairbrush and put them on the bedside table. I have no idea what the weather was like, except that it wasn’t raining. The faces of the taxi driver, of the woman in reception at the students’ quarters, of anyone else I saw that day, are a blur. The room is not difficult to remember as it was a rectangular shape with a window at one end. I stood at that window and looked out onto other hospital buildings, and the figures of people walking below. That night I lay in the bed and let the waves of relief ripple over me. My parents were not there, sitting in the next room, speaking in low voices about how bad I was. I was not going to wake up and brace myself for my father’s opprobrium, or feel guilty for letting my mother down. Not right then, and not the next morning. The guilt and the self-loathing were, at that moment, banished, frozen, held-in-time. The knowledge of my adoption was also held-in-time: I couldn’t deal with it in any real way, and would not for a long time. I pushed it to the back of my mind, put it away in a compartment. I was suddenly free, and floating in the novelty of it.ReferencesChoy, Wayson. Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood. Ringwood: Penguin, 2000.Lucy, Judith. The Lucy Family Alphabet. Camberwell: Penguin, 2008.Teichman, Jenny. Illegitimacy: An Examination of Bastardy. New York: Cornell University Press, 1982. Watson, Maureen. Surviving Secrets. Short-Stop Press, 2010.

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society." -- Orville Schell Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley "Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financial information, but I don't think people know what good information is when you get into culture, society, and politics." -- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's Content Once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much more complicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And they possessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you've known all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oats boxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass of water with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessen your indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be a little obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisements also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space of magazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads got too annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel. The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slamming your front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisements acquired a more complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of their familiar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote a best-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders which identified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hanging around Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden, subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple props to help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions of female anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aesthetic streamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular feature of the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was the simple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like David Ogilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and was replaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal Techniques The book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing about congressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominent motivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the new ad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even Vance Packard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," he wrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old- fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knows that things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In fact what seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletons they once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features and benefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazement at the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads for watches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcely mention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified the product. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modern advertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images and feelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the product and why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seem totally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying to convey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart of corporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine, "far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho- persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannot sell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four- wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalit observes, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising Yet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become, the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where" it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modern advertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" of advertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. The ultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot be distinguished from their background environment. When this happens, the environment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts in magazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early science fiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgrounds and suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is not being driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products but by media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertising space. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the new world of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of this change in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" from the 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscription fees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content for free, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it". Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have also been a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't like paying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to pay for actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web as readers' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowl for new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity of advertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In the process, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societal institutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new "territory" to exploit. That time when advertisements knew their place in the landscape of popular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TV commercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded by thousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keep them out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of the old door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar, on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseball caps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a little more personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They have even wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-out counter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasoline pumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article is not an ad.) Advertising and Entertainment In advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have been crossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising's search for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largely invisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising from entertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of the increasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed out in best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economy and Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom, Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becoming synonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will be entertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on this expectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, in The Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses to provide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditional entertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage" of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new media that carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose of entertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment was also simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. There was money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make a healthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, the entertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways to squeeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products in paid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins to other areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popular with the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning" of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainment content is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once. A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is a good chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in video rentals. Advertising and Journalism The merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards a world of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising and journalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitous advertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make money provides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final "promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week, this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. The more the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder it will be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by news organisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence by keeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length. But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for online media. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons for this. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorial content than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines and newspapers from printing advertisements that look like editorial copy, these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reason making it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growing merger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimately advertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a product when it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalist works for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make direct investments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes, CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago in September 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4% stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network for trading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors to cnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in the awkward position of both providing coverage of online trading and profiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such as Dow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties to their own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on the expense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice of accepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. The confusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisements with "an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thriving online. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of puffery inserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- it doesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones, into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example in forbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-written articles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift to discipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsored edits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking fees of up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness", its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclose future promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach online companies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less "revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of the Internet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes "as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush to colonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce is beginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When you can't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land? The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is not the increasing merger of advertising with other industries (like entertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of online commerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technology provides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websites and to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websites take a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, a media site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every product mentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economic partnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rate ads where there is little connection between product sales and the advertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, the emerging Internet technology for their application is one of the great economic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. The promise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides product manufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit from selling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturer of a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now, however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations and entertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transaction fees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general population provides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising. This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliate programs" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internet technology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money through affiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in the sale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are most likely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves with e-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media at Forrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites will receive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17 billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great direct response advertisements taking a transaction fee percentage for anything sold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that all of us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising. All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When this happens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nice things about products, what is the need and importance of subliminal techniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try to trick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics? It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming an increasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens when one can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticism because it is based around disconnection rather than connection to products. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics are becoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea of transaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money on transaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies is little more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago by Vance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" of modern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a point well made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still may remain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest cultural criticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, voting for a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue to need unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must ask what happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationship with suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquity of advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certain point, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthy and what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have a corrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media's importance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns, "if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become types of Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to America to learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. In effect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy with that old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. America stands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growing ubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities or threats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and its centre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, there is the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society in the early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture. Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of the Internet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture rather than in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slam that front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or toss that magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television. We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, that television commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of the characteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJ Reynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alien abduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel through space then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through all our space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted by a new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday. (Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products which can make a new you.) References Brill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. <http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_41/b3650163.htm>. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph, and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999. Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27 Sep. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders/index.php>. Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php>. Chicago style: John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionUtopian and forward looking in tenor, official narratives of urban renewal and development implicitly promote normative ideals of progress and necessary civic improvement. Yet an underlying condition of such renewal is frequently the very opposite of building: the demolition of existing urban fabric. Taking as its starting point the large-scale demolition of buildings proposed for the NSW Government’s Sydney Metro rail project, this article interrogates the role of literary treatments of demolition in mediating complex, and often contradictory, responses to transformations of the built environment. Case studies are drawn from literary texts in which demolition and infrastructure development are key preoccupations, notably Louis Aragon’s 1926 Surrealist document of a threatened Parisian arcade, Paris Peasant, and the non-fiction accounts of the redevelopment of London’s East End by British writer Iain Sinclair. Sydney UnbuiltPresently, Australia’s biggest public transport project according to the NSW Government website, the Sydney Metro is set to revolutionise Sydney’s rail future with more than 30 metro stations and a fleet of fully-automated driverless trains. Its impetus extends at least as far back as the Liberal-National Coalition’s landslide win at the 2011 New South Wales state election when Barry O’Farrell, then party leader, declared “NSW has to be rebuilt” (qtd in Aston). Infrastructure upgrades became one of the Coalition’s key priorities upon forming government. Following a second Coalition win at the 2015 election, the state of NSW, or the city of Sydney more accurately, remains today deep amidst widespread building works with an unprecedented number of infrastructure, development and urban renewal projects simultaneously underway.From an historical perspective, Sydney is certainly no stranger to demolition. This was in evidence in Demolished Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney that captured the zeitgeist of 2016 with its historical survey of Sydney’s demolished architecture. As the exhibition media release pointed out: “Since 1788 Sydney has been built, unbuilt and rebuilt as it has grown from Georgian town to Victorian city to the global urban centre it is today” (Museum of Sydney). What this evolutionist narrative glosses over, however, is the extent to which the impact of Sydney’s significant reinventions of itself through large-scale redevelopment are often not properly registered until well after such changes have taken place. With the imminent commencement of Sydney Metro Stage 2 CBD works, the city similarly stands to lose a number of buildings that embody the civic urban ideals of an earlier era, the effects of which are unlikely to be fully appreciated until the project’s post-demolition phase. The revelation, over the past year, of the full extent of demolition required to build Sydney Metro casts a spotlight on the project and raises questions about its likely impact in reconfiguring the character of Sydney’s inner city. An Environmental Impact Statement Summary (EISS) released by the NSW Government in May 2016 confirms that 79 buildings in the CBD and surrounding suburbs are slated for demolition as part of station development plans for the Stage 2 Chatswood to Sydenham line (Transport for NSW). Initial assurances were that the large majority of acquisitions would be commercial buildings. Yet, the mix also comprises some locally-heritage listed structures including, most notably, 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney (Image 1), a residential apartment tower of 54 studio flats located at the top end of the Sydney central business district.Image 1: 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney apartment towers (middle). Architect: Emil Sodersten. Image credit: Ella Mudie.As the sole surviving block of CBD flats constructed during the 1930s, 7 Elizabeth Street had been identified by the Australian Institute of Architects as an example of historically significant twentieth-century residential architecture. Furthermore, the modernist block is aesthetically significant as the work of prominent Art Deco architect Emil Sodersten (1899-1961) and interior designer Marion Hall Best (1905-1988). Disregarding recommendations that the building should be retained and conserved, Transport for NSW compulsorily acquired the block, evicting residents in late 2016 from one of the few remaining sources of affordable housing in the inner-city. Meanwhile, a few blocks down at 302 Pitt Street the more than century-old Druids House (Image 2) is also set to be demolished for the Metro development. Prior to purchase by Transport for NSW, the property had been slated for a state-of-the-art adaptive reuse as a boutique hotel which would have preserved the building’s façade and windows. In North Sydney, a locally heritage listed shopfront at 187 Miller Street, one of the few examples of the Victorian Italianate style remaining on the street, faces a similar fate. Image 2. Druids House, 302 Pitt Street Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.Beyond the bureaucratic accounting of the numbers and locations of demolitions outlined in the NSW Government’s EISS, this survey of disappearing structures highlights to what extent, large-scale transport infrastructure projects like Sydney Metro, can reshape what the Situationists termed the “psychogeography” of a city; the critical manner in which places and environments affect our emotions and behaviour. With their tendency to erase traces of the city’s past and to smooth over its textures, those variegations in the urban fabric that emerge from the interrelationship of the built environment with the lived experience of a space, the changes wrought by infrastructure and development thus manifest a certain anguish of urban dynamism that is connected to broader anxieties over modernity’s “speed of change and the ever-changing horizons of time and space” (Huyssen 23). Indeed, just as startling as the disappearance of older and more idiosyncratic structures is the demolition of newer building stock which, in the case of Sydney Metro, includes the slated demolition of a well-maintained 22-storey commercial office tower at 39 Martin Place (Image 3). Completed in just 1972, the fact that the lifespan of this tower will amount to less than fifty years points to the rapid obsolescence, and sheer disposability, of commercial building stock in the twenty first-century. It is also indicative of the drive towards destruction that operates within the project of modernism itself. Pondering the relationship of modernist architecture to time, Guiliana Bruno asks: can we really speak of a modernist ruin? Unlike the porous, permeable stone of ancient building, the material of modernism does not ‘ruin.’ Concrete does not decay. It does not slowly erode and corrode, fade out or fade away. It cannot monumentally disintegrate. In some way, modernist architecture does not absorb the passing of time. Adverse to deterioration, it does not age easily, gracefully or elegantly. (80)In its resistance to organic ruination, Bruno’s comment thus implies it is demolition that will be the fate of the large majority of the urban building stock of the twentieth century and beyond. In this way, Sydney Metro is symptomatic of far broader cycles of replenishment and renewal at play in cities around the world, bringing to the fore timely questions about demolition and modernity, the conflict between economic development and the civic good, and social justice concerns over the public’s right to the city. Image 3: 39 Martin Place Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.In the second part of this article, I turn to literary treatments of demolition in order to consider what role the writer might play in giving expression to some of the conflicts and tensions, as exemplified by Sydney Metro, that manifest in ‘unbuilding’ the city. How might literature, I ask, be uniquely placed to mobilise critique? And to what extent does the writer—as both a detached observer and engaged participant in the city—occupy an ambivalent stance especially sensitive to the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of the built environment’s relationship to modernity?Iain Sinclair: Calling Time on the Grand Projects For more than two decades, British author Iain Sinclair has been mapping the shifting terrain of London and its edgelands across a spectrum of experimental fiction and non-fiction works. In addition to the thematic attention paid to neoliberal capitalist processes of urban renewal and their tendency to implode established ties between place, memory and identity, Sinclair’s hybrid documentary-novels are especially pertinent to the analysis of “writing demolition” for their distinct writerly approach. Two recent texts, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2011) and London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), highlight an intensification of interest on Sinclair’s part in the growing influence exerted by global finance, hyper consumerism and security fears on the reterritorialisation of the English capital. Written in the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics, Ghost Milk is Sinclair’s scathing indictment of the corporate greed that fuelled the large-scale redevelopment of Stratford and its surrounds ahead of the Games. It is an angry and vocal response to urban transformation, a sustained polemic intensified by the author’s local perspective. A long-term resident of East London, in the 1970s Sinclair worked as a labourer at Chobham Farm and thus feels a personal assault in how Stratford “abdicated its fixed identity and willingly prostituted itself as a backdrop for experimental malls, rail hubs and computer generated Olympic parks” (28). For Sinclair, the bulldozing of the Stratford and Hackney boroughs was performed in the name of a so-called civic legacy beyond the Olympic spectacle that failed to culminate in anything more than a “long march towards a theme park without a theme” (11), a site emblematic of the bland shopping mall architecture of what Sinclair derisorily terms “the GP [Grand Project] era” (125).As a literary treatment of demolition Ghost Milk is particularly concerned with the compromised role of language in urban planning rhetoric. The redevelopment required for the Olympics is backed by a “fraudulent narrative” (99), says Sinclair, a conspiratorial co-optation of language made to bend in the service of urban gentrification. “In many ways,” he writes, “the essential literature of the GP era is the proposal, the bullet-point pitch, the perversion of natural language into weasel forms of not-saying” (125). This impoverishment and simplification of language, Sinclair argues, weakens the critical thinking required to recognise the propagandising tendencies underlying so many urban renewal programs.The author’s vocal admonishment of the London Olympics did not go unnoticed. In 2008 a reading from his forthcoming book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), at a local library was cancelled out of fear of providing a public platform for his negative views. In Ghost Milk Sinclair reflects upon the treatment of his not yet published docu-novel as “found guilty, with no right of reply, of being political but somehow outside politics” (115). Confronted with the type of large-scale change that underpins such projects as the Olympic Games, or the Sydney Metro closer to home, Sinclair’s predicament points to the ambiguous position of influence occupied by writers. On the one hand, influence is limited in so far as authors play no formal part in the political process. Yet, when outspoken critique resonates words can become suddenly powerful, radically undermining the authority of slick environmental impact statements and sanctioned public consultation findings. In a more poetic sense, Sinclair’s texts are further influential for the way in which they offer a subjective mythologising of the city as a counterpoint to the banal narratives of bureaucratised urbanism. This is especially apparent in London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), in which Sinclair recounts a single-day street-level pedestrian exploration of the 35-mile and 33-station circuit of the new London Overground railway line. Surveying with disapproval the “new bridges, artisan bakeries, blue-bike racks and coffee shops” (20) that have sprung up along the route of the elevated railway, the initial gambit of the text appears to be to critique the London Overground as a “device for boosting property values” (23). Rail zone as “generator for investment” (31), and driver of the political emasculation of suburbs like Hackney and Shoreditch. Yet as the text develops the narrator appears increasingly drawn to the curious manner in which the Overground line performs an “accidental re-mapping of London” (24). He drifts, then, in search of: a site in which to confront one’s shadow. In a degraded form, this was the ambition behind our orbital tramp. To be attentive to the voices; to walk beside our shadow selves. To reverse the polarity of incomprehensible public schemes, the secret motors of capital defended and promoted by professionally mendacious politicians capable of justifying anything. (London Overground 127)Summoning the oneiric qualities of the railway and its inclination to dreaming and reverie, Sinclair reimagines it as divine oracle, a “ladder of initiation” (47) bisecting resonant zones animated by traces of the visionary artists and novelists whose sensitivity to place have shaped the perception of the London boroughs in the urban imaginary. It is in this manner that Sinclair’s walks generate “an oppositional perspective against the grand projects of centralized planning and management of space” (Weston 261). In a kind of poetic re-enchantment of urban space, texts like Ghost Milk and London Overground shatter the thin veneer of present-day capitalist urbanism challenging the reader to conceive of alternative visions of the city as heterogeneous and imbued with deep historical time.Louis Aragon: Demolition and ModernityWhile London Overground was composed after the construction of the new railway circuit, the pre-demolition phase of a project is, by comparison, a threshold moment. Literary responses to impending demolition are thus shaped in an unstable context as the landscape of a city becomes subject to unpredictable changes that can unfold at a very swift pace. Declan Tan suggests that the writing of Ghost Milk in the lead up to the London Olympics marks Sinclair’s disapproval as “futile, Ghost Milk is knowingly written as a documentary of near-history, an archival treatment of 2012 now, before it happens.” Yet, paradoxically it is the very futility of Sinclair’s project that intensifies the urgency to record, sharpening his polemic. This notion of writing a “documentary of near-history” also suggests a certain breach in time, which in the case of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant is mined for its revolutionary energies.First published in book form in 1926, Paris Peasant is an experimental Surrealist novel comprising four collage-like fragments including Aragon’s famous panegyric on the Passage de l’Opéra, a nineteenth-century Parisian arcade slated for demolition to make way for a new access road to the Boulevard Haussmann. Reading the text in the present era of Sydney Metro works, the predicament of the disappearing Opera Arcade resonates with the fate of the threatened Art Deco tower at 7 Elizabeth Street, soon to be razed to build a new metro station. Critical of the media’s overall neglect of the redevelopment, Aragon’s text pays sympathetic attention to the plight of the arcade’s business owners, railing against the injustices of their imminent eviction whilst mourning the disappearance of one of the last vestiges of the more organic configuration of the city that preceded the Haussmann renovation of Paris:the great American passion for city planning, imported into Paris by a prefect of police during the Second Empire and now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums. (Aragon 14)In light of these concerns it is tempting to cast Paris Peasant as a classic anti-development polemic. However, closer interrogation of the narrator’s ambivalent stance points to a more complicated attitude towards urban renewal. For, as he casts a forensic eye across the arcade’s shops it becomes apparent that these threatened sites hold a certain lure of attraction for the Surrealist author. The explanatory genre of the guide-book is subverted in a highly imaginative inventory of the arcade interiors. Touring its baths, brothels and hair salon, shoe shine parlour, run-down theatre, and the Café Certa—meeting place of the Surrealists—the narrator’s perambulation provides a launching point for intoxicated reveries and effervescent flights of fancy. Finally, the narrator concedes: “I would never have thought of myself as an observer. I like to let the winds and the rain blow through me: chance is my only experience, hazard my sole experiment” (88). Neither a journalist nor an historian, Paris Peasant’s narrator is not concerned merely to document the Opera Arcade for posterity. Rather, his interest in the site resides in its liminal state. On the cusp of being transformed into something else, the ontological instability of the arcade provides a dramatic illustration of the myth of architecture’s permanency. Aragon’s novel is concerned then, Abigail Susik notes, with the “insatiable momentum of progress,” and how it “renders all the more visible what could be called the radical remainders of modernity: the recently ruined, lately depleted, presently-passé entities that, for better and for worse, multiply and accumulate in the wake of accelerated production and consumption in industrial society” (34). Drawing comparison with Walter Benjamin’s sprawling Arcades Project, a kaleidoscopic critique of commodity culture, Paris Vaclav similarly characterises Paris Peasant as manifesting a distinct form of “political affect: one of melancholy for the destruction of the arcades yet also of a decidedly non-conservative devotion to aesthetic innovation” (24).Sensitive to the contradictory nature of progress under late capitalist modernity, Paris Peasant thus recognises destruction as an underlying condition of change and innovation as was typical of avant-garde texts of the early twentieth century. Yet Aragon resists fatalism in his simultaneous alertness to the radical potential of the marvellous in the everyday, searching for the fault lines in ordinary reality beneath which poetic re-enchantment challenges the status quo of modern life. In this way, Aragon’s experimental novel sketches the textures and psychogeographies of the city, tracing its detours and shifts in ambience, the relationship of architecture to dreams, memory and fantasy; those composite layers of a city that official documents and masterplans rarely ascribe value to and which literary authors are uniquely placed to capture in their writings on cities. ConclusionUnable to respond within the swift publication timeframes of journalistic articles, the novelist is admittedly not well-placed to halt the demolition of buildings. In this article, I have sought to argue that the power and agency of the literary response resides, rather, in its long view and the subjective perspective of the author. At the time of writing, Sydney Metro is poised to involve a scale of demolition that has not been seen in Sydney for several decades and which will transform the city in a manner that, to date, has largely passed uncritiqued. The works of Iain Sinclair and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant point to the capacity of literary texts to deconstruct those broader forces that increasingly reshape the city without proper consideration; exposing the seductive ideology of urban renewal and the false promises of grand projects that transform multifaceted cityscapes into homogenous non-places. The literary text thus makes visible what is easily missed in the experience of everyday life, forcing us to consider the losses that haunt every gain in the building and rebuilding of the city.ReferencesAragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Trans. Simon Taylor Watson. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Aston, Heath. “We’ll Govern for All.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Mar. 2011. 23 Feb. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/state-election-2011/well-govern-for-all-20110326-1cbbf.html>. Bruno, Guiliana. “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies.” Ruins. Ed. Brian Dillon. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. 76-81.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Museum of Sydney. Demolished Sydney Media Release. Sydney: Sydney Living Museums 20 Oct. 2016. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/2016/12/05/new-exhibition-demolished-sydney>.Paris, Vaclav. “Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.1 (Autumn 2013): 21-39.Sinclair, Iain. Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009.———. London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015.Susik, Abigail. “Paris 1924: Aragon, Le Corbusier, and the Question of the Outmoded.” Wreck: Graduate Journal of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory 2.2 (2008): 29-44.Tan, Declan. “Review of Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair.” Huffington Post 15 Dec. 2011; updated 14 Feb. 2012. 21 Feb 2017 <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/declan-tan/ghost-milk-ian-sinclair-review_b_1145692.html>. Transport for NSW, Chatswood to Sydenham: Environmental Impact Statement Summary. 25 Mar. 2017 <http://www.sydneymetro.info>. Sydney: NSW Government, May-June 2016.Weston, David. “Against the Grand Project: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (Summer 2015): 255-79.


 
 
 Pornography can appear as a staid genre with a rigid series of rules and representations, each video consisting of a specified number of liaisons and pre-designated sexual acts, but it is also a genre that has developed and focused its numerous activities. What was considered to be an arousing taboo in the 1970s would not, for example, be considered as such today. Anal sex, while once comparatively rare in pornographic films, is now commonplace, and, while once utterly unspoken in mainstream heterosexual culture it is now acknowledged and celebrated, even by female targeted films such as Brigit Jones’ Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001). Pornography, however, has raised the stakes again. Hardcore is dependent on so called ‘nasty girls’ and most interviews with starlets focus on their ability to enjoy being ‘nasty’, to enjoy what are considered or labelled as ‘perverse’ manifestations of sexuality by the normalising discourses of dominant culture and society. While once a porn star merely had to enjoy – or pretend to enjoy – sucking cock, now it is expected her repertoire will include a wider range of activities. With anal sex, an event that transpires in most modern pornography, the site of penises – either singularly or in pairs – pushed into swollen sore assholes is a visual commonplace. In the 1980s and 1990s (when the representation of heterosexual anal sex became truly dominant in pornography) there was a recognizable process of sexual acts, between penetration of mouth, vagina, and asshole. Each penetration would be edited and between each take the male star would wipe down his penis. Until somebody in hardcore pornography developed the A-to-M, a.k.a ass-to-mouth aka A2M. In this move the male pulls his cock from the asshole of the female and then sticks it straight into her open mouth and down her throat without wiping it clean first. All of this is presented unmediated to the viewer, in one singular shot that follows the penis as it moves from one willing hole to the other (and the body must be understood as fragmented, it is a collection of zones and areas, in this instance orifices each with their own signifying practices, not a singular organic whole). Even assuming that the nubile starlet has had an enema to blast clean her rectum prior to filming there will still be microscopic traces of her shit and rectal mucus on his penis. Indeed the pleasure for the viewers is in the knowledge of the authenticity of the movement between ass and mouth, in the knowledge that there will be small flakes of shit stuck to her lips and teeth (a variant of the ass-to-mouth sees the penis being pulled from one starlet’s anus and inserted into another starlet’s gaping mouth, again in one unedited shot). Shit escapes simple ontology it is opposed to all manner of being, all manner of knowledge and of existence yet it is also intimately linked to self-presence and continuity. From earliest infancy we are encouraged not to engage with it, rather it is that which is to be flushed away immediately, it is everything about being human that is repulsive, rejected and denied. Shit escapes simple symbolism; it exists in its own discursive zone. While death may be similarly horrific to us, it is so because it is utterly unknown shit, however, horrifies precisely because it is known to us. Like death, shit makes us all equal, but shit is familiar, we know its fragrance, we know its texture, we know its colour, and – yes – deep down, repressed in our animal brain we know its taste. Its familiarity results because it is a part of us, yet it is no longer of us. In death the cadaver can be theorized as the body without a soul, without spirit, or without personality, but with shit humanity does not have this luxury, shit is the part of us that both defies and defines humanity. Shit is that which was us but is no longer, yet it never fully stops being part of us, it contains traces of our genetic material, pieces of our diet, even as it is flushed more is already being pushed down our intestine. Shit is substance and process. If the act of fucking is that which affirms vital existence against death, then introducing shit into the equation becomes utterly transgressive. Defecation and copulation are antithetical St Augustine’s recognition that we are born between piss and shit – inter faeces et urinam – understands the animistic nature of existence and sex as contaminated by sin, but he does not conflate the act of shitting and fucking as the same, his description is powerful precisely because they are not understood as the same. Introducing shit into sexual activity is culturally forbidden, genuine scatologists, coprophiles and shit fetishists are rare, and most keep their desires secret even from their closest companions. Even the few that confess to enjoying ‘brown showers’ do not admit to eating raw shit, either their own or that of somebody else. The practice is considered to be too dangerous, too unhealthy, and too disgusting. Even amongst the radical sexual communities many find that it stinks of excess, as if desires and fantasies had limits. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematic masterpiece Salo (1975) the quartet of libertines and their fellow explorers in unleashed lust – both the willing and the coerced – indulge in a vast coprophilic feast, but in this film the shit that is slathered over the bodies of the young charges and greedily scoffed down is not real. However there are a handful of directly scatological pornographic videos, often they depict people crouching down and shitting, the shit being rubbed on to nude bodies and eventually consumed. In some videos hungry mouths open directly under the puckering asshole, allowing the brown turd to plop directly onto the enthusiastic tongue and into the mouth. Cameras zoom in to show the shit-smeared lips and teeth. Like the image of ejaculation manifested in the cum-shot of mainstream hardcore pornography this sight is a vindication of the authenticity of the action. Such videos are watched by both fetishists and the curious – commonly teenage males trying to out shock each other. Unlike ‘traditional’ heterosexual hardcore pornography, which depicts explicit penetrative sex, scatology films rarely appear on the shelves of video stores and enthusiasts are compelled to search the dark bowels of pornography to find them. Yet the popularity of the ass-to-mouth sequence in hardcore suggests that there is an interest with such faecal taboo acts that may be more common that previously imagined. This is not to suggest that the audience who witness an ass-to-mouth scene want to go and eat shit, or want their partners to, but it does suggest that there is an interest in the transgressive potential of shit or the idea of shit on an erect penis. Watching these scenes the audience’s attention is drawn to the movement from the locus of defecation to that of consumption. Perhaps the visual pleasure lies in the degradation of the ‘nasty’ girl, in the knowledge that she can taste her own mucus and faecal matter. But if the pleasures are purely sadistic then these films fail, they do not (just) depict the starlets ‘suffering’ as they engage in these activities, in contrast, they are ‘normalised’ into the sexual conventions of the form. Hardcore pornography is about the depiction of literal excess; about multiple penis plunging into one asshole or one vagina (or even both) about orgies about the world’s biggest gang bangs and facials in which a dozen or more men shoot their genetic material onto the grinning faces of starlets as cum slathers their forehead, cheeks, chin, lips, and teeth. The sheer unremitting quantity becomes an object in itself. Nothing can ever be enough. This excess is also philosophical; all non-reproductive sexual activity belongs to the category of excess expenditure, where the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself both object choice and subject. Some would see such pornographic activities as anti-humanist, as cold, and as nihilistic, but such an interpretation fails. In watching these films, in seeing the penis move from asshole to mouth the audience are compelled by the authenticity of the gesture to read the starlet as human the ‘pleasure’ is in knowing that she can taste her own shit on some anonymous cock. Finally, she is smiling through its musky taste so we do not have to. Appendix / Sources / Notes / Parallel Text Throughout this paper I am referring only to pornographic material marketed to an audience who are identified or identify as heterosexual. These films may contain scenes with multiple males and females having sex at one time, however while there may be what the industry refers to as girl-on-girl action there will be no direct male-on-male contact (although often all that seperates two male penises is the paper thin wall of fleshy tissue between the vagina and anus). The socio-cultural history of heterosexual anal sex is a complex one, made more so because of its illicit and, in some jurisdictions, illegal status. It is safe to assume that many people have engaged in it even if they have not subsequently undertaken an active interest in it (statistics published in Exploring the Dimensions of Human Sexuality 2nd Edition suggest that 28% of male and 24% of female American college graduates and 21% of male and 13% of female high school graduates have experienced anal sex [377]). In hardcore pornography it is the male who penetrates the female, who presents her asshole for the viewer’s delectation. In personal sexual behaviour heterosexual males may also enjoy anal penetration from a female partner both in order to stimulate the sensitive tissue around the anus and to stilulate the prostate, but the representation of such activities is very rare in the mainstream of American hardcore porn. As inventer of gonzo porn John Stagliano commented when interviewed about his sexual proclivities in The Other Hollywood , “…you know, admitting that I really wanted to get fucked in the ass, and might really like it, is not necessarily a socially acceptable thing for a straight man” (587). Anal sex was most coherently radicalised by the Marquis de Sade, the master of sodomaniacal literature, who understood penetrating male / penetrated female anal sex as a way in which erotic pleasure/s could be divorced from any reproductive metanarrative. The scene in Brigit Jones’ Diary is made all the more strange because there is no mention of safe sex. There are, however, repeated references and representations of the size and shape of the heroine’s buttocks and her willingness to acquiesce to the evidentially dominant will of her ‘bad’ boyfriend the aptly named Daniel Cleaver. For more on heterosexual anal sex in cinema see my ‘Hot, Hard Cocks and Tight, Tight Unlubricated Assholes.Transgression, Sexual Ambiguity and ‘Perverse’ Pleasures in Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus’, in Senses of Cinema 30 (Jan.-March 2004). Hardcore pornography commonly means that which features a depiction of penetrative intercourse and the visual presentation of male ejaculation as a climax to a sequence. For more on the contemporary porn scene and the ‘nasty girl’ see Anthony Petkovich, The X Factory: Inside The American Hardcore Film Industry, which contains numerous interviews with porn starlets and industry insiders. While pornography is remembered for a number of key texts such as Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) or Behind the Green Door (Jim & Artie Mitchell, 1972), these were shot and marketed as erotic narrative film and released theatrically (albeit to grindhouse and specialist cinemas). However since 1982 and the widespread availability of video – and more recently DVD – pornography has been produced almost exclusively for home consumption. The increasing demands of the consumer, combined with the accessablity of technology and cheap production costs of video when compared to film have led to a glut of available material. Now videos/DVDs are often released in series with absurdly self descriptive titles such as Anal Pounding, Lesbian Bukkake, and Pussy Party, most of which provide examples of the mise-en-scene of contemporary hardcore, specific ass to mouth series include Ass to Mouth (vol 1 – 15), Ass to Mouth CumShots (vol 1 – 5), Her First Ass to Mouth, From Her Ass to Her Mouth, From My Ass to My Mouth, A2M (vol 1 – 9), and no doubt many others. For more on hardcore pornography and its common themes and visual styles see Linda Williams, Hardcore. Wikipedia suggests that the director Max Hardcore was responsible for introducing the form in the early 1990s in his series Cherry Poppers. The act is now a staple of the form. (Note that while Wikipedia can not normally be considered an academic source the vagaries of the subject matter necessitate that research takes place where necessary). All pornographic positions and gestures have a nickname, industry shorthand, thus there are terms such as the DP (double penetration) or the reverse cowgirl. These names are no more or less shocking than the translations for sexual positions offered in ‘classic’ erotic guidebooks such as the Kama Sutra. This fragmented body is a result of the cinematic gaze of pornography. Lenses are able to zoom in and focus on the body, and especially the genitals, in minute detail and present the flesh enlarged to proportions that are impossible to see in actual sexual encounters. The body viewed under such scrutiny but devoid of singular organic plenitude echoes the body without organs of Deleuze and Guattari (in contrast some radical feminist writers such as Andrea Dworkin would merely interpret such images as reflecting the misogyny of male dominated discourse). For more on the psychological development of the infant and the construction of the clean and unclean see Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror. It should be noted that commonly those who enjoy enema play – klismaphiliacs – are not related to scatologists, and often draw a distinction between their play, which is seen as a process of cleansing, and scatologists’ play, which is understood to be a celebration of the physical shit itself. Salo has undergone numerous sanctions, been banned, scorned, and even been interpreted by some as a metaphor / allegory for the director’s subsequent murder. Such understandings and pseudo-explanations do not do justice to either the director or to his film and its radical engagement with de Sade’s literature. These videos always come from ‘elsewhere’ of course, never close to home, thus in Different Loving the authors note “the Germans seem to specialize in scat” (518). Correspondence concerning the infamous bestiality film Animal Farm (197?) in the journal Headpress (issues 15 and 16, 1998) suggested that the audience was made up from teenage males watching it as a rite of passage, rather than by true zoophiles. Those I have seen were on shock and ‘gross out’ Internet sites rather than pornographic sites. Disclaimer – I have no interest per se in scatology, but an ongoing interest with the vagaries of human thought, and desire in particular, necessarily involves exploring areas others turn their noses up at. References Brame, Gloria G., William D. Brame, and Jon Jacobs. Different Loving: The World of Dominance and Submission. London: Arrow, 1998. Greenberg, Jerrold S., Clint E. Bruess, and Debra W. Haffner. Exploring the Dimensions of Human Sexuality. 2nd Edition. London: James & Bartlett, 2004. Russ Kick, ed. Everything You Know about Sex Is Wrong. New York: Disinformation, 2006. Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. McNeil, Legs, and Jennifer Osborne, with Peter Pavia. The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. New York: Regan Books, HarperCollins, 2006. Petkovich, Anthony. The X Factory: Inside the American Hardcore Film Industry. Stockport: Critical Vision, 2001. Marquis de Sade. Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings. London: Arrow, 1991. Sargeant, Jack. “Hot, Hard Cocks and Tight, Tight Unlubricated Assholes: Transgression, Sexual Ambiguity and ‘Perverse’ Pleasures in Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus.“ Senses of Cinema 30 (Jan.-March 2004). Wikipedia. “Ass to Mouth.” 15 Sep. 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org.wk/Ass_to_mouth>. Williams, Linda. Hardcore. London: Pandora Press, 1990. 
 
 
 
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My father killed the boar when he was 16. He’d dreamed of killing the boar for some time. My father’s brother had killed a boar when he was only fifteen. My father’s brother was five years older than him. Like most big brothers, he treated his little brother with intolerant contempt. He’d been saying for months that my father would never kill a boar. He was too weak. He was a girl. He was useless. And, just the day before, he told him he was so worthless he better finish the fence on the bottom paddock before dusk or he could expect a kicking. The family farm was gradually being cleared from the bush and the fencing slow and arduous. My father finished the fence. My father was very good with his hands and in truth a much better fencer than his brother, which didn’t help matters between them. That night my father didn’t go to sleep in the room he shared with his brother. Instead he went out into the bush past the bottom paddock, where the boars roamed, his rifle strapped over his shoulder and a knife in his ankle scabbard. The cleared ground was rough and uneven, a broken landscape created by the eruptions and outpourings of the volcanoes Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro. In the bush, the terrain was even rougher, jagged rises and deep gullies, all ripe with the verdant vegetation flourishing on the rich volcanic soil. My father found himself a niche in a cliff on the edge of the bush above a small clearing near the creek. He huddled there in his woollen coat and dungarees and waited. He’d brought the dogs with him and they drove the boar out of the bush and into the clearing among the tree ferns just before dawn. By then my father was hunched on a rock, out of the way. The dogs worried the boar. They grabbed its tail, snapped at its balls, sank their teeth into its legs. The boar fought back. It lashed at them with its tusks. It caught one and tossed it into a tree fern, the dog yelping from the pain of its ripped rib cage. The boar roared, stomping and rooting. The dogs continued to circle. My father had waited all night in the cold, his rifle loaded and the safety catch off. My father was a very good shot. Better than his brother. That was why his parents had splurged on his birthday gift and bought him a .303 rifle. His brother had a .22, but he couldn’t shoot pigeons or ducks. My father, though, could use his brother’s gun to bring down a brace of ducks. Another reason his brother treated him like a piece of dirt. But out in the bush he couldn’t shoot the boar for fear of killing one of the dogs. He slipped the catch on and laid the gun down beside him. He took a knife from the scabbard on his belt. He waited until the boar was facing away from him, dogs in front and behind it. He jumped from the rock, and kicked the boar’s right hind leg out. The boar went down. My father threw himself on its back and plunged the knife in between the shoulders. Deep, to cut the spine and throat. The boar squealed, thrashed and subsided. My father thrust himself upright, knife still in blood-soaked hand, and stood away from the boar. The boar rolled over, the dogs still nipping at it. My father used the knife again, slashing deep across the boar’s throat. It screamed and lunged at him with head and tusks. He leapt away, falling over one of the dogs. The boar didn’t die straight away. It thrashed about on the ground, snorting and sighing at first, then whimpering as blood gushed out, steamed on the cold ground and coagulated in the crushed ferns. Eventually it was just panting, and slowly at that. Finally it was dead. My father shooed the dogs away. He cut off the boar’s balls and pizzle and tossed them to the dogs. He slit the boar from arse to belly and began the process of removing its warm innards, first working with the bladder to attempt to keep its contents from having too much contact with his game. His hands reached right inside to disentangle the intestines. His shirt and jacket were soaked with its blood. His hands were greasy with blood and shit. He washed himself as best as he could in the freezing water of the creek. He manoeuvred the boar so that it was half sitting on the ground then he lowered himself down and backed between the boar’s front legs, his head under its chin. Taking the weight of the beast on his shoulders, he slowly stood and began to trudge out of the bush and through the rough paddocks towards his family home on the top of the rise. The dogs kept him company for a bit, but the lure of home was too much for them and they took off up the hill in a barking frenzy. All except the one that had been tossed by the boar. It slunk at his heels, blood on its flank where the tusk had ripped through. His father and brother were waiting for him on the veranda. His brother glared and yelled at him because he had missed the morning milking of the cows, but his father told him to take the boar to the meat shack. This was behind the house. It was a rough weatherboard structure on the cool, south-side. It was secure against dogs and vermin and big enough to hang several carcases. A sheep and legs of ham were already there. The shack had a smooth stone floor with drainage channels grooved into it. My father laid the boar on the floor of the shack. He cut the hock of each hind leg just behind the tendon to make a space for the gambrel hook. He inserted the hook then used the hoist in the shack to raise the boar up to the rail that ran down the centre of the room and from which the meat hung. My father then began to skin the boar, stripping back the black bristled outer flesh as much as possible in one piece. Once it was scrubbed of the bristles and tanned, the skin would be soft and supple, suitable for a purse or for covering a saddle. He washed the carcass. Later, when the day’s farm work was over, the whole family would work on preparing and preserving the boar. His mother had already fired up the copper to boil water for the cleaning and salting. Lastly, he sawed off the boar’s head. He placed it on the butcher’s block in the shack and worked at the tusks. On this big beast the tusks were almost five inches long, curved and very sharp. They were much larger than the tusks from his brother’s boar. Once he had the tusks out of the boar’s mouth, he stripped of all but his underpants and washed himself as best as he could at the tap of the water tank at the back of the house. The water was icy and there was a stiff breeze from the snow on the mountains. It was still winter. But my father hardly noticed. He was still warm from the blood of the boar and the sight of his brother’s face when he had seen the size of it. Two months later, he took the tusks into the town of Taumaranui. He sought advice from the jeweller in the main street, who had made a speciality of working with tusks. The jeweller was known all over the King Country. The jeweller talked about how the tusks might be mounted. He suggested a band of gold, edges engraved with delicate leaves, to join the tusks base to base, so that the points formed a semicircle. Just below the points, he suggested two gold bands joined with a delicate gold chain, from which the tusks could be hung. And that is what my father agreed to. The jeweller took one month then my father claimed his tusks and took them home to mount on his bedroom wall, where his brother was forced to see them every day. My father signed up for the Air Force when he was 18. He wanted to fly away from his brother and the cows and the fencing and digging the rocks out of the paddock and that is exactly what he did. He learned to fly, something he’d dreamed of doing, same as he had dreamed of killing a boar. My father was a great dreamer. He left the tusks at home with his mother. She took them out of the bedroom them and placed them on the wall of the family room to remind her of him. His brother would turn them back to front. My father sent home photographs of himself: one from Cairo with him in tropical gear, sparkling eyes and a jaunty smile under his new moustache; another from Waddingham in his Sergeant pilot’s uniform standing with his crew in front of their Lancaster as it is loaded with bombs; a last one from an unknown place but he is wearing his Flying Officer’s uniform for he had been promoted and there are ribbons on his chest, too, but his eyes do not shine and he does not smile. As they arrived from the other side of the world in the slow mail his mother placed these photographs on the sideboard in the family room under my father’s tusks. In a mood after the Sunday roast his brother would turn them face down, saying my father wouldn’t be coming back so why did he have to be reminded of him. But he did come back, which even his brother had to acknowledge. He was 23. He was a shell of the boy who had killed the boar. He had been gutted by the war, though he showed no outward signs of the mutilation. It was all within, deep within, embedded in him like tusks in the jaw of a boar. My father began studying to be a veterinarian when he was 25. As part of his repatriation package, he was paid to study at the University of Sydney. He took the tusks down from his mother’s wall and packed them into one of the suitcases he and my mother took with them on the flying boat to Sydney. The tusks hung on the wall of the semi in Enmore they lived in for the five years he studied. Then after he had graduated they went back across the Tasman and my father began his work with animals. The animals received his ministrations with passive indifference and helped resolve the horror in his head, an unremitting memory of the perilous flights under attack across black skies and terrain, the fires unleashed by the phosphorous bombs released from his plane’s bomb bay let alone the destruction from other ordnance, the morning briefings after what was left of the squadron had returned and he learned which of his mates was no longer. He drank a bit. Maybe too much, but nobody ever sat down with him and talk about what he had been through. He had some medals and his old flying jacket and it was expected that he just get on with life. Which he did, overall. Once my parents were back in New Zealand, he set up practice in Waikato, with dairy cattle his most frequent patients. The Waikato district lies to the north of the King Country where my father had killed the boar. His family were not so far away, but he didn’t visit them that often. His brother was running things down there. His brother held vets in contempt and made that clear on the rare occasions my father did visit. Then his father, my grandfather, died. The farm went to his older brother as was the custom of those times. His widowed mother moved up to Auckland, so my father had no reason to visit the farm or his brother any more. Maybe it was only a matter of moving away from his brother but he lost and found himself in Australia. Maybe it was also the fact that a few years after he had made the move, the phone rang one night and he found he was talking to his brother’s wife. His brother had shot himself down in the bottom paddock that morning. It seems my father’s brother was never a very good farmer. From that time on my father mellowed, relaxed and began to enjoy himself. The tusks, though, were always on his bedside table, reminding him of that night he spent out in the bush and killed the boar. My father died three weeks before he was to turn 80. His death was long and painful to those of us who had to watch it, though for him it was ameliorated by painkillers and palliative care given him. It was my job to arrange the details of his funeral. Since his death was no surprise, all of his family, his three sons and his two daughters, grandsons and grand-daughters and his great grand children as well, had already gathered to say goodbye to him. But everybody was now under pressure to get back to jobs and other commitments. I spoke to the undertakers. They arranged the funeral the day following my father’s death in their own chapel. My mother wanted an open casket so my father had to be dressed in his best clothes. My mother and I selected the clothes and I took them to the undertakers. The next morning, before the ceremony, the undertakers called me and asked me to come to their rooms behind the chapel. They asked me to check that my father looked as much as we wanted him to look. He lay in the coffin, only his head and hands showing, the rest of him expertly trussed and dressed for this last display. His hair was neatly brushed and there was a bristle or two of whiskers on his cheek and chin. His eyes were closed and the skin on his face waxy, but cold from wherever he had been stored. I kissed him on his forehead. Then I placed the tusks on his chest, just under his neck and over the tie and jacket my mother had decided he should wear. My father was ready. I drove my mother down to the chapel just before 2 pm. She and I were the last people to be seated. We were both to sit in the front row. She walked straight up the aisle past the other mourners to my father’s coffin and she stood there for a moment looking at her husband of nearly sixty years. She stretched out her arm and stroked the tusks on his chest. Then she turned and I reached out and guided her to her seat. “He’ll like having them,” she whispered to me. Then we sang “There’s a hole in the bucket”. My father always liked that song. The crematorium was miles away. My father travelled there alone. Just as he had faced the boar. References De Hek, Danny. “Hunting regions—King Country: The home of wild pig hunting in New Zealand.” New Zealand’s Information Network 16 Aug. 2010 . Dick, Tim. “The boar wars.” WAtoday.com.au 13 Nov. 2008. 16 Aug. 2010 . Rushmer, Miles. “Bush surfing: That’s a New Zealand pig hunt.” ESPN Outdoors 28 Apr. 2005. 16 Aug. 2010 . Walrond, Carl. “Pig hunting.” Te Ara: The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand 1 Mar. 2009. 16 Aug. 2010 .

Indigenous cross-cultural training has been around since the 1980s. It is often seen as a way to increase the skills and competency of staff engaged in providing service to Indigenous clients and customers, teaching Indigenous students within universities and schools, or working with Indigenous communities (Fredericks and Bargallie, “Indigenous”; “Which Way”). In this article we demonstrate how such training often exposes power, whiteness, and concepts of an Indigenous “other”. We highlight how cross-cultural training programs can potentially provide a setting in which non-Indigenous participants can develop a deeper realisation of how their understandings of the “other” are formed and enacted within a “white” social setting. Revealing whiteness as a racial construct enables people to see race, and “know what racism is, what it is not and what it does” (Bargallie, 262). Training participants can use such revelations to develop their racial literacy and anti-racist praxis (Bargallie), which when implemented have the capacity to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations.What Does the Literature Say about Cross-Cultural Training? An array of names are used for Indigenous cross-cultural training, including cultural awareness, cultural competency, cultural responsiveness, cultural safety, cultural sensitivity, cultural humility, and cultural capability. Each model takes on a different approach and goal depending on the discipline or profession to which the training is applied (Hollinsworth). Throughout this article we refer to Indigenous cross-cultural training as “cultural competence” or “cultural awareness” and discuss these in relation to their application within higher education institutions. While literature on health and human services programs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other nation states provide clear definitions of terms such as “cultural safety”, cultural competence or cultural awareness is often lacking a concise and consistent definition.Often delivered as a half day or a one to two-day training course, it is unrealistic to think that Indigenous cultural competence can be achieved through one’s mere attendance and participation. Moreover, when courses centre on “cultural differences” and enable revelations about those differences they are in danger of presenting idealised notions of Indigeneity. Cultural competence becomes a process through which an Indigenous “other” is objectified, while very little is offered by way of translating knowledge and skills into practice when working with Indigenous peoples.What this type of learning has the capacity to do is oversimplify and reinforce racism and racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous cultures. What is generally believed is that if non-Indigenous peoples know more about Indigenous peoples and cultures, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will somehow improve. The work of Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson is vital to draw on here, when she asks, has the intellectual investment in defining our cultural differences resulted in the valuing of our knowledges? Has the academy become a more enlightened place in which to work, and, more important, in what ways have our communities benefited? (xvii)What is revealed in a range of studies – whether centring on racism and discrimination or the ongoing disparities across health, education, incarceration, employment, and more – is that despite forty plus years of training focused on understanding cultural differences, very little has changed. Indigenous knowledges continue to be devalued and overlooked. Everyday and structural racisms shape everyday experiences for Indigenous employees in Australian workplaces such as the Australian Public Service (Bargallie) and the Australian higher education sector (Fredericks and White).As the literature demonstrates, the racial division of labour in such institutions often leaves Indigenous employees languishing on the lower rungs of the employment ladder (Bargallie). The findings of an Australian university case study, discussed below, highlights how power, whiteness, and concepts of “otherness” are exposed and play out in cultural competency training. Through their exposure, we argue that better understandings about Indigenous Australians, which are not based on culture difference but personal reflexivity, may be gained. Revealing What Was Needed in the Course’s Foundation and ImplementationThis case study is centred within a regional Australian university across numerous campuses. In 2012, the university council approved an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy, which included a range of initiatives, including the provision of cross-cultural training for staff. In developing the training, a team explored the evidence as it related to university settings (Anning; Asmar; Butler and Young; Fredericks; Fredericks and Thompson; Kinnane, Wilks, Wilson, Hughes and Thomas; McLaughlin and Whatman). This investigation included what had been undertaken in other Australian universities (Anderson; University of Sydney) and drew on the recommendations from earlier research (Behrendt, Larkin, Griew and Kelly; Bradley, Noonan, Nugent and Scales; Universities Australia). Additional consultation took place with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.While some literature on cross-cultural training centred on the need to understand cultural differences, others exposed the problems of focusing entirely on difference (Brach and Fraser; Campinha-Bacote; Fredericks; Spencer and Archer; Young). The courses that challenged the centrality of cultural difference explained why race needed to be at the core of its training, highlighting its role in enabling discussions of racism, bias, discrimination and how these may be used as means to facilitate potential individual and organisational change. This approach also addressed stereotypes and Eurocentric understandings of what and who is an Indigenous Australian (Carlson; Gorringe, Ross and Forde; Hollinsworth; Moreton-Robinson). It is from this basis that we worked and grew our own training program. Working on this foundational premise, we began to separate content that showcased the fluidity and diversity of Indigenous peoples and refrained from situating us within romantic notions of culture or presenting us as an exotic “other”. In other words, we embraced work that responded to non-Indigenous people’s objectified understandings and expectations of us. For example, the expectation that Indigenous peoples will offer a Welcome to Country, performance, share a story, sing, dance, or disseminate Indigenous knowledges. While we recognise that some of these cultural elements may offer enjoyment and insight to non-Indigenous people, they do not challenge behaviours or the nature of the relationships that non-Indigenous people have with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Bargallie; Fredericks; Hollinsworth; Westwood and Westwood; Young).The other content which needed separating were the methods that enabled participants to understand and own their standpoints. This included the use of critical Indigenous studies as a form of analysis (Moreton-Robinson). Critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic) was also used as a means for participants to interrogate their own cultural positionings and understand the pervasive nature of race and racism in Australian society and institutions (McLaughlin and Whatman). This offered all participants, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, the opportunity to learn how institutional racism operates, and maintains discrimination, neglect, abuse, denial, and violence, inclusive of the continued subjugation that exists within higher education settings and broader society.We knew that the course needed to be available online as well as face-to-face. This would increase accessibility to staff across the university community. We sought to embed critical thinking as we began to map out the course, including the theory in the sections that covered colonisation and the history of Indigenous dispossession, trauma and pain, along with the ongoing effects of federal and state policies and legislations that locates racism at the core of Australian politics. In addition to documenting the ongoing effects of racism, we sought to ensure that Indigenous resistance, agency, and activism was highlighted, showing how this continues, thus linking the past to the contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples.Drawing on the work of Bargallie we wanted to demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience racism through systems and structures in their everyday work with colleagues in large organisations, such as universities. Participants were asked to self-reflect on how race impacts their day-to-day lives (McIntosh). The final session of the training focused on the university’s commitment to “Closing the Gap” and its Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). The associated activity involved participants working individually and in small groups to discuss and consider what they could contribute to the RAP activities and enact within their work environments. Throughout the training, participants were asked to reflect on their personal positioning, and in the final session they were asked to draw from these reflections and discuss how they would discuss race, racism and reconciliation activities with the governance of their university (Westwood and Westwood; Young).Revelations in the Facilitators, Observers, and Participants’ Discussions? This section draws on data collected from the first course offered within the university’s pilot program. During the delivery of the in-person training sessions, two observers wrote notes while the facilitators also noted their feelings and thoughts. After the training, the facilitators and observers debriefed and discussed the delivery of the course along with the feedback received during the sessions.What was noticed by the team was the defensive body language of participants and the types of questions they asked. Team members observed how there were clear differences between the interest non-Indigenous participants displayed when talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and a clear discomfort when they were asked to reflect on their own position in relation to Indigenous people. We noted that during these occasions some participants crossed their arms, two wrote notes to each other across the table, and many participants showed discomfort. When the lead facilitator raised this to participants during the sessions, some expressed their dislike and discomfort at having to talk about themselves. A couple were clearly unhappy and upset. We found this interesting as we were asking participants to reflect and talk about how they interpret and understand themselves in relation to Indigenous people and race, privilege, and power.This supports the work of DiAngelo who explains that facilitators can spend a lot of time trying to manage the behaviour of participants. Similarly, Castagno identifies that sometimes facilitators of training might overly focus on keeping participants happy, and in doing so, derail the hard conversations needed. We did not do either. Instead, we worked to manage the behaviours expressed and draw out what was happening to break the attempts to silence racial discussions. We reiterated and worked hard to reassure participants that we were in a “safe space” and that while such discussions may be difficult, they were worth working through on an individual and collective level.During the workshop, numerous emotions surfaced, people laughed at Indigenous humour and cried at what they witnessed as losses. They also expressed anger, defensiveness, and denial. Some participants revelled in hearing answers to questions that they had long wondered about; some openly discussed how they thought they had discovered a distant Aboriginal relative. Many questions surfaced, such as why hadn’t they ever been told this version of Australian history? Why were we focusing on them and not Aboriginal people? How could they be racist when they had an Aboriginal friend or an Aboriginal relative?Some said they felt “guilty” about what had happened in the past. Others said they were not personally responsible or responsible for the actions of their ancestors, questioning why they needed to go over such history in the first place? Inter-woven within participants’ revelations were issues of racism, power, whiteness, and white privilege. Many participants took a defensive stance to protect their white privilege (DiAngelo). As we worked through these issues, several participants started to see their own positionality and shared this with the group. Clearly, the revelation of whiteness as a racial construct was a turning point for some. The language in the group also changed for some participants as revelations emerged through the interrogation and unpacking of stories of racism. Bargallie’s work exploring racism in the workplace, explains that “racism”, as both a word and theme, is primarily absent in conversations amongst non-Indigenous colleagues. Despite its entrenchment in the dialogue, it is rarely, if ever addressed. In fact, for many non-Indigenous people, the fear of being accused of racism is worse than the act of racism itself (Ahmed; Bargallie). We have seen this play out within the media, sport, news bulletins, and more. Lentin describes the act of denying racism despite its existence in full sight as “not racism”, arguing that its very denial is “a form of racist violence” (406).Through enhancing racial literacy, Bargallie asserts that people gain a better understanding of “what racism is, what racism is not and how race works” (258). Such revelations can work towards dismantling racism in workplaces. Individual and structural racism go hand-in-glove and must be examined and addressed together. This is what we wanted to work towards within the cultural competency course. Through the use of critical Indigenous studies and critical race theory we situated race, and not cultural difference, as central, providing participants with a racial literacy that could be used as a tool to challenge and dismantle racism in the workplace.Revelations in the Participant Evaluations?The evaluations revealed that our intention to disrupt the status quo in cultural competency training was achieved. Some of the discussions were difficult and this was reflected in the feedback. It was valuable to learn that numerous participants wanted to do more through group work, conversations, and problem resolution, along with having extra reading materials. This prompted our decision to include extra links to resource learning materials through the course’s online site. We also opted to provide all participants with a copy of the book Indigenous Australia for Dummies (Behrendt). The cost of the book was built into the course and future participants were thankful for this combination of resources.One unexpected concern raised by participants was that the course should not be “that hard”, and that we should “dumb down” the course. We were astounded considering that many participants were academics and we were confident that facilitators of other mandatory workplace training, for example, staff Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Fire Safety, Risk Management, Occupational Health and Safety, Discrimination and more, weren’t asked to “dumb down” their content. We explained to the participants what content we had been asked to deliver and knew their responses demonstrated white fragility. We were not prepared to adjust the course and dumb it down for white understandings and comfortabilities (Leonardo and Porter).Comments that were expected included that the facilitators were “passionate”, “articulate”, demonstrated “knowledge” and effectively “dealt with issues”. A couple of the participants wrote that the facilitators were “aggressive” or “angry”. This however is not new for us, or new to other Aboriginal women. We know Aboriginal women are often seen as “aggressive” and “angry”, when non-Indigenous women might be described as “passionate” or “assertive” for saying exactly the same thing. The work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Australia, and the works of numerous other Aboriginal women provide evidence of this form of racism (Fredericks and White; Bargallie; Bond). Internationally, other Indigenous women and women of colour document the same experiences (Lorde). Participants’ assessment of the facilitators is consistent with the racism expressed through racial microaggression outside of the university, and in other organisations. This is despite working in the higher education sector, which is normally perceived as a more knowledgeable and informed environment. Needless to say, we did not take on these comments.The evaluations did offer us the opportunity to adjust the course and make it stronger before it was offered across the university where we received further evaluation of its success. Despite this, the university decided to withdraw and reallocate the money to the development of a diversity training course that would cover all equity groups. This meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be covered along with sexual diversity, gender, disability, and people from non-English speaking backgrounds. The content focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was reduced to one hour of the total course. Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this way is not based on evidence and works to minimise Indigenous Australians and their inherent rights and sovereignty to just another “equity group”. Conclusion We set out to develop and deliver a cross-cultural course that was based on evidence and a foundation of 40 plus years’ experience in delivering such training. In addition, we sought a program that would align with the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan and the directions being undertaken in the sector and by Universities Australia. Through engaging participants in a process of critical thinking centring on race, we developed a training program that successfully fostered self-reflection and brought about revelations of whiteness.Focusing on cultural differences has proven ineffective to the work needed to improve the lives of Indigenous Australian peoples. Recognising this, our discussions with participants directly challenged racist and negative stereotypes, individual and structural racism, prejudices, and white privilege. By centring race over cultural difference in cultural competency training, we worked to foster self-revelation within participants to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations. The institution’s disbandment and defunding of the program however is a telling revelation in and of itself, highlighting the continuing struggle and importance of placing additional pressure on persons, institutions, and organisations to implement meaningful structural change. ReferencesAhmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.Anderson, Ian. “Advancing Indigenous Health through Medical Education”. Focus on Health Professional Education: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal 13.1 (2011): 1-12.Anning, Beres. “Embedding an Indigenous Graduate Attribute into University of Western Sydney’s Courses”. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 39 (2010): 40-52.Asmar, Christine. Final Report on the Murrup Barak of Indigenous Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Melbourne, 2010-2011. Murrup Barak – Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development, University of Melbourne, 2011.Bargallie, Debbie. Unmasking The Racial Contract: Everyday Racisms and the Impact of Racial Microaggressions on “Indigenous Employees” in the Australian Public Service. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2020. Behrendt, Larissa. Indigenous Australia for Dummies. Wiley Publishing, 2010.Behrendt, Larissa, Steven Larkin, Robert Griew, Robert, and Patricia Kelly. Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People: Final Report. Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations, 2012.Brach, Cindy, and Irene Fraser. “Can Cultural Competency Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities? A Review and Conceptual Model”. Medical Care Research and Review 57.sup 1 (2000): 181-217.Bond, Chelsea. “When the Object Teaches: Indigenous Academics in Australian Universities”. Right Now 14 (2014). <http://rightnow.org.au/opinion-3/when-the-object-teaches-indigenous-academics-in-australian-universities/>.Bradley, Denise, Peter Noonan, Helen Nugent, and Bill Scales. Review of Australian Higher Education. Australian Government, 2008.Butler, Kathleen, and Anne Young. Indigenisation of Curricula – Intent, Initiatives and Implementation. Canberra: Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, 2009. 20 Apr. 2020 <http://www.teqsa.gov.au/news-publications/publications>.Campinha-Bacote, Josepha. “A Model and Instrument for Addressing Cultural Competence in Health Care”. Journal of Nursing Education 38.5 (1999): 203-207.Carlson, Bronwyn. The Politics of Identity – Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016.Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 2001.DiAngelo, Robin. “Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions”. Understanding and Dismantling Privilege 11.1 (2012). <http://www.wpcjournal.com/article/view/10100/Nothing%20to%20add%3A%20A%20Challenge%20to%20White%20Silence%20in%20Racial%20Discussions>.Frankenburg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.Fredericks, Bronwyn. “The Need to Extend beyond the Knowledge Gained in Cross-Cultural Awareness Training”. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 37.S (2008): 81-89.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Debbie Bargallie. “An Indigenous Cultural Competency Course: Talking Culture, Care and Power”. In Cultural Competence and the Higher Education Sector: Perspectives, Policies and Practice, eds. Jack Frawley, Gabrielle Russell, and Juanita Sherwood, Springer Publications, 295-308. <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-981-15-5362-2>.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Debbie Bargallie. “‘Which Way? Talking Culture, Talking Race’: Unpacking an Indigenous Cultural Competency Course”. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 9.1 (2016): 1-14.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Marlene Thompson. “Collaborative Voices: Ongoing Reflections on Cultural Competency and the Health Care of Australian Indigenous People”. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 13.3 (2010): 10-20.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Nereda White. “Using Bridges Made by Others as Scaffolding and Establishing Footings for Those That Follow: Indigenous Women in the Academy”. Australian Journal of Education 62.3 (2018): 243–255.Gorringe, Scott, Joe Ross, and Cressida Fforde. Will the Real Aborigine Please Stand Up? Strategies for Breaking the Stereotypes and Changing the Conversation. AIATSIS Research Discussion Paper No. 28. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), 2011.Hollinsworth, David. “Forget Cultural Competence: Ask for an Autobiography”. Social Work Education: The International Journal 32.8 (2013): 1048-1060.hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. London: Pluto Press, 2000.Kinnane, Stephen, Judith Wilks, Katie Wilson, Terri Hughes, and Sue Thomas. Can’t Be What You Can’t See: The Transition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students into Higher Education. Final report to the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. Canberra: Office of Learning and Teaching, 2014.Lentin, Alana. “Beyond Denial: ‘Not Racism’ as Racist Violence”. Continuum 32.1 (2018): 1-15.Leonardo, Zeus, and Ronald L. Porter. “Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory of ‘Safety’ in Race Dialogue”. Race Ethnicity and Education 13.2 (2010): 139-157.Lorde, Audrey. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.McIntosh, Peggy. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies. Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, 1988.McLaughlin, Juliana, and Sue Whatman. “The Potential of Critical Race Theory in Decolonizing University Curricula”. Asia Pacific Journal of Education 31.4 (2011): 365-377.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.Sargent, Sara E., Carol A. Sedlak, and Donna S. Martsolf. “Cultural Competence among Nursing Students and Faculty”. Nurse Education Today 25.3 (2005): 214-221.Sherwood, Juanita, and Tahnia Edwards. “Decolonisation: A Critical Step for Improving Aboriginal health”. Contemporary Nurse 22.2 (2016): 178-190.Spencer, Caroline, and Frances L. Archer. “Surveys of Cultural Competency in Health Professional Education: A Literature Review”. Journal of Emergency Primary Health Care 6.2 (2008): 17.Universities Australia. National Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency in Australian Universities. Universities Australia, 2011. <http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/lightbox/1312>.University of Sydney. National Centre for Cultural Competence, 2016. <http://sydney.edu.au/nccc/>.Westwood, Barbara, and Geoff Westwood. “Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Training: Policy v. Accountability – Failure in Reality”. Australian Health Review 34 (2010): 423-429.Young, Susan. “Not Because It’s a Bloody Black Issue! Problematics of Cross Cultural Training”. In Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation, ed. Belinda McKay, 204-219. Queensland Studies Centre, University of Queensland Press, 1999.

Lorri Neilsen, whose feature article appears in this edition of M/C Journal, is Professor of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Neilsen has been teaching and researching in literacy studies for more than four decades. She is internationally recognised as a poet and as an arts-based research methodologist specialising in lyric inquiry. In the latter half of this last decade she was appointed for a five year term to be the Poet Laureate for Nova Scotia. As an academic, she has published widely under the name of Lorri Neilsen; as a poet, she uses Lorri Neilsen Glenn. In this article I refer to her as Neilsen. This article reflects specifically on the poetics and the politics of the work of poet-scholar Lorri Neilsen. In doing so, it explores the theme of catastrophe in several senses. Firstly, it introduces the reader to the poetic articulations of the everyday catastrophes of grief and loss found in Neilsen’s recent work. Secondly, it uses Neilsen’s work on grief and loss to draw attention to a rarely recognised scholarly catastrophe: the catastrophe of the methodological divide between the humanities and the social sciences that runs the risk of creating, for the social sciences, a limiting and limited approach to research project design, knowledge production, and relationships between researchers and subjects, to which Lorri Neilsen’s ground-breaking use of lyric inquiry is a response. And thirdly, it alerts us to the need to fight to retain the arts and humanities within universities, in order to avoid a scholarly catastrophe of a different order. In undertaking this exploration, the article uses several terms with which some readers of M/C Journal might not be familiar. Research literacies is a term used to signal capacity and fluency in the understanding and use of research methodologies. Arts-based inquiry is the umbrella term used by researchers using their creative practice in the arts—in writing, theatre performance, visual arts, music, dance, movement—to lead them into new insights into the topic under investigation. This work is frequently embodied and sensuous. So, for example, the understanding of anorexia might be deepened by a dance performance or a series of paintings or a musical score devised in response to work with research participants; or, as I argue here, understandings of the everyday catastrophes of grief and loss might be deepened by the writing of poetry or expressive prose that uncovers nuance and sheds light in ways not possible using the more traditional research methodologies available to social scientists. Lyric inquiry, a sub-set of arts-based inquiry, is Neilsen’s own term for a research methodology that uses writing itself as the research tool, and whose hallmark is embodied language expressed as poem, song, or poetic prose, to “create the possibility of a resonant, ethical, engaged relationship between the knower and the known” (Handbook 94).This article, then, reflects on the research work of Lorri Neilsen. In this article I use Neilsen’s responses to grief and loss as the starting point to follow her journey from the early days of her involvement in literacy research to her present enchantment with arts-based inquiry in literacy and social science research. I outline her writing on research literacies, explore her notion of lyric inquiry as a crucial facet of arts-based research, and conclude with examples of her poetry born of creative reflection on what we might call everyday catastrophes. Ultimately I argue the need to avoid a scholarly catastrophe of a different order from those Neilsen explores, through the continued recognition of the crucial place of the arts in academic institutions.I open with excerpts from a piece in Lorri Neilsen’s collection, Threading Light, published in 2011. This piece, The Sea, written out of the grief of losing her aged mother, is one I find most moving. It begins: Days later—a week, a month, hard to tell—sun comes out of drizzle and ice and fog and snow showers, ripping open a bright day. Snow-mounded. If you were a kid, you’d look for your sled. He is sure the box of wrenches is in the cabin, and you know a drive to the country is better than another day in bed with Kleenex and a hacking cough, hiding a flayed heart, and pouring CBC into your ears around the clock. (104) The two figures in the piece, he and she, head south to their seaside cabin. They take a walk beside an ice-covered seashore.Today, you step carefully because of ice, and what you find catches your breath. For a brief moment you have escaped the grizzly claws of grief ripping at your chest. You are kneeling on the ice, touching the frosted edges of kelp and weeds, slimy umber and sienna, and putrid green growths that slurp in and out most of the year, but here, now, are stunned, immobile, impaled on the rocks by the cold. Desire is a feral animal; let it loose, it will seek beauty. You point out to each other tableaus: rimming white, translucent blues and greens, coppered plants flash-frozen, fringed by crystalline tatters. A Burtynsky, you think, but not man-made. This is life’s ebb, as Tu Fu wrote. The ocean’s winter verge. Death’s magnificent intaglio. Your fingers follow the lines of kelp: these things once lived, and moved. Take the long view, maybe they still do. You pause to sit on a cold rock and look at the sky; for a moment you are back beside her body, that last morning, your fingers on cooling flesh. Then, water, the sound of waves. Presence. You look up. He has found one periwinkle fused to a rock, then another. Several more. He places them in your hand, one by one, each dark brown ball with its own scurf of ice that gives off the smallest breath of mist as it touches the heat of your palm. Each a small jolt. This is what the sea creates while you are busy with your own tides: precise cups of glossy perfection with curves like a blues howl that open your heart, craning for light. (Threading Light 104–5)One of the things I appreciate most about Lorri Neilsen’s lyric work is her capacity to hold the miniscule simultaneously with the universal; a flash of insight under the arc of a timeless sky. “Smaller than small; larger than large,” write the Hindu prophets (Upanishads). “This is what the sea creates while you are busy with your own tides,” she writes, and in that moment of reading I am jolted into an awareness of the contours of grief that no amount of social scientific observation could provide: an awareness of the nature of self-absorption and inward focus so intense that even the most inevitable of natural rhythms—the ocean’s tides—are forgotten: forgotten, that is, until the protagonist is shaken awake again, by exquisite beauty, into a new kind of response-ability to the world. Lorri Neilsen’s feature article in this edition of M/C creates layer upon layer of insights exploring the notion that loss, an everyday catastrophe, involves a turning inside-out, a jolting into a new sense of self, or a propulsion out of an old, restrictive one; and that inevitably it propels us headlong into a state of living in the moment, of being present to what is, rather than distantly taking stock of what we have. As I ponder this experience, as a reader of her work, I re-experience that moment of stasis:physiologically we all know that experience of time suspended after shock, time inexplicably, irrationally, standing still. But what Neilsen has done so successfully as a poet-scholar, in my view, is not simply find words to express this turning inside out as poetry. Additionally, she has claimed the moment of poetic insight as a crucial form of knowledge-making that has a central and necessary place in illuminating our social worlds. This claim has far-reaching political significance for social science researchers, introducing, as it does, a re-invigorated understanding of the very concept of research:Research [she tells us] is not only the creation of products to market at the academic fair; research is the process of learning through the words, actions and revisionings of our daily life. […] Research is the attuned mind/body working purposefully to explore, to listen, to support, to transgress, to gather with care, to create, to disrupt, to offer back, to contribute, sometimes all at once […] Inquiry is praxis that cannot be boxed up and delivered: it is a story with no ending. (Knowing 264) Neilsen’s particular fascination is with lyric inquiry which she claims as political, poetic, and sustaining of the individual and the larger world: It has the capacity to develop voice and agency in both researcher and participant; it foregrounds conceptual and philosophical processes marked by metaphor, resonance and liminality; and it reunites us with the vivifying effects of imagination and beauty – those long-forgotten qualities that add grace and wisdom to public discourse. (Knowing 101)So what has led her here, to that place where lyric inquiry forms the basis of her engagement with the knowledge-making endeavour in the academy and beyond? As a feminist scholar fascinated by biography, by life writing and story, I find myself drawn as much towards the story of Neilsen’s evolution as a poet-scholar as to the work itself. How has she come to an awareness of the need to create new ways of doing research? What has she uncovered here about the ethics and the politics of doing research in the social world? As I read her work I become aware that her current desire to dance at the edge of the conventional research world has been driven as much by a series of professional catastrophes as by an underpinning desire for methodological innovation. Neilsen herself explores these issues in her 1998 collection of academic essays, called Knowing Her Place: Research Literacies and Feminist Occasions. There are several threads weaving their way through this account of a young academic researcher and scholar finding her way into a larger, wiser, more resonant space: there’s the story of the young graduate student learning the language of and experiencing the perpetual isolation of disembodied fact-finding statistically resonant research into literacy; there’s the story of the young mother juggling academic life and research and parenting, wanting to make sense to the teaching research participants she is working with, wanting to close the gap between the public and the private worlds, wanting to spend time with her partner and her two sons, especially her second son whose birth could have been a catastrophe but whose gentle ways of being in the world gifted them all with the desire to slow down, to see afresh; and, later, there’s the story of the mature woman whose impulse is to community and to solitude, to living with a generosity of spirit that takes seriously the intertwining of her poetic life and her academic and everyday worlds. Interwoven with these stories is the story of writing itself: here we find the formal disembodied writing of Western scientific research practices; here now is collectivist writing generated at kitchen tables, in community centres, in schools; here now is every mode of writing that evokes nuance and explores the senses; and here now too is the research writing that privileges response-ability, scholartistry, bodily sensation, reciprocity, engagement with the world.Neilsen’s account of this journey begins when, as a young postgraduate student doing research into literacy, she learned the language of statistical significance to measure syntactic complexity, noting, as she wrote up her MA, the distance between the language she had learned and the everyday language of the classroom teachers the research was meant to inform. The emphasis of this early research was on removing language from its context, isolating components of language for scrutiny, making findings that were replicable. In time she came to see this kind of knowledge-making as dry, limited, rule-bound, androcentric. From this disengaged, disembodied place she moved, over decades, into a space where compassion, wisdom, humility, and wonder combine to locate her as researcher who understands, alongside researcher David Smith, that “writing is a holy act, an articulation of limited understanding” (qtd. in Neilsen, Knowing 119). In an echo of Luce Irigaray’s insistence that the research and writing we do as fully alive feminist scholars will link the celestial and the terrestrial, the horizontal, and the vertical, and in a further echo of Helene Cixous’ claim that when writing from the body, “an opera inhabits me” (Cixous 53), Neilsen writes unabashedly of the metaphysical nature of her research world: Artful living, artful writing, connecting with a purpose to help each other transcend and grow through inquiry. Connection, embodiment, transformation, transcendence. All these expressions tap spiritual chords […] But if inquiry is to transcend the destructive circumstances of our lifeworlds, if its purpose is to make a difference, not a career, we cannot avoid using words such as vision, spirit, humanity, soul. Interest in metaphysical perspectives is not new in feminist circles, but is IS new in conventional research communities where the intangible, the deeply disturbing and consciousness-awakening dimensions of life are compartmentalized, reserved […] for a walk by the ocean, for the rare meditative times of our lives, if we find them at all […] But (she concludes) the awareness that we know when we live in the eternal present […] is an awareness full of tremendous power, and, ultimately, hope. (Knowing 280)In the final chapter of this 1998 text outlining her journey into research literacies, called Notes on Painting Ghosts and Writing the Poetry Report: Some Things I know But Not For Certain, Lorri Neilsen writes confidently against the grain of what she sees as the limits of androcentric research practices: Everything we know is at once out there and in here […] My place is to apprentice myself to the world, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, not in subservience and compliance, as the androcentric practices we have followed would keep me, but in reciprocity, curiosity and response-ability. What we must seek are the transgressive experiences and the fresh words which reveal us, in Annie Dillard’s words, ‘startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down bewildered’. (qtd. in Neilsen, Knowing 261)And in a gesture that I find heartwarming, she writes of the impact of being scooped up into a collective research-making endeavour, of belonging to a community of scholars (including poet-sociologists Laurel Richardson and Trinh T. Minh-ha) whose research agenda is to expand the ways we might know, to reflect the fullness and richness and complexity of the research endeavour itself, and, in so doing, of human experience: Time and enculturation have combined to make inquiry a terrain where I live, rather than a place I visit on occasion.Inquiry is less a stance and more an intentional gesture, a re-bodied approach to working with people, particularly women, on projects which matter to them locally and globally. Inquiry is a conspiracy, a breathing together, for which we need the conditions of being together and sharing a climate, or air, for breathing. Inquiry values difference, rather than fearing it, sees contiguity or complementarity as necessary for working together without suppressing our diversity. (Knowing 262) Hers is no airy-fairy disengaged mood-making endeavour. It is decidedly political: the inclination is to openness and growth, to take risks, to create critical spaces[…] When we make the assumptions of the norms of research problematic, we make the assumptions and the norms of life together on this planet problematic as well. We begin to dismantle the Western knowledge project, and we begin to learn a fundamental humility. Expanding our research literacies keeps us full of wonder, in spite of the shakey ground and the shadows. We can learn more when our pen is a tool of discovery, not domination.And her focus is ever on the artistry of research practices: The ontological and epistemological waters in which these [research] literacies continue to develop are social, political, ecological [...] Re-imagining inquiry is re-imagining ways to work with people and ideas which keep us, like the painter, the dancer, and the performance artist, watchfully poised, momentarily still, and yet fluidly in motion. (Knowing 263)In summary, then, the kind of writing that accompanies the research methodology that Lorri Neilsen has created cuts across the notion of knowledge as product, commodity, trump card. Knowing [for Neilsen] is an experience of immersion and expression rather than one of gathering data only to advance an argument […] A reader does not take away three key points or five examples. A reader comes away with the resonance of another’s world…our senses stimulated, our spirit and emotions affected. (Knowing 96) This kind of writing emerges from her desires to create a resonant, embodied, ethical, activist, feminist-honouring, and collaborative way to grapple with the nuance of human experience. This she calls lyric inquiry. Lyric inquiry sits on the margins, inhabits the liminal spaces, “places where we perceive patterns in new ways, find sensuous openings into new understandings, fresh concepts, wild possibilities” (Knowing 98). In her chapter on lyric inquiry in the 2008 Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research, Neilsen argues that lyric inquiry leans on no other mode of enquiry: it stands on its own, resonant and expressive, inviting fresh ways to see, read, consider experience. Unlike the narrative enquiry that currently popularly accompanies much social science research in order to bolster an argument, or illustrate a point being made in policy formulation or discussion (Hopkins), lyric inquiry adopts its own mode, its own performative spaces. It’s a heady concept and, I would argue, a brave contribution to the repertoire of qualitative arts-based research methodologies.For me Lorri Neilsen’s stance as poet, writer, researcher, woman, is beautifully captured in her piece from Threading Light which she has titled Writing has always felt like praying. Here we glimpse the lives of four figures: the Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, and the poet herself, each responding to catastrophe of sorts: Gotama saw the face of his infant son and sleeping wife,shaved his head and beard, put on his yellow robe, andleft without saying good-bye. Duties, possessions,ties of the heart: all dustweighing down his soul. He walked and walked,seeking a life wide open, complete and pure as polished shell.In a cave away from the fray of Mecca, vendettas,and a world soured by commerce, Muhammadshook as the words of a new scripturecame to him. Surrendered himselfto its beauty, singing and weeping verse by verse, year by yearfor twenty-one years.Of course you remember the man from Galileewho carried on his back the very wood on whichhis blood was spilled. How he pushed back the rockfrom the front of the cave and – this is gospel –ascended, emptied of self and full of god, returningnow in offerings of bread and wine.I pace back and forth on a cliff above the unknowable, luredby slippery and maverick tales that call forth terror, crackthe earth, shatter my bones with light. I have no needto verify old brown marks of stigmata, translate Coptic fragments.A burlap robe on display in the cold stone air of the Church of Santa Croceis inscrutable: it tells me only that my body is a ragged garmentand will be discarded too.But here, now, I am ready as a tuned stringto witness what is ravenous, mythic. Here I am holy, misbegotten,gossip on the lips of the gods, forgotten by the time the cupsare washed and put away. So I start as I start every day,cobbling a makeshift pulpit, casting for truths as they are given me:Man, woman, child, sun, moon, breath, tears,Stone, sand, sea. (Threading Light 102–3) It is ironic that the kind of research that Neilsen advocates, research that draws specifically on the arts to create new methodologies for the uncovering of topics traditionally explored by the social sciences, is being developed at precisely that moment when university arts departments around the world are being dismantled, and their value questioned (See Cohen, NY Times; Donoghue, Chronicle of Higher Education; Kitcher, Republic). As I indicated at the beginning of the article, I use this homage to Lorri Neilsen and her work to make the broader point that we lose the arts and the humanities in our universities at our peril. It’s not just that the arts are a pleasant addition, a ruffle on the edge of the serious straight-tailored cut of the research garment: rather, as Neilsen has argued throughout her research and writing career, the arts are central to our survival as a response-able, interactive, creative, thoughtful species. To turn our back on the arts in contemporary research practices is already a dangerous erosion, a research and knowledge-making catastrophe which Neilsen’s lyric inquiry seeks to address: to lose the arts from universities altogether would be a catastrophe of a much higher order. References Cohen, Patricia. “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth”. New York Times. 24 Feb. 2009. Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1993. Donoghue, Frank. “Can the Humanities Survive the 21st Century?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 5 Sep. 2010. Hopkins, Lekkie. “Why Narrative? Reflections on the Politics and Processes of Using Narrative in Refugee Research.” Tamara Journal for Critical Organisation and Inquiry 8.2 (2009): 135-45.Irigaray, Luce. “Sexual Difference.” The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. 165-77. Kitcher, Philip. “The Trouble with Scientism”. New Republic. 4 May 2012.Muller, M. (trans.). The Upanishads. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1879.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light. Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Neilsen, Lorri. “Lyric Inquiry.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88-98. Neilsen, Lorri. Knowing Her Place: Research Literacies and Feminist Occasions. San Francisco: Caddo Gap Press, and Halifax, NS: Backalong Books, 2008. Richardson, Laurel. “The Consequences of Poetic Representation: Writing the Self and Writing the Other.” Investigating Subjectivity: Windows on Lived Experience. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Michael Flaherty. Newbury Park: Sage, 1992. 125-140. Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. 959-978.Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Briefs and Hot Brown Honey are two Brisbane based companies producing genre-bending work combining different mixes of circus, burlesque, hiphop, dance, boylesque, performance art, rap and drag. The two companies produce provocative performance that is entertaining and draws critical acclaim. However, what is particularly distinctive about these two companies is that they are both founded and directed by performers from Samoan cultural backgrounds who have leap-frogged over the normative whiteness of much contemporary Australian performance. Both companies have a radical political agenda. This essay argues that through the presentation of diverse alternative bodies, not only through the performing bodies presented on stage but also in the corporate bodies of the companies they have set up, they profoundly challenge the structure of the Australian performance industry and contribute a radical re-envisaging of the potential of circus to act as a vital political force.Briefs was co-founded by Creative Director, Samoan, Fez Fa’anana with his brother Natano Fa’anana in 2008. An experienced dancer and physical theatre performer, Fa’anana describes the company’s performances as the “dysfunctional marriage of theatre, circus, dance, drag and burlesque with the simplicity of a variety show format” (“On the Couch”). As Fa’anana’s alter ego, “the beautiful bearded Samoan ringmistress Shivannah says, describing The Second Coming, the Briefs show at the Sydney Festival 2017, the show is ‘A little bit butch with a f*** load of camp’” (Lavers). The show involves “extreme costume changes, extravagant birdbath boylesque, too close for comfort yo-yo tricks and more than one highly inappropriate banana” (“Briefs: The Second Coming”).Briefs is an all-male company with gender-bending forming an integral part of the ethos. In The Second Coming the accepted sinuous image of the female performer entwining herself around the aerial hoop or lyra is subverted with the act featuring instead a male contortionist performing the same seductive moves with silky smooth sensuousness. Another example of gender bending in the show is the Dita Von Teese number performed by a male performer in a birdbath filled with water with a trapeze suspended over the top of it. Perhaps the most sensational example of alternative bodies in the show is “the moment when performer Dallas Dellaforce, wearing a nude body stocking with a female body drawn onto it, and an enormously long, curly white-blond wig blown by a wind machine, stands like a high camp Botticelli Venus rising up out of the stage” (Lavers). The highly visible body of Fez Fa’anana as the gender-bending Samoan ringmistress challenges the pervasive whiteness in contemporary circus. Although there has been some discourse on the issue of whiteness within the context of Australian theatre, for example Lee Lewis arguing for an aggressive approach to cross-racial casting to combat the whiteness of Australian theatre and TV (Lewis), there has however been very little discussion of this issue within Australian contemporary circus. Mark St Leon’s discussion of historical attitudes to Aboriginal performers in Australian circus is a notable exception (St Leon).This issue remains widely unacknowledged, an aspect of whiteness that social geographers Audrey Kobashi and Linda Peake identify in their writing, whiteness is indicated less by its explicit racism than by the fact that it ignores, or even denies, racist indications. It occupies central ground by deracializing and normalizing common events and beliefs, giving them legitimacy as part of a moral system depicted as natural and universal. (Kobayashi and Peake 394)As film studies scholar, Richard Dyer writes,the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity … In fact for most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general. Research – into books, museums, the press, advertising, films, television, software – repeatedly shows that in Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all, are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard. Whites are everywhere in representation … At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race. (3)Dyer writes in conclusion that “white people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words whiteness needs to be made strange” (541). This applies in particular to contemporary circus. In a recent interview with the authors, ex-Circus Oz Artistic Director and CEO, Mike Finch, commented, “You could make an all-round entertaining family circus show with [racial] diversity represented and I believe that would be a deeply subversive act in a way in contemporary Australia” (Finch).Today in contemporary Australian circus very few racially diverse bodies can be seen and almost no Indigenous performers and this fact goes largely unremarked upon. In spite of there being Indigenous cultures within Australia that celebrate physical achievement, clowning and performance, there seem to be few pathways into professional circus for Indigenous athletes or artists. Although a considerable spread of social circus programs exists across Australia working with Indigenous youth at risk, there seem to be few structures in place to facilitate the transitioning between these social circus classes and entry into circus training programs or professional companies. Since 2012 Circus Oz has set up the program Blakflip to mentor and support young Indigenous performers to try and redress this problem. This has led to two graduates of the program moving on to perform with the company, namely Dale Woodbridge Brown and Ghenoa Gella, and also led to the mentorship and support of several students in gaining entry into the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. Circus Oz has also now appointed an Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Program Officer, Davey Thomson, who is working to develop networks between past and present participants in the Blakflip program and to strengthen links with Indigenous Communities. However, it could be argued that Fez Fa’anana with Briefs has in fact leapfrogged over these programs aimed at addressing the whiteness in contemporary circus. As a Samoan Australian performer he has not only co-founded his own contemporary performance company in which he takes the central performing role, but has now also established another company called Briefs Factory, which is a creative production house that develops, presents, produces and manages artists and productions, and now at any one time employs around 20 people. In terms of his performative physical presence on stage, in an interview in 2015, Fa’anana described his performance alter ego, Shivannah, as the “love child of the bearded lady and ring master.” In the same interview he also described himself tellingly as “a Samoan (who is not a security guard, football player nor a KFC cashier),” and as “an Australian … a legal immigrant” (“On the Couch”). The radical racial difference that the alternative body of Shivannah the ringmistress presents in performance is also constantly reinforced by Fa’anana’s repartee. At the beginning of the show he urges the audience “to put their feet flat on the floor and acknowledge the earth and how lucky we are to be in this beautiful country that for 200 years now has been called Australia” (Fa’anana). Comments about his Samoan ancestry are sprinkled throughout the show and are delivered with a light touch, constantly making the audience laugh. At one point in the show resplendent in a sequined costume, Fa’anana stands downstage in front of two performers on their knees cleaning up the mess left on the stage from the act before, and he says, “Finally, I’ve made it! I’ve got a couple of white boys cleaning up after me” (Fa’anana). In another part of the show, alluding to white stereotypes of Indigenous performers, Fa’anana thanks the drag artist who taught him how to put his drag make-up on, saying “I used to put my make-up on with a burnt stick before he showed me how to do it” (Fa’anana).In his book on critical pedagogy, political activist and scholar Peter McLaren writes on approaches to developing the means to resist and subvert pervasive whiteness, saying, “To resist whiteness means developing a politics of difference […] we need to re-think difference and identity outside a set of binary oppositions. We need to view identity as coalitional, as collective, as processual, as grounded in the struggle for social justice” (213). One example of how identity outside binary oppositions was explored in The Second Coming was in an act by drag artist Dallas Dellaforce, who dressedin a sumptuous fifties evening dress with pink balloon breasts rising out of the top of his low cut evening dress and wearing a Marilyn Monroe blonde wig, camped it up as a fifties coquette, flipping from sultry into a totally scary horror tantrum, before returning to coquette mode with the husky phrase, ‘I love you.’ When at the end of the song, stripped naked, sporting a shaved bald head and wearing only a suggestive long thin pink balloon, the full potential of camp to reveal different layers of artifice and constructed identity was revealed. (Lavers)Fez Fa’anana comments at the end of the show that The Second Coming was not aimed at any particular group of people, but instead aimed to “celebrate being human.” However, if this is the case, Fa’anana is demanding an extended definition of being human that through the inclusion of diverse alternative bodies pushes for a new understandings of what constitutes being human and how human identity can be construed. His work demands an understanding that is not oppositional nor grounded in binary opposition to normative whiteness but instead forms part of a re-thinking of human identity through alternative bodies that are presented as processual, and deeply grounded in the struggle for the social justice issue of acceptance of difference and alternatives.Hot Brown Honey is another Brisbane based company working with circus in conjunction with other forms such as burlesque, hip hop, and cabaret. The all-female company was recently awarded the UK 2016 Total Theatre Award for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form. The company was co-founded by dancer and choreographer Lisa Fa’alafi, who is from the same Samoan family as Fez and Natano Fa’anana, with sound designer Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers, a successful hip hop artist, poet and record producer. From the beginning Hot Brown Honey was envisaged as providing a performance space for women of colour. Lisa Fa’alafi says the company was formed to address the lack of performance opportunities available, “It’s plain knowledge that there are limited roles for people of colour, let alone women of colour” (quoted in Northover).Lyn Gardner, arts critic for The Guardian in the UK, describing Hot Brown Honey’s performance, writes that the company fights “gender and racial stereotypes with a raucous glee, while giving a feminist makeover to circus, hip-hop and burlesque” (Gardner). The company includes women mainly “of Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Indonesian heritage taking on colonialism, sexism, gender stereotypes and racism through often confronting performance and humour; their tagline is ‘fighting the power never tasted so sweet’” (Northover).In their show Hot Brown Honey present a straps act. Straps is a physically demanding aerial circus act that requires great upper body strength and is usually performed by male aerialists. However, in the Hot Brown Honey show gender expectations are subverted with the straps act performed by a female aerialist. Gardner writes of the performance of this straps act at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a “sequence that conjures the twisted moves of a woman trying to escape domestic violence,” and “One of the best circus sequences I’ve seen at this festival” (Gardner). Hula hoops, a traditionally female act, is also subverted and used to explore the stereotypes of the “exotic notion of Pacific culture” (Northover). Gardner writes of this act that the hoola hoops “are called into service to explore western tourists’ culture of entitlement”. Company co-founder Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers, talks about the group’s approach to flipping perceptions of women of colour through investigating the power dynamics in gender relations, “We have a lot of flips around sexuality,” says Bowers. “Especially around the way people expect a black woman to be. We like to shift the exploitation and the power” (quoted in Northover).Another pressing issue that Hot Brown Honey address is a strange phenomenon apparent in much contemporary circus. In addition to the pervasive whiteness in contemporary circus, relatively few women are visible in many contemporary circus companies. Suzie Williams from Acrobatic Conundrum, the Seattle-based circus company, writes in her blog, “there are a lot of shows that feature many young, fit, exuberant guys and one flexible girl who performs a sensual/sentimental/romantic solo act” (Williams). Writing about Complètement Cirque, Montreal’s international circus festival which took place in July 2016, Williams says, “this year at the festival, my least favorite trend was … out of the 9 ticketed productions only one had more than one woman in it” (Williams, emphasis in original).Circus scholars have started to research this trend of lack of female representation both in contemporary circus schools and performance companies. “Gender in Circus Education: the institutionalization of stereotypes” was the title of a paper presented at the Circus and Its Others Conference in Montreal in July 2016 by Alisan Funk, a circus choreographer, teacher and director and an MA candidate at Concordia University in Montreal. Funk cited research from France showing that the educational programs and the industry are 70% male dominated. Although recreational programs in France have majority female populations, there appears to be a bottleneck at the level of entrance exams to superior schools. The few female students accepted to those schools are then frequently pushed towards solo aerial work (Funk). This push to solo aerial work means that the group floor work and acrobatics are often performed by men who create acrobatic groups that often then go on to form the basis for companies. (In this context the work of Circus Oz in this area needs to be acknowledged with the company having had a consistent policy over its 39 year existence of employing 50% female performers, however in the context of international contemporary circus this is increasingly rare).Williams writes in her blog about contemporary circus performance, “I want to see more women. I want to see women who look different from each other. I want to see so many women that no single women has to stand as a symbol of what all women can be” (Williams).Hot Brown Honey tackle the issue Williams raises head on, and they do it in the form of internationally award winning circus/cabaret that is all-female, where the bodies of the performers offer a radical alternative to the norms of contemporary circus and performance generally. The work shows women, a range of women performing circus-women of colour, with a wide range of bodies of varying shapes and sizes on stage. In Hot Brown Honey no single women in the show has to stand as a symbol of what all women can be. Briefs and Hot Brown Honey, through accessible yet political circus/cabaret, subvert the norms and institutionalized racial and gender-based biases inherent in contemporary circus both in Australia and internationally. By doing so these two companies have leap-frogged the normative presentation of performers in contemporary circus by speaking directly to a celebration of difference and diversity through the presentation of radical alternative bodies.ReferencesAlthusser, L. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1965/2005.Beeby, J. “Briefs: The Second Coming – Jack Beeby Chats with Creative Director Fez Faanana.” Aussie Theatre 2015. <http://aussietheatre.com.au/features/briefs-the-second-coming-jack-beeby-chats-with-creative-director-fez-faanana>.“Briefs: The Second Coming.” Sydney Festival 2016. <http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2017/briefs>.Dyer, R. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. Fa’anana, F. Repartee as Shivannah in The Second Coming by Briefs. Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, Sydney Festival, 7 Jan. 2017. Performance.Finch, M. Personal communication. 13 Dec. 2016.Funk, A. “Gender in Circus Education: The Institutionalization of Stereotypes.” Paper presented at Circus and Its Others, July 2016.Gardner, L. “Shameless and Subversive: The Feminist Revolution Hits the Edinburgh Fringe.” The Guardian Theatre Blog 14 Aug. 2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2016/aug/14/feminist-revolution-edinburgh-stage-fringe-2016-burlesque>.Kyobashi A., and L. Peake. “Racism Out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millennium.” Annals of American Geographers 90.2 (2000): 392-403.Lavers, K. “Briefs: The Second Coming.” ArtsHub Reviews 2017. <http://performing.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/performing-arts/katie-lavers/briefs-the-second-coming-252936>.Lewis, L. Cross-Racial Casting: Changing the Face of Australian Theatre. Platform Papers No. 13. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency House, 2007. McLaren, P. Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education. 6th ed. New York: Routledge, 2016. McLaren, P., and R. Torres. “Racism and Multicultural Education: Rethinking ‘Race’ and ‘Whiteness’ in Late Capitalism.” Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education. Ed. S. May. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press, 1999. 42-76. Northover, K. “Melbourne International Comedy Festival: A Mix of Politically Infused Hip Hop and Cabaret.” Sydney Morning Herald 3 Apr. 2016. <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/comedy/melbourne-international-comedy-festival-hot-brown-honey-a-mix-of-politicallyinfused-hiphop-and-cabaret-20160403-gnxazn.html>.“On the Couch with Fez Fa’anana.” Arts Review 2015. <http://artsreview.com.au/on-the-couch-with-fez-faanana/>.“Outrageous Boys’ Circus Briefs Is No Drag.” Daily Telegraph 2016. <http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/archive/specials/outrageous-boys-circus-briefs-is-no-drag/news-story/7d24aee1560666b4eca65af81ad19ff3>.St Leon, M. “Celebrated at First, Then Implied and Finally Denied.” The Routledge Circus Studies Reader. Eds. Katie Lavers and Peta Tait. London: Routledge, 2008/2016. 209-33. Williams, S. “Gender in Circus.” Acrobatic Conundrum 3 Aug. 2016. <http://www.acrobaticconundrum.com/blog/2016/8/3/gender-in-circus>.