Journal articles on the topic 'Inter-disciplinary citations'

Background: Anthropogenic global warming, interacting with social and other environmental determinants, constitutes a profound health risk. This paper reports a comprehensive literature review for 1989–2013 (inclusive), the first 25 years in which this topic appeared in scientific journals. It explores the extent to which articles have identified potentially catastrophic, civilization-endangering health risks associated with climate change. Methods: PubMed and Google Scholar were primarily used to identify articles which were then ranked on a three-point scale. Each score reflected the extent to which papers discussed global systemic risk. Citations were also analyzed. Results: Of 2143 analyzed papers 1546 (72%) were scored as one. Their citations (165,133) were 82% of the total. The proportion of annual papers scored as three was initially high, as were their citations but declined to almost zero by 1996, before rising slightly from 2006. Conclusions: The enormous expansion of the literature appropriately reflects increased understanding of the importance of climate change to global health. However, recognition of the most severe, existential, health risks from climate change was generally low. Most papers instead focused on infectious diseases, direct heat effects and other disciplinary-bounded phenomena and consequences, even though scientific advances have long called for more inter-disciplinary collaboration.

This research aims to investigate whether multi/inter-disciplinary research activities are related to research impact and publication counts of scholars. Since researchers with very high levels of multi/inter-disciplinarity might be able to target complex problems, we would expect them to receive more credits than their colleagues with a stronger disciplinary orientation. We analysed Web of Science (WoS) indexed publications of all associate and full professors from a random sample of Australian universities in physics, chemistry and biology (1980–2014). Australian Fields of Research (FoR) codes assigned to journals were used to calculate the diversification of authors’ publications. The number of citations in the first 3 years, number of 10% most frequently cited papers, and citation impact percentile were used for impact assessment. A few indicators were used to measure the diversity including ‘extent of diversification (ED)’ (number of distinct FoR codes divided by the number of publications) and ‘diversification ratio (DR)’ (ratio of the publications falling outside the dominant code to the total number of publications). A total of 47.76% of biologists’ publications, 35.23% of physicists’ publications and 20.36% of chemists’ publications were published in journals assigned to fields other than the Australian associate and full professors’ fields. Publications from biologists had the largest values of diversification. Women (compared with men) and associate professors (compared with full professors) in chemistry, biology and overall were more probably to publish diversely. ED was negatively correlated with output and citation impact. DR also had a negative but weak correlation with the number of publications and 10% most frequently cited paper.

The paper investigates how Information Systems (IS) has emerged as the product of interdisciplinary discourses. The research aim in this study is to better understand diversity in IS research, and the extent to which the diversity of discourse expanded and contracted from 1995 to 2011. Methodologically, we apply a combined citations/co-citations analysis based on the eight Association for Information Systems basket journals and the 22 subject-field classification framework provided by the Association of Business Schools. Our findings suggest that IS is in a state of continuous interaction and competition with other disciplines. General Management was reduced from a dominant position as a reference discipline in IS at the expense of a growing variety of other discourses including Business Strategy, Marketing, and Ethics and Governance, among others. Over time, IS as a field moved from the periphery to a central position during its discursive formation. This supports the notion of IS as a fluid discipline dynamically embracing a diverse range of adjacent reference disciplines, while keeping a degree of continuing interaction with them. Understanding where IS is currently at allows us to better understand and propose fruitful avenues for its development in both academia and practice.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze the modularity literature to identify the established and emerging perspectives. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature search and review was conducted through the use of bibliometrics and network analysis. The analysis identified structure within the literature, which revealed how the research area evolved between 1990 and 2015. Based on this search, the paper establishes the basis for analyzing the structure of modularity literature. Findings Factors were identified within the literature, demonstrating how it has evolved from a primary focus on the modularity of products to a broader view of the applicability of modularity. Within the last decade, numerous research areas have emerged within the broader area of modularity. Through core-periphery analysis, eight emerging sub-research areas are identified, of which one is the study of modularity in the context of services. Research limitations/implications Although bibliographic methods are limited as they are based on common citations within the field, they enable systematic analysis and the identification of structure within an emergent field of research. Such analysis has implications by for a growing and inter-disciplinary field like modularity by providing overview and suggesting future directions. Originality/value This paper contributes by conducting a systematic review based on the citation structure within modularity and identifies the established and emerging areas of research on modularity.

To reflect further on 20 years of the journal, we present a lexicographic and bibliometric study of all papers published in Public Understanding of Science (PUS). Lexicographical analysis of the vocabulary of 465 abstracts shows five classes of associated concepts in two periods, 1992–2001 and 2002–2010. The concern for public attitudes and mass media coverage remains on the card; while language has shifted from ‘public understanding’ to ‘public engagement’ and environmental concerns have waned then waxed. The bibliometric analysis traces the position of PUS in the inter-citation network of 165 related journals (ISI Web of Science citation database), grouped into 10 disciplines for the purpose of this analysis. Indicators derived from network logic show that the established position of PUS has been stable since 1997. PUS serves a varied brokerage role as gatekeeper into and liaison maker between disciplines. Its inter-citation network position allows PUS to perform inter-disciplinary boundary spanning work that offers a safe space for experimentation with ideas.

A journal stands as a marker of the intellectual space which holds vast areas of literature. Exploring and analysing the underlined knowledge sources and themes of the journal literature will significantly benefit any institution to identify the key intellectual domain strength and improve in research collaboration. The main objective of this paper is to identify inter-disciplinary trends of research for one university as a case study, using journal co-citation analysis. With the help of correlation metric and cluster analysis, the published literature between 2004 and 2013 from seven subject domains (i.e. including medicine, pharmacy and pharmacology, biological sciences, linguistics, modern languages, chemistry, and computer science and information systems) are analysed and interpreted. The results can demonstrate that there are the strong research dominance in the medical field and the prospective collaboration in social science and chemistry. In addition, the interpretation of the findings could be served as a foundation for future research in the direction of strong bonding between inter-disciplinary fields.

This paper aims to outline challenging issues of urban biodiversity in order to address yardsticks related to ecohydrology, and with a complementary approach to eutrophication impacts. The vision of environmental services, urbanization's consequences and management aspects of water governance are also depicted. Factors of river restoration, environmental tradeoffs and socio-cultural constrains are envisaged through concept questions towards emerging aspects that figure out methodological guides, strategic challenges for stakeholders and inter-disciplinary opportunities. Examples from case studies on restoration and management, from experiences and lessons learned, are enclosed, with brief discussions and literature citation.

Over the last twenty years, higher education for sustainable development (HESD) has attracted increasing interest from scholars, students, and academic institutions globally. This bibliometric review of research analyzed 1459 Scopus-indexed documents related to higher education for sustainable development. The goals of the review were to document the volume, growth trajectory, and geographic distribution of the HESD literature, identify key authors, journals, and publications, analyze the intellectual structure of this knowledge base, and highlight emerging research issues. The review documented a rapidly growing knowledge base of recent vintage, mostly authored by scholars located in developed societies. Four core journals were identified, based on the volume of HESD publications and citation impact. Author co-citation analysis revealed three research clusters that underlie this knowledge base: Managing for Sustainability in Higher Education, HESD Competencies, and Implementation of HESD. This review provides a benchmark for future reviews of research on HESD, reveals the emerging intellectual structure of this inter-disciplinary field, and offers reference points for scholars entering this discipline.

AbstractWhy are researchers studying the health effects of economic change reaching markedly varying conclusions? To understand these differences, we first systematically searched Web of Science for the literature on recessions and health yielding 461 articles and 14,401 cited documents. We then undertook a network analysis of co-citation pattern by disciplines, journals and backgrounds of the authors, followed by a chronological review of the literature, to trace the evolution of ideas. We then examined the extent to which earlier literature predicted what has happened in the 2007–2012 crisis. Our analysis finds the literature is dominated by disciplinary silos, with economics studies predominantly citing each other and relative isolation of psychiatry and substance abuse journals. Different philosophical approaches to assessing causality appear to contribute to varying interpretations, a tendency that is unlikely to be resolved without a shift in research norms. We conclude by calling for more inter-disciplinary research that combines empirical findings with a search for plausible mechanisms. This approach would evaluate not only the effects of economic shocks but also the mechanisms that offer protection against them.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of serendipity and approaches to its study particularly in relation to information studies. Design/methodology/approach – The origins of the term serendipity are described and its elaboration as an exploratory and explanatory concept in science and the social sciences are outlined. The distinction between serendipity and serendipity pattern is explained and theoretical and empirical studies of both serendipity and the serendipity patterns are explored. The relationship between information encountering is described. Empirical studies of serendipity using Citation Classics and other research approaches in information studies are described. Findings – The discrepancy between occurrences of serendipity in studies using Citation Classics and reported serendipity in philosophy of science, research anecdotes, information encountering and information seeking by inter-disciplinary researchers is highlighted. A comparison between a process model of serendipity and serendipity as an emergent behavioural characteristic are indicates directions for future research. Originality/value – The paper provides and original synthesis of the theoretical and empirical literature on serendipity with particular reference to work in information studies and an indication of the methodological difficulties involved in its study.

Background. Founded in 1970, Simulation & Gaming has emerged as the leading journal in this field of educational research. Given the centrality the journal’s influence, scholars have periodically reflected on the Journal’s contributions towards enhancing and refining both research and practice in educational simulation and gaming. Aims. This systematic review aimed to quantitatively document the distinctive contributions of S&G to research and practice on simulations and games over the past 50 years. The review sought to identify the geographic distribution of publications, influential authors and documents published in the Journal, the intellectual structure of the literature, and topics of recent interest. Method. The authors used the Scopus search engine to identify 1,427 research articles and reviews published in Simulation & Gaming from 1970 through the end of 2019. Bibliometric analyses included descriptive statistics, citation and co-citation and keyword co-occurrence analysis. Results. The review found that while the Journal has increased its geographical breadth impressively, the majority of Simulation & Gaming publications continue to be authored by scholars located in Anglo-American-European societies. The review also found that the Journal has become a prime venue for disseminating inter-disciplinary research on simulation and games. Nonetheless, business simulation/gaming surfaced as the dominant focus in the Journal’s content. Analysis of the intellectual structure of the knowledge base confirmed that the field is theoretically anchored in theories of social cognitive and experiential learning. Temporal keyword analysis identified active learning, game design, technology-enhanced simulations and games, and sustainability as topical clusters of recent interest to authors in Simulation & Gaming.

PurposeThis paper scrutinizes the scholarship on community archives' information work. Community archives and archiving projects represent unprecedentedly democratic venues for information work centering on essential documentary concepts such as custody, collection development and appraisal, processing, arrangement and description, organization, representation and naming, collaboration, resource generation and allocation, activism and social justice, preservation, reuse, and sustainability.Design/methodology/approachUnearthed through databases searches, citation chaining, and browsing, sources examined include peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and book chapters published in the English language between 1985 and 2018.FindingsThe literature on community archives’ information work shows considerable geographical (six continents), topical, and (inter)disciplinary variety. This paper first explores scholars' efforts to define both community and community archives. Second, it unpacks the ways in which community archives include new stakeholders and new record types and formats even as they leverage alternative archival principles and practices. Third, it discusses community archives as political venues for empowerment, activism, and social justice work. Fourth, this paper delves into the benefits and challenges of partnerships and collaborations with mainstream institutions. Fifth, it documents the obstacles community archives face: not only tensions within and among communities, but also sustainability concerns. Finally, it sets forth six directions for future research.Originality/valueThis paper is the first systematic review of the community archives literature.

Inter-disciplinary collaborative research is generally believed to lead to innovative outcomes in areas that may be missed in research studies based in a single discipline. However, currently available research performance indicators, based on scholarly peer-reviewed publications and citations from a single discipline, do little to recognise the merits of collaborative and inter-disciplinary research. This paper presents an empirical study of members of a research unit and their publication and grant profiles. From analysis of this data a set of profile categories emerged together with the relevant indicators which provide a framework from which a deeper understanding of how different research behaviours contribute to the differences in researchers’ individual profiles. These profiles could be used to provide a richer environment for the evaluation of research performance, both in terms of outputs and potential funding opportunities, and indicators of ‘good research’ in inter-disciplinary projects.

Abstract Cross-disciplinary research (multi-/inter-disciplinarity) is incentivised by funding agencies to foster research outcomes addressing complex societal challenges. This study focuses on the link between crossdisciplinary research and its uptake in a broad set of policy-related documents. Using the new policyoriented database Overton, matched to Scopus, logistic regression was used in assessing this relationship in publications from FP7- and H2020-supported projects. Cross-disciplinary research was captured through two lenses at the paper level, namely from the disciplinary diversity of contributing authors (DDA) and of cited references (DDR). DDA increased the likelihood that publications were cited in policy documents, with DDR possibly making a contribution, but only when publications result from the work of few authors. Citations to publications captured by Overton were found to originate in scientific advice documents, rather than in legislative or executive records. Our approach enables testing in a general way the assumption underlying many funding programmes, namely that cross-disciplinary research will increase the policy relevance of research outcomes. Findings suggest that research assessments could benefit from measuring uptake in policy-related literature, following additional characterisation of the Overton database; of the science-policy interactions it captures; and of the contribution of these interactions within the larger policymaking process. Peer Review https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00137

ObjectiveTo evaluate the extent to which the inter-institutional, inter-disciplinary mobilisation of data and skills in the Farr Institute contributed to establishing the emerging field of data science for health in the UK. Design and Outcome measuresWe evaluated evidence of six domains characterising a new field of science: defining central scientific challenges, demonstrating how the central challenges might be solved, creating novel interactions among groups of scientists, training new types of experts, re-organising universities, demonstrating impacts in society. We carried out citation, network and time trend analyses of publications, and a narrative review of infrastructure, methods and tools. SettingFour UK centres in London, North England, Scotland and Wales (23 university partners), 2013-2018. Results1. The Farr Institute helped define a central scientific challenge publishing a research corpus, demonstrating insights from electronic health record (EHR) and administrative data at each stage of the translational cycle in 593 papers with at least one Farr Institute author affiliation on PubMed. 2. The Farr Institute offered some demonstrations of how these scientific challenges might be solved: it established the first four ISO27001 certified trusted research environments in the UK, and approved more than 1000 research users, published on 102 unique EHR and administrative data sources, although there was no clear evidence of an increase in novel, sustained record linkages. The Farr Institute established open platforms for the EHR phenotyping algorithms and validations (>70 diseases, CALIBER). Sample sizes showed some evidence of increase but remained less than 10% of the UK population in primary care-hospital care linked studies. 3.The Farr Institute created novel interactions among researchers: the co-author publication network expanded from 944 unique co-authors (based on 67 publications in the first 30 months) to 3839 unique co-authors (545 papers in the final 30 months). 4. Training expanded substantially with 3 new masters courses, training >400 people at masters, short-course and leadership level and 48 PhD students. 5. Universities reorganised with 4/5 Centres established 27 new faculty (tenured) positions, 3 new university institutes. 6. Emerging evidence of impacts included: > 3200 citations for the 10 most cited papers and Farr research informed eight practice-changing clinical guidelines and policies relevant to the health of millions of UK citizens. ConclusionThe Farr Institute played a major role in establishing and growing the field of data science for health in the UK, with some initial evidence of benefits for health and healthcare. The Farr Institute has now expanded into Health Data Research (HDR) UK but key challenges remain including, how to network such activities internationally.

IR has long been concerned about its claim on disciplinary status. This includes concerns about its differentiation from Political Science and a divide between scholars who advocate a narrow disciplinary approach and others who conceive of IR as a pluri-disciplinary concept. Although these dilemmas revolve around its position vis-à-vis other disciplines, the vast majority of the recent disciplinary-sociology debates have focused on the extent of IR scholarship’s intradisciplinary fragmentation, along epistemological, topical, national, status and other lines. However, the sociology of science literature stresses that disciplines are the product of not only internal practice but also their knowledge relations to and differentiation from other disciplines. In short, intradisciplinary fragmentation cannot be considered as detached from a discipline’s relations to other disciplines – and, by extension, the differentiated knowledge relationships held by distinct intradisciplinary fragments to other disciplines. Taking this into account, this article uses bibliometric analysis of journals as a proxy for analysing the relationship between IR’s intradisciplinary make-up and its interdisciplinary relations to eight cognate disciplines between 2013 and 2017. Three distinct modes of bibliometric analysis are operationalised to map three different aspects of interdisciplinary knowledge practice: (inter)disciplinary debates (direct citation), multidisciplinary knowledge bases (bibliographic coupling) and interdisciplinary knowledge production (co-citation). On this basis, the article asks, one, whether and how differences in the interdisciplinary knowledge relations practised by IR scholarship correlate with intra-IR lines of fragmentation. And two, what are the implications for how IR’s socio-intellectual composition is understood and its disciplinary status evaluated?

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the characteristics of knowledge diffusion of library and information science to reveal its development trend and influence on other disciplines.Design/methodology/approachBased on the ESI discipline classification, this paper measures the knowledge diffusion from the library and information science to other disciplines over the last 24 years using indicators in four dimensions: breadth, intensity, speed and theme of knowledge diffusion.FindingsThe results show that the knowledge diffusion breadth of library and information science is wide, spreading to 21 ESI disciplines; the knowledge spread mainly concentrates in four soft or applied disciplines, and yet partially inter-disciplinary, and the knowledge diffusion intensity to each ESI discipline is parabolic whose highest point is mostly in 2004–2005; the speed of spreading to the 21 ESI disciplines is faster and faster, and the articles at the highest speed of knowledge diffusion are basically published after 2005; the knowledge diffusion themes are becoming increasingly diverse, deepening and specialization over time.Originality/valueThis paper modifies the relevant indicators of knowledge diffusion and constructs a measurement framework of knowledge diffusion from four aspects: breadth, intensity, speed and theme. The research method can also be used to explore the characteristics of knowledge absorption of a discipline from other ones.

Abstract Purpose Interdisciplinarity is a hot topic in science and technology policy. However, the concept of interdisciplinarity is both abstract and complex, and therefore difficult to measure using a single indicator. A variety of metrics for measuring the diversity and interdisciplinarity of articles, journals, and fields have been proposed in the literature. In this article, we ask whether institutions can be ranked in terms of their (inter-)disciplinary diversity. Design/methodology/approach We developed a software application (interd_vb.exe) that outputs the values of relevant diversity indicators for any document set or network structure. The software is made available, free to the public, online. The indicators it considers include the advanced diversity indicators Rao-Stirling (RS) diversity and DIV*, as well as standard measures of diversity, such as the Gini coefficient, Shannon entropy, and the Simpson Index. As an empirical demonstration of how the application works, we compared the research portfolios of 42 “Double First-Class” Chinese universities across Web of Science Subject Categories (WCs). Findings The empirical results suggest that DIV* provides results that are more in line with one's intuitive impressions than RS, particularly when the results are based on sample-dependent disparity measures. Furthermore, the scores for diversity are more consistent when based on a global disparity matrix than on a local map. Research limitations “Interdisciplinarity” can be operationalized as bibliographic coupling among (sets of) documents with references to disciplines. At the institutional level, however, diversity may also indicate comprehensiveness. Unlike impact (e.g. citation), diversity and interdisciplinarity are context-specific and therefore provide a second dimension to the evaluation. Policy or practical implications Operationalization and quantification make it necessary for analysts to make their choices and options clear. Although the equations used to calculate diversity are often mathematically transparent, the specification in terms of computer code helps the analyst to further precision in decisions. Although diversity is not necessarily a goal of universities, a high diversity score may inform potential policies concerning interdisciplinarity at the university level. Originality/value This article introduces a non-commercial online application to the public domain that allows researchers and policy analysts to measure “diversity” and “interdisciplinarity” using the various indicators as encompassing as possible for any document set or network structure (e.g. a network of co-authors). Insofar as we know, such a professional computing tool for evaluating data sets using diversity indicators has not yet been made available online.

“Interdisciplinarity” and “multidisciplinarity” are buzz-words indicating one of the main directions in which the academy is currently proceeding. As one example, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) includes multidisciplinarity as one of its six funding objectives. Under the “Standard Research Grants” program, SSHRC lists the objective to “foster and develop vigorous collaborative, multidisciplinary research activities among researchers in the social sciences and humanities” (n.pag.). Of course, this is not simply a Canadian phenomenon—institutes of higher education all over the world are endorsing the ideas of cross-disciplinary fertilization and interdisciplinarity as the path for the future. Certain tensions accompany this move, most particularly a concern for the maintenance of disciplinary boundaries. SSHRC objectives reflect this tension as well. Another SHRRC objective is to “maintain and develop vigorous disciplinary research activities” which requires the maintenance of disciplinary boundaries to some extent. Scholars within different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities have reacted with varying degrees of enthusiasm to the drive for inter/multidisciplinarity, ranging from enthusiastic approbation to outright hostility. This paper details the experiences of one scholar, myself, whose attempts at multidisciplinarity received more, and less, favourable responses from different disciplines with which he came into contact, and relates these responses to the disciplines’ attitudes toward multidisciplinarity and perceived needs for protection of their academic turf. This article draws primarily from multidisciplinarity rather than interdisciplinarity; a full treatment of the latter would require consideration of collaborative work by scholars in multiple disciplines. The disciplines I consider here include sociology, media and communication studies, English language and literature, and history. I turn to experiences at conferences and in graduate courses, and to correspondence with book and journal editors in writing this article. I am not suggesting mine is a universal experience, but I believe it makes a useful case study. I come to the social sciences and humanities disciplines as somewhat of an outsider. Although I possess an undergraduate degree in sociology, I undertook my graduate training within kinesiology departments, with a Masters in sport sociology, and a doctorate in sport history. I have been required to take the majority of my graduate courses outside of kinesiology, delving mostly into the offerings of history and sociology departments. Over the past seven years, I have attended and presented at conferences devoted to history, sociology, sport history and sport sociology, medical history, military history, communications, and “socialist studies.” In my experience, sociology is the discipline most open to multidisciplinarity and work from outside scholars. Likely, this is in part because sociology tends to borrow theories from a wide range of other areas, and the field itself encompasses a variety of perspectives. Certainly, there have always been attempts to define a single, coherent approach to society, such as Marx’s theories early in the discipline’s history, and, recently, Anthony Giddens’s ideas about structuration, circa 1984. Despite this emphasis upon unity and coherence, any introductory text to the field reveals several different approaches to social phenomena. Taken as a whole, sociology remains relatively tolerant of the different approaches taken by scholars under its banner, and to multidisciplinary endeavours: when you perceive the whole social world as your turf, outside perspectives are none too threatening. Generally, I have received two sorts of responses from the field of media and communication studies. Scholars interested in the topic of sport and the media have been interested in multidisciplinary overtures and greatly assisted my research endeavours. Scholars who are not interested in sport-related topics often simply ignore my work, or, on rare occasions, treated it with disdain. I do not read these varying responses as an indicator of a dislike for multidisciplinarity or as a form of turf protection. Media and communication scholars often take a multidisciplinary approach. As David Crowley and David Mitchell write, “If contemporary studies of communication exhibit a widening diversity of approaches, in part this phenomenon sends a signal about the discovery of communication and media issues by other areas of scholarship, with the resulting cross-talk” (2). At the source of this, therefore, lies an internal debate over what constitutes appropriate research topics in a field with an expanding research base rather than a resistance to outside dialogue. In this sense, these responses suggest an intradisciplinary rather than inter-disciplinary turf war. My few forays into the discipline of English literature have produced the same result. I have been ignored by conference organisers and book and journal editors to whom I made submissions , receiving, in most cases, no response. I suggest several possible reasons for this: 1) Quality—My submissions fail to meet a perceived standard, or, being an outsider, I am missing some nuance in the disciplinary approach. 2) Content—Despite my work relating sport to other disciplines, those disciplines may not consider sport related topics as being of serious scholarly interest. However, not all my work in this area is readily identifiable as a sport-related topic. 3) Practicalities—The editors and conference organisers are so inundated with submissions that they pick from within their discipline first. 4) Protection—A certain amount of turf protection is occurring. Reserving conference and publication slots for those situated within the discipline preserves the traditional research areas and prevents outsiders from encroaching into them. Reasons 3 and 4, above, seem the most plausible explanations. Realistically, English language and literature is one of the largest disciplines within the humanities, so “promoting from within” is only a sensible survival strategy. Furthermore, opening the traditional base of the discipline (writing and literature) to scholars from outside disciplines arguably might erode the academic turf upon which the discipline has always stood. This protectionism is somewhat ironic in that, as Keith Windschuttle notes, scholars within the English/literary studies area have been the group who have most widely ranged over the other traditional humanities and social sciences—such as history and philosophy, in the last three decades (16-19). Multidisciplinarity is possible: for example, the small but congenial Sport Literature Association comprises scholars from English departments and kinesiology/physical education departments in equal measures. However, my concern is that such cross-disciplinary connection will likely only occur for the time being in marginal topic areas like sport literature. In the discipline of history, I have met both the strongest supporters of multidisciplinarity and its staunchest opponents. Curiously, I did not encounter the fiercest resistance among the “old guard” of the profession, but instead among graduate students who firmly held to visions of objective historians searching for truth. In addition to being a legitimate historiographical viewpoint, graduate student support for disciplinary boundaries and traditional norms may represent a means of group affiliation and a strategy of personal academic survival. Many historians who operate in areas where they deal intimately with practitioners, such as medical and military history, openly welcome outside scholars. However, within the mainstream of the discipline, I have encountered scholars who believe that anyone not trained in a traditional historical method should not be researching historical topics. This relates to two turf wars for history, one within the discipline and one waged on outside scholars. Within history, scholars who believe the traditional notion of objective, positivistic research are fighting against newer methods largely borrowed from other disciplines. Several historians wrote books on this topic in the 1980s and 1990s, including Peter Novick’s well-balanced That Noble Dream (1988) and Norman F. Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages (1991), the latter filled with ad hominem attacks on anyone not following the tradition. The second turf war is a rear-guard action against outside scholars who began to write on historical topics over the last three decades, a turf war represented by such books as Richard Evans’s In Defence of History (1997) and Windschuttle’s more vociferous The Killing of History (1994). Scholars engaged in this battle argue that they are not only protecting their academic turf, but preserving the life of their discipline. In my experience, the disciplines of English literature and history are less open to multidisciplinarity than either sociology or communication studies. This reflects the traditional stance of the disciplines, but it may also be due, in part, to the recent change in the status of these disciplines within the university environment. Fifty years ago, history and English were central departments in any university, but with recent stresses on multidisciplinarity, commercialization and the scientific fields, their centrality has eroded. This highlights an inherent danger that accompanies multidisciplinarity—the erosion of individual disciplines. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavours attract funding and attention, but they blur disciplinary boundaries and may ultimately affect the status of different disciplines in the academic sphere. Depending on the discipline, and allowing for national and regional variation, multidisciplinarity may be taken as an opportunity, or as encroachment by outsiders. Disciplines, departments and individual scholars need to determine their own stance on the issue, and negotiate their position between these two poles. Works Cited Cantor, Norman F. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. Crowley, David, and David Mitchell. Communication Theory Today. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994. Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. London: Granta Books, 1997. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity, 1984. Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. “Standard Research Grants.” Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 27 Feb. 2004. <http://www.sshrc.ca/web/apply/program_descriptions/standard_e.asp>. Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists. Paddington, NSW, Australia: Macleay, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mason, Fred. "Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/07-multidisciplinarity.php>. APA Style Mason, F. (2004, Mar17). Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/07-multidisciplinarity.php>

The original idea for this issue of M/C was for contributors to discuss the many and varying possible meanings of the word "culture" and/or the various uses of the concepts of culture (in general) and cultures (in particular). If that original project had stood, then only the papers in the "Cultural Theory" middle section (Laba, McHoul, Mules) would have filled the brief in the strictest sense. In that section, Martin Laba begins by taking apart philosophical and anthropological versions of culture and running them up against his own experiences of cultural action in Pakistan (where "cultural action" is opposed to "theoretical insinuation"). Behind Laba's "ethnography", for those who have eyes to read it, lies a deep and trenchant critique of what is now the dominant and, to some extent, restrictive discipline in the area, Cultural Studies. This is followed by Alec's own paper which, on the surface, deals with a rather obscure (and atypical) dialogue of Heidegger's. It could, of course, have been located in the "Crossing Cultures" section (Berger, Degabriele, Gillard, Hyndman). But that's not the main point. The main point is to effect a critique -- in the Kantian sense of pushing to the limits in order to define -- of the idea of culture, by asking "When are we in the presence of a culture and not something else altogether?" The fundamental assumption here is that, ontologically, the cultural is a quite specific domain, contrary to the popular idea that "everything is cultural". Warwick Mules takes this up in a different and original way by asking how the concept of culture is practically challenged by current technologies. His argument is that our idea of culture is always tainted by the idea of physical presence. When new technologies allow that presence to be removed, what shall we then take as "the cultural"? As it turns out, for Mules, the cultural then becomes much more significant and less dominated by its "other" -- the social. As he writes: "the reduction of culture to the social should be replaced by an inquiry into the proliferation of the social through the cultural, as so many experiences of the virtual in time and space". So all of that would make a fine issue in itself. Except that we received much more challenging and contestable papers that opened up the question of culture by showing it rather than saying it. Arthur Asa Berger's paper, to start with, looks like the "pure theory" of Section 2, since it starts with something called "the origins of the term". But, in fact, by looking at travellers' stories -- and so using cultural difference as its sticking post -- and then coming back, after the fact, to the question of culture itself, leaves us wondering about the very idea. His view, that culture makes a "big difference", opens matters up in new ways that "pure theory" could never resolve. Shifting the ground, Maria Degabriele asks what happens when a traditionally non-culturalist discipline opens its doors to the idea of culture. Here, she writes specifically of Business Studies -- perhaps one of the last areas of intellectual inquiry where we'd expect to find culture discussed. Although critical of how Business Studies manipulates the idea of culture, she concludes with the possibility of opening a dialogue between the disciplines and how that may be done. Then we move on, again in the disciplinary sense, to Garry Gillard's investigation of culture in Freud's meaning of the term. If "Freud reads culture like a text", as Gillard says from the outset, then there might be a possible super-text, that is also a mind-culture system. The consequences of such a hypothesis are far-reaching -- because, if Gillard is right, then culture is built into the psychoanalytic project from the start rather than being a mere add-on to an analysis of individual minds. Then the David Hyndman paper takes us back to the more "practical" world by making us read the pages of perhaps the international cross-cultural organ, the National Geographic. Who, in the West, has never seen such pages? Who has never taken this ubiquitous organ as their own way into the culturally "exotic"? What Hyndman does is to take us there -- again -- but with a critical edge. And, in the process, shows us what the common sense idea of culture is in its mediated form. What surprised us, as editors of these pieces, was how often the question of culture overlapped with the question of identity. Somehow the two are intrinsically linked perhaps? To open this possibility, Felicity Newman, Tracey Summerfield and Reece Plunkett stage three quite different and distinct reflections on three equally distinct forms of cultural identity: being a Jew, being a lawyer and being a dyke. What emerges from this is a rather curious paradox: identities are radically different both in their "content" and in the ways in which different persons come to acquire and accept them. What is shown here, even if it's not said, is this: can there be a single theory of cultural identity that can cope with such incredible differences? If not, then identity itself may be a radically and irrevocably fractured concept. Something similar emerges when we look at cultural identities that are specific and local in the geographical sense. Here, Catherine Richardson takes us through the question of culture in an Australian country town, Tamworth, during an election phase. What is opened here is the possibility of islands of relatively stable cultural identity in a world which Richardson sees as otherwise fragmented and fractured and therefore torn by anxiety about cultural identities. Finally, Nadine Wills opens up the questions of cultural identity and cross-cultural alterity by turning to the everyday matter of clothing. Her argument is that "culture defines itself not only by what is contained within but by what is outside its boundaries as well". Working, then, with the dual concepts of borderlines and "transition discourses", Wills shows us how these can be used to analyse cultures as inter-connected small worlds. Susan Luckman & Alec McHoul -- 'Culture' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: Susan Luckman, Alec McHoul. "Editorial: 'Culture'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/edit.php>. Chicago style: Susan Luckman, Alec McHoul, "Editorial: 'Culture'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Susan Luckman, Alec McHoul. (2000) Editorial: 'Culture'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Of Motivational Art “Live to be outstanding.” What is new media in the age of the ‘rock ‘n’ roll life coach’ Anthony Robbins? There is no need to be ‘spectacular’ anymore. The Situationist critique of the ‘spectacle’ has worn out. That would be my assessment of the Robbins Age we now live in. Audiences are no longer looking for empty entertainment; they need help. Art has to motivate, not question but assist. Today’s aesthetic experience ought to awaken the spiritual side of life. Aesthetics are not there for contemplation only. Art has to become (inter)active and take on the role of ‘coaching.’ In terms of the ‘self mastery’ discourse, the 21st Century artist helps to ‘unleash the power from within.’ No doubt this is going to be achieved with ‘positive energy.’ What is needed is “perverse optimism” (Tibor Kalman). Art has to create, not destroy. A visit to the museum or gallery has to fit into one’s personal development program. Art should consult, not criticize. In order to be a true Experience, the artwork has to initiate through a bodily experience, comparable to the fire walk. It has to be passionate, and should shed its disdain for the viewer, along with its postmodern strategies of irony, reversal and indifference. In short: artists have to take responsibility and stop their silly plays. The performance artist’s perfect day-job: the corporate seminar, ‘trust-building’ and distilling the firm’s ‘core values’ from its ‘human resources’. Self-management ideology builds on the 80s wave of political correctness, liberated from a critical negativism that only questioned existing power structures without giving guidance. As Tony says: “Live with passion!” Emotions have to flow. People want to be fired up and ‘move out of their comfort zone.’ Complex references to intellectual currents within art history are a waste of time. The art experience has to fit in and add to the ‘personal growth’ agenda. Art has to ‘leverage fears’ and promise ‘guaranteed success.’ Part therapist, part consultant, art no longer compensates for a colourless life. Instead it makes the most of valuable resources and is aware of the ‘attention economy’ it operates in. In order to reach such higher plains of awareness it seems unavoidable to admit and celebrate one’s own perverse Existenz. Everyone is a pile of shit and has got dirty hands. Or as Tibor Kalman said: “No one gets to work under ethically pure conditions.” (see Rick Poynor’s <http://www.undesign.org/tiborocity/>). It is at that Zizekian point that art as a counseling practice comes into being. Mapping the Limits of New Media To what extent has the ‘tech wreck’ and following scandals affected our understanding of new media? No doubt there will also be cultural fall-out. Critical new media practices have been slow to respond to both the rise and the fall of dotcommania. The world of IT firms and their volatile valuations on the world’s stock markets seemed light years away from the new media arts galaxy. The speculative hey-day of new media culture was the early-mid 90s, before the rise of the World Wide Web. Theorists and artists jumped eagerly at not-yet-existing and inaccessible technologies such as virtual reality. Cyberspace generated a rich collection of mythologies. Issues of embodiment and identity were fiercely debated. Only five years later, with Internet stocks going through the roof, not much was left of the initial excitement in intellectual and artistic circles. Experimental technoculture missed out on the funny money. Over the last few years there has been a steady stagnation of new media culture, its concepts and its funding. With hundreds of millions of new users flocking onto the Net, the arts could no longer keep up and withdrew to their own little world of festivals, mailing lists and workshops. Whereas new media arts institutions, begging for goodwill, still portray artists as working at the forefront of technological developments, collaborating with state of the art scientists, the reality is a different one. Multi-disciplinary goodwill is at an all time low. At best, the artist’s new media products are ‘demo design’ as described by Peter Lunenfeld in Snap to Grid. Often it does not even reach that level. New media art, as defined by its few institutions, rarely reaches audiences outside of its own subculture. What in positive terms could be described as the heroic fight for the establishment of a self-referential ‘new media arts system’ through a frantic differentiation of works, concepts and traditions, may as well be classified as a dead-end street. The acceptance of new media by leading museums and collectors will simply not happen. Why wait a few decades anyway? The majority of the new media art works on display at ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Linz Ars Electronica Center, ICC in Tokyo or the newly opened Australian Centre for the Moving Image are hopeless in their innocence, being neither critical nor radically utopian in approach. It is for that reason that the new media arts sector, despite its steady growth, is getting increasingly isolated, incapable of addressing the issues of today’s globalized world. It is therefore understandable that the contemporary (visual) arts world is continuing the decades old silent boycott of interactive new media works in galleries, biennales and shows such as Documenta. A critical reassessment of the role of arts and culture within today’s network society seems necessary. Let’s go beyond the ‘tactical’ intentions of the players involved. This is not a blame game. The artist-engineer, tinkering away on alternative human-machine interfaces, social software, or digital aesthetics has effectively been operating in a self-imposed vacuum. Over the last few decades both science and business have successfully ignored the creative community. Even worse, artists have actively been sidelined in the name of ‘usability’. The backlash movement against web design, led by usability guru Jakob Nielsen, is a good example of this trend. Other contributing factors may have been fear of corporate dominance by companies such as AOL/Time Warner and Microsoft. Lawrence Lessig argues that innovation of the Internet itself is in danger. In the meanwhile the younger generation is turning its back from new media arts questions and operates as anti-corporate activists, if at all engaged. Since the crash the Internet has rapidly lost its imaginative attraction. File swapping and cell phones can only temporarily fill the vacuum. It would be foolish to ignore this. New media have lost their magic spell; the once so glamorous gadgets are becoming part of everyday life. This long-term tendency, now in a phase of acceleration, seriously undermines the future claim of new media altogether. Another ‘taboo’ issue in new media is generationalism. With video and expensive interactive installations being the domain of the ‘68 baby boomers, the generation of ‘89 has embraced the free Internet. But the Net turned out to be a trap for them. Whereas real assets, positions and power remains in the hands of the ageing baby boomers, the gamble of its predecessors on the rise of new media did not materialize. After venture capital has melted away, there is still no sustainable revenue system in place for the Internet. The slow working education bureaucracies have not yet grasped the new media malaise. Universities are still in the process of establishing new media departments. But that will come to a halt at some point. The fifty-something tenured chairs and vice-chancellors must feel good about their persistent sabotage. ‘What’s so new about new media anyway? Technology was hype after all, promoted by the criminals of Enron and WorldCom. It’s enough for students to do a bit of email and web surfing, safeguarded within a filtered and controlled intranet…’ It is to counter this cynical reasoning that we urgently need to analyze the ideology of the greedy 90s and its techno-libertarianism. If we don’t disassociate new media quickly from that decade, if we continue with the same rhetoric, the isolation of the new media sector will sooner or later result in its death. Let’s transform the new media buzz into something more interesting altogether – before others do it for us.The Will to Subordinate to Science The dominant wing of Western ‘new media arts’ lacks a sense of superiority, sovereignty, determination and direction. One can witness a tendency towards ‘digital inferiority’ at virtually every cyber-event. Artists, critics and curators have made themselves subservient to technology – and ‘life science’ in particular. This ideological stand has grown out of an ignorance that cannot be explained easily. We’re talking here about a subtle mentality, almost a taboo. The cult practice between ‘domina’ science and its slaves the new media artists is taking place in backrooms of universities and art institutions, warmly supported by genuinely interested corporate bourgeois elements – board members, professors, science writers and journalists – that set the technocultural agenda. Here we’re not talking about some form of ‘techno celebration.’ New media art is not merely a servant to corporate interests. If only it was that simple. The reproach of new media arts ‘celebrating’ technology is a banality, only stated by outsiders; and the interest in life sciences can easily be sold as a (hidden) longing to take part in science’s supra-human ‘triumph of logos,’ but I won’t do that here. Scientists, for their part, are disdainfully looking down at the vaudeville interfaces and well-meant weirdness of biotech art. Not that they will say anything. But the weak smiles on their faces bespeak a cultural gap light years wide. An exquisite non-communication is at hand here. Performance artist Coco Fusco recently wrote a critique of biotech art on the Nettime mailinglist (January 26, 2003). “Biotech artists have claimed that they are redefining art practice and therefore the old rules don't apply to them.” For Fusco bioart’s “heroic stance and imperviousness to criticism sounds a bit hollow and self-serving after a while, especially when the demand for inclusion in mainstream art institutions, art departments in universities, art curricula, art world money and art press is so strong.” From this marginal position, its post-human dreams of transcending the body could better be read as desires to transcend its own marginality, being neither recognized as ‘visual arts’ nor as ‘science.’ Coco Fusco: “I find the attempts by many biotech art endorsers to celebrate their endeavor as if it were just about a scientific or aesthetic pursuit to be disingenuous. Its very rhetoric of transcendence of the human is itself a violent act of erasure, a master discourse that entails the creation of ‘slaves’ as others that must be dominated.” OK, but what if all this remains but a dream, prototypes of human-machine interfaces that, like demo-design, are going nowhere? The isolated social position of the new media arts in this type of criticism is not taken into consideration. Biotech art has to be almighty in order for the Fusco rhetoric to function. Coco Fusco rightly points at artists that “attend meetings with ‘real’ scientists, but in that context they become advisors on how to popularize science, which is hardly what I would call a critical intervention in scientific institutions.” Artists are not ‘better scientists’ and the scientific process is not a better way of making art than any other, Fusco writes. She concludes: “Losing respect for human life is certainly the underbelly of any militaristic adventure, and lies at the root of the racist and classist ideas that have justified the violent use of science for centuries. I don't think there is any reason to believe that suddenly, that kind of science will disappear because some artists find beauty in biotech.” It remains an open question where radical criticism of (life) science has gone and why the new media (arts) canon is still in such a primitive, regressive stage. Links http://www.undesign.org/tiborocity/ Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Lovink, Geert. "Fragments on New Media Arts and Science" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/10-fragments.php>. APA Style Lovink, G. (2003, Aug 26). Fragments on New Media Arts and Science. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/10-fragments.php>

Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic, parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie advertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line -- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a (any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film -- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason, and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute, everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life, points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of spectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an industrial edifice. Streamline Audiences In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market and the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process, however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt, much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty; here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity (genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense", and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of three national television structures and their operating assumptions about audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing 'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips, "hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of, and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially, her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of "actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of industry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non- necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques, which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this detailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily occurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms, that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which the practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition Time One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S. and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other continental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and service management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone. Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements, trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990, when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes (Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter- media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearing in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and locations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip, offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow", which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisements and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing text of television. There are not the same possibilities for "interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow. Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors, especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release, with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer- guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to; acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural consumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday, sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate seating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend, and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food (George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema, reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints, will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual Frameworks A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as well. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety 13 June 1990: 48. Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+. Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy -- or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38. Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>. Chicago style: Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).

In “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber outline what they term “wicked problems.” According to Rittel and Webber, wicked problems are unavoidably “ill-defined,” that is, unlike “problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable…[wicked problems] are never solved. At best they are only re-solved—over and over again” (160). Rittel and Webber were thinking specifically of the challenges involved in making decisions within immensely complex social circumstances—building highways through cities and designing low income housing projects, for example—but public policy-making and urban design are not the only fields rife with wicked problems. Indeed, the nub of Rittel and Webber’s articulation of wicked problems concerns a phenomenon common to many disciplines: interdisciplinary collaboration. As anyone who has collaborated with people outside her area of expertise will acknowledge, interdisciplinary collaboration itself is among the wickedest problems of all. By way of introduction, we direct the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. In the seven years since LGI was inaugurated, we have undertaken many productive and well-received collaborations, including: 1) leading workshops at national and international conferences; 2) presenting numerous academic talks; 3) editing academic journals; 4) writing books, book chapters, journal articles, and other scholarly materials; 5) exhibiting creative and archival work in museums, galleries, and libraries; and 6) building one of the largest academic research archives of computer games, systems, paraphernalia, and print-, video-, and audio-scholarship in the world. We thus have a fair bit of experience with the wicked problem of collaboration. The purpose of this article is to share some of that experience with readers and to describe candidly some of the challenges we have faced—and sometimes overcome—working collaboratively across disciplinary, institutional, and even international boundaries. Collaborative Circle? Michael Farrell, whose illuminating analysis of “collaborative circles” has lent much to scholars’ understandings of group dynamics within creative contexts, succinctly describes how many such groups form: “A collaborative circle is a set of peers in the same discipline who, through open exchange of support, ideas, and criticism develop into an interdependent group with a common vision that guides their creative work” (266). Farrell’s model, while applicable to several of the smaller projects LGI has nurtured over the years, does not capture the idiosyncratic organizational method that has evolved more broadly within our collective. Rather, LGI has always tended to function according to a model more akin to that found in used car dealerships, one where “no reasonable offer will be refused.” LGI is open to anyone willing to think hard and get their hands dirty, which of course has molded the organization and its projects in remarkable ways. Unlike Farrell’s collaborative circles, for example, LGI’s collaborative model actually decentralizes the group’s study and production of culture. Any member from anywhere—not just “peers in the same discipline”—can initiate or join a project provided she or he is willing to trade in the coin of the realm: sweat equity. Much like the programmers of the open source software movement, LGI’s members work only on what excites them, and with other similarly motivated people. The “buy-in,” simply, is interest and a readiness to assume some level of responsibility for the successes and failures of a given project. In addition to decentralizing the group, LGI’s collaborative model has emerged such that it naturally encourages diversity, swelling our ranks with all kinds of interesting folks, from fine artists to clergy members to librarians. In large part this is because our members view “peers” in the most expansive way possible; sure, optical scientists can help us understand how virtual cameras simulate the real properties of lenses and research linguists can help us design more effective language-in-context tools for our games. However, in an organization that always tries to understand the layers of meaning-making that constitute computer games, such technical expertise is only one stratum. For a game about the cultural politics of ancient Greece that LGI has been working on for the past year, our members invited a musical instrument maker, a potter, and a school teacher to join the development team. These new additions—all experts and peers as far as LGI is concerned—were not merely consultants but became part of the development team, often working in areas of the project completely outside their own specialties. While some outsiders have criticized this project—currently known as “Aristotle’s Assassins”—for being too slow in development, the learning taking place as it moves forward is thrilling to those on the inside, where everyone is learning from everyone else. One common consequence of this dynamic is, as Farrell points out, that the work of the individual members is transformed: “Those who are merely good at their discipline become masters, and, working together, very ordinary people make extraordinary advances in their field” (2). Additionally, the diversity that gives LGI its true interdisciplinarity also makes for praxical as well as innovative projects. The varying social and intellectual concerns of the LGI’s membership means that every collaboration is also an exploration of ethics, responsibility, epistemology, and ideology. This is part of what makes LGI so special: there are multiple levels of learning that underpin every project every day. In LGI we are fond of saying that games teach multiple things in multiple ways. So too, in fact, does collaborating on one of LGI’s projects because members are constantly forced to reevaluate their ways of seeing in order to work with one another. This has been particularly rewarding in our international projects, such as our recently initiated project investigating the relationships among the mass media, new media, and cultural resource management practices. This project, which is building collaborative relationships among a team of archaeologists, game designers, media historians, folklorists, and grave repatriation experts from Cambodia, the Philippines, Australia, and the U.S., is flourishing, not because its members are of the same discipline nor because they share the same ideology. Rather, the team is maturing as a collaborative and productive entity because the focus of its work raises an extraordinary number of questions that have yet to be addressed by national and international researchers. In LGI, much of the sweat equity we contribute involves trying to answer questions like these in ways that are meaningful for our international research teams. In our experience, it is in the process of investigating such questions that effective collaborative relationships are cemented and within which investigators end up learning about more than just the subject matter at hand. They also learn about the micro-cultures, histories, and economies that provide the usually invisible rhetorical infrastructures that ground the subject matter and to which each team member is differently attuned. It is precisely because of this sometimes slow, sometimes tense learning/teaching dynamic—a dynamic too often invoked in both academic and industry settings to discourage collaboration—that François Chesnais calls attention to the fact that collaborative projects frequently yield more benefits than the sum of their parts suggests possible. This fact, says Chesnais, should lead institutions to value collaborative projects more highly as “resource-creating, value-creating and surplus-creating potentialities” (22). Such work is always risky, of course, and Jitendra Mohan, a scholar specializing in cross-cultural collaborations within the field of psychology, writes that international collaboration “raises methodological problems in terms of the selection of culturally-coloured items and their historical as well as semantic meaning…” (314). Mohan means this as a warning and it is heeded as such by LGI members; at the same time, however, it is precisely the identification and sorting out of such methodological problems that seems to excite our best collaborations and most innovative work. Given such promise, it is easy to see why LGI is quite happy to adopt the used car dealer’s slogan “no reasonable offer refused.” In fact, in LGI we see our open-door policy for projects as mirroring our primary object of study: games. This is another factor that we believe contributes to the success of our members’ collaborations. Commercial computer game development is a notoriously interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavor. By collaborating in a fashion similar to professional game developers, LGI members are constantly fashioning more complex understandings of the kinds of production practices and social interactions involved in game development; these practices and interactions are crucial to game studies precisely because they shape what games consist of, how they mean, and the ways in which they are consumed. For this reason, we think it foolish to refuse any reasonable offer to help us explore and understand these meaning-making processes. Wicked Problem Backlash Among the striking points that Rittel and Webber make about wicked problems is that solutions to them are usually created with great care and planning, and yet inevitably suffer severe criticism (at least) or utter annihilation (at worst). Far from being indicative of a bad solution, this backlash against a wicked problem’s solution is an integral element of what we call the “wicked problem dialectic.” The backlash against attempts to establish and nurture transdisciplinary collaboration is easy to document at multiple levels. For example, although our used car dealership model has created a rich research environment, it has also made the quotidian work of doing projects difficult. For one thing, organizing something as simple as a project meeting can take Herculean efforts. The wage earners are on a different schedule than the academics, who are on a different schedule from the artists, who are on a different schedule from the librarians. Getting everyone together in the same room at the same time (even virtually) is like herding cats. As co-directors of LGI, we have done our best to provide the membership with both synchronous and asynchronous resources to facilitate communication (e.g., conference-call enabled phones, online forums, chat clients, file-sharing software, and so on), but nothing beats face-to-face meetings, especially when projects grow complex or deadlines impend mercilessly. Nonetheless, our members routinely fight the meeting scheduling battle, despite the various communication options we have made available through our group’s website and in our physical offices. Most recently we have found that an organizational wiki makes the process of collecting and sharing notes, drawings, videos, segments of code, and drafts of writing decidedly easier than it had been, especially when the projects involve people who do not live a short distance (or a cheap phone call) away from each other. Similarly, not every member has the same amount of time to devote to LGI and its projects despite their considerable and demonstrated interest in them. Some folks are simply busier than others, and cannot contribute to projects as much as they might like. This can be a real problem when a project requires a particular skill set, and the owner of those skills is busy doing other things like working at a paying job or spending time with family. LGI’s projects are always done in addition to members’ regular workload, and it is understandable when that workload has to take precedence. Like regular exercise and eating right, the organization’s projects are the first things to go when life’s demands intrude. Different projects handle this challenge in a variety of ways, but the solutions always tend to reflect the general structure of the project itself. In projects that follow what Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede refer to as “hierarchical collaborations”—projects that are clearly structured, goal-oriented, and define clear roles for its participants—milestones and deadlines are set at the beginning of the project and are often tied to professional rewards that stand-in for a paycheck: recommendation letters, all-expenses-paid conference trips, guest speaking invitations, and so forth (133). Less organized projects—what Lunsford and Ede call “dialogic collaborations”—deal with time scheduling challenges differently. Inherently, dialogic collaborations such as these tend to be less hampered by time because they are loosely structured, accept and often encourage members to shift roles, and often value the process of working toward the project’s goals as highly as actually attaining them (134). The most common adaptive strategy used in these cases is simply for the most experienced members of the team to keep the project in motion. As long as something is happening, dialogic collaborations can be kept fruitful for a very long time, even when collaborators are only able to contribute once or twice a month. In our experience, as long as each project’s collaborators understand its operative expectations—which can, by the way, be a combination of hierarchical and dialogical modes—their work proceeds smoothly. Finally, there is the matter of expenses. As an institutionally unaffiliated collective, the LGI has no established revenue stream, which means project funding is either grant-based or comes out of the membership’s pockets. As anyone who has ever applied for a grant knows, it is one thing to write a grant, and another thing entirely to get it. Things are especially tough when grant monies are scarce, as they have been (at least on this side of the pond) since the U.S. economy started its downward spiral several years ago. Tapping the membership’s pockets is not really a viable funding option either. Even modest projects can be expensive, and most folks do not have a lot of spare cash to throw around. What this means, ultimately, is that even though our group’s members have carte blanche to do as they will, they must do so in a resource-starved environment. While it is sometimes disappointing that we are not able to fund certain projects despite their artistic and scholarly merit, LGI members learned long ago that such hardships rarely foreclose all opportunities. As Anne O’Meara and Nancy MacKenzie pointed out several years ago, many “seemingly extraneous features” of collaborative projects—not only financial limitations, but also such innocuous phenomena as where collaborators meet, the dance of their work and play patterns, their conflicting responsibilities, geographic separations, and the ways they talk to each other—emerge as influential factors in all collaborations (210). Thus, we understand in LGI that while our intermittent funding has influenced the dimension and direction of our group, it has also led to some outcomes that in hindsight we are glad we were led to. For example, while LGI originally began studying games in order to discover where production-side innovations might be possible, a series of funding shortfalls and serendipitous academic conversations led us to favor scholarly writing, which has now taken precedence over other kinds of projects. At the most practical level, this works out well because writing costs nothing but time, plus there is a rather desperate shortage of good game scholarship. Moreover, we have discovered that as LGI members have refined their scholarship and begun turning out books, chapters, and articles on a consistent basis, both they and the organization accrue publicity and credibility. Add to this the fact that for many of the group’s academics, traditional print-based work is more valued in the tenure and promotion economy than is, say, an educational game, an online teachers’ resource, or a workshop for a local parent-teacher association, and you have a pretty clear research path blazed by what Kathleen Clark and Rhunette Diggs have called “dialectical collaboration,” that is, collaboration marked by “struggle and opposition, where tension can be creative, productive, clarifying, as well as difficult” (10). Conclusion In sketching out our experience directing a highly collaborative digital media research collective, we hope we have given readers a sense of why collaboration is almost always a “wicked problem.” Collaborators negotiate different schedules, work demands, and ways of seeing, as well as resource pinches that hinder the process by which innovative digital media collaborations come to fruition. And yet, it is precisely because collaboration can be so wicked that it is so valuable. In constantly requiring collaborators to assess and reassess their rationales, artistic visions, and project objectives, collaboration makes for reflexive, complex, and innovative projects, which (at least to us) are the most satisfying and useful of all. References Chesnais, François. “Technological Agreements, Networks and Selected Issues in Economic Theory.” In Technological Collaboration: The Dynamics of Cooperation in Industrial Innovation. Rod Coombs, Albert Richards, Vivien Walsh, and Pier Paolo Saviotti, eds. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1996. 18-33. Clark, Kathleen D., and Rhunette C. Diggs. “Connected or Separated?: Toward a Dialectical View of Interethnic Relationships.” In Building Diverse Communities: Applications of Communication Research. McDonald, Trevy A., Mark P. Orbe, and Trevellya Ford-Ahmed, eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 3-25. Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics & Creative Work. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Mohan, Jitendra. “Cross-Cultural Experience of Collaboration in Personality Research.” Personality across Cultures: Recent Developments and Debates. Jitendra Mohan, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 313-335. O’Meara, Anne, and Nancy R. MacKenzie. “Reflections on Scholarly Collaboration.” In Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy. Elizabeth G. Peck and JoAnna Stephens Mink, eds. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. 209-26. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Weber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155-69. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ruggill, Judd, and Ken McAllister. "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php>. APA Style Ruggill, J., and K. McAllister. (May 2006) "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php>.

Previously limited and somewhat neglected as a focus of academic scrutiny, interest in home and domesticity is now growing apace across the humanities and social sciences (Mallett; Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Home”; Blunt and Dowling). This is evidenced in the recent publication of a range of books on home from various disciplines (Chapman and Hockey; Cieraad; Miller; Chapman; Pink; Blunt and Dowling), the advent in 2004 of a new journal, Home Cultures, focused specifically on the subject of home and domesticity, as well as similar recent special issues in several other journals, including Antipode, Cultural Geographies, Signs and Housing, Theory and Society. This increased interest in the home as a site of social and cultural inquiry reflects a renewed fascination with home and domesticity in the media, popular culture and everyday life. Domestic life is explicitly central to the plot and setting of many popular and/or critically-acclaimed television programs, especially suburban dramas like Neighbours [Australia], Coronation Street [UK], Desperate Housewives [US] and The Secret Life of Us [Australia]. The deeply-held value of home – as a place that must be saved or found – is also keenly represented in films such as The Castle [Australia], Floating Life [Australia], Rabbit-Proof Fence [Australia], House of Sand and Fog [US], My Life as a House [US] and Under the Tuscan Sun [US]. But the prominence of home in popular media imaginaries of Australia and other Western societies runs deeper than as a mere backdrop for entertainment. Perhaps most telling of all is the rise and ratings success of a range of reality and/or lifestyle television programs which provide their audiences with key information on buying, building, renovating, designing and decorating home. In Australia, these include Backyard Blitz , Renovation Rescue, The Block, Changing Rooms, DIY Rescue, Location, Location and Our House. Likewise, popular magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Australian Vogue Living tell us how to make our homes more beautiful and functional. Other reality programs, meanwhile, focus on how we might secure the borders of our suburban homes (Crimewatch [UK]) and our homeland (Border Security [Australia]). Home is also a strong theme in other media forms and debates, including life writing, novels, art and public dialogue about immigration and national values (see Blunt and Dowling). Indeed, notions of home increasingly frame ‘real world’ experiences, “especially for the historically unprecedented number of people migrating across countries”, where movement and resettlement are often configured through processes of leaving and establishing home (Blunt and Dowling 2). In this issue of M/C Journal we contribute to these critical voices and popular debates, seeking to further untangle the intricate and multi-layered connections between home and everyday life in the contemporary world. Before introducing the articles comprising this issue, we want to extend some of the key themes that weave through academic and popular discussions of home and domesticity, and which are taken up and extended here by the subsequent articles. Home is powerful, emotive and multi-faceted. As a basic desire for many, home is saturated with the meanings, memories, emotions, experiences and relationships of everyday life. The idea and place of home is perhaps typically configured through a positive sense of attachment, as a place of belonging, intimacy, security, relationship and selfhood. Indeed, many reinforce their sense of self, their identity, through an investment in their home, whether as house, hometown or homeland. But at the same time, home is not always a well-spring of succour and goodness; others experience alienation, rejection, hostility, danger and fear ‘at home’. Home can be a site of domestic violence or ‘house arrest’; young gay men and lesbians may feel alienated in the family home; asylum seekers are banished from their homelands; indigenous peoples are often dispossessed of their homelands; refugees might be isolated from a sense of belonging in their new home(land)s. But while this may seriously mitigate the affirmative experience of home, many still yearn for places, both figurative and material, to call ‘home’ – places of support, nourishment and belonging. The experience of violence, loss, marginalisation or dispossession can trigger, in Michael Brown’s words, “the search for a new place to call home”: “it means having to relocate oneself, to leave home and reconfigure it elsewhere” (50). Home, in this sense, understood as an ambiguous site of both belonging and alienation, is not a fixed and static location which ‘grounds’ an essential and unchanging sense of self. Rather, home is a process. If home enfolds and carries some sense of desire for positive feelings of attachment – and the papers in this special issue certainly suggest so, most quite explicitly – then equally this is a relationship that requires ongoing maintenance. Blunt and Dowling call these processes ‘homemaking practices’, and point to how home must be understood as a lived space which is “continually created and recreated through everyday practices” (23). In this way, home is posited as relational – the ever-changing outcome of the ongoing and mediated interaction between self, others and place. What stands out in much of the above discussion is the deep inter-connection between home, identity and self. Across the humanities and social sciences, home has been keenly explored as a crucial site “for the construction and reconstruction of one’s self” (Young 153). Indeed, Blunt and Dowling contend that “home as a place and an imaginary constitutes identities – people’s sense of themselves are related to and produced through lived and imaginative experiences of home” (24). Thus, through various homemaking practices, individuals generate a sense of self (and social groups produce a sense of collective identity) while they create a place called home. Moreover, as a relational entity, neither home nor identity are fixed, but mutually and ongoingly co-constituted. Homemaking enables changing and cumulative identities to be materialised in and supported by the home (Blunt and Dowling). Unfolding identities are progressively embedded and reflected in the home through both everyday practices and routines (Wise; Young), and accumulating and arranging personally meaningful objects (Marcoux; Noble, “Accumulating Being”). Consequently, as one ‘makes home’, one accumulates a sense of self. Given these intimate material and affective links between home, self and identity, it is perhaps not surprising that writing about a place called home has often been approached autobiographically (Blunt and Dowling). Emphasising the importance of autobiographical accounts for understanding home, Blunt argues that “through their accounts of personal memories and everyday experiences, life stories provide a particularly rich source for studying home and identity” (“Home and Identity”, 73). We draw attention to the importance of autobiographical accounts of home because this approach is prominent across the papers comprising this issue of M/C Journal. The authors have used autobiographical reflections to consider the meanings of home and processes of homemaking operating at various scales. Three papers – by Brett Mills, Lisa Slater and Nahid Kabir – are explicitly autobiographical, weaving scholarly arguments through deeply personal experiences, and thus providing evocative first-hand accounts of the power of home in the contemporary world. At the same time, several other authors – including Melissa Gregg, Gilbert Caluya and Jennifer Gamble – use personal experiences about home, belonging and exclusion to introduce or illustrate their scholarly contentions about home, self and identity. As this discussion suggests, home is relational in another way, too: it is the outcome of a relationship between material and imaginative qualities. Home is somewhere – it is situated, located, emplaced. But it is also much more than a location – as suggested by the saying, ‘A house is not a home’. Rather, a house becomes a home when it is imbued with a range of meanings, feelings and experiences by its occupants. Home, thus, is a fusion of the imaginative and affective – what we envision and desire home to be – intertwined with the material and physical – an actual location which can embody and realise our need for belonging, affirmation and sustenance. Blunt and Dowling capture this relationship between emplacement and emotion – the material and the imaginative – with their powerful assertion of home as a spatial imaginary, where “home is neither the dwelling nor the feeling, but the relation between the two” (22). Moreover, they demonstrate that this conceptualisation also detaches ‘home’ from ‘dwelling’ per se, and invokes the creation of home – as a space and feeling of belonging – at sites and scales beyond the domestic house. Instead, as a spatial imaginary, home takes form as “a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connects places” (Blunt and Dowling 2). The concept of home, then, entails complex scalarity: indeed, it is a multi-scalar spatial imaginary. Put quite simply, scale is a geographical concept which draws attention to the layered arenas of everyday life – body, house, neighbourhood, city, region, nation and globe, for instance – and this terminology can help extend our understanding of home. Certainly, for many, house and home are conflated, so that a sense of home is coterminous with a physical dwelling structure (e.g. Dupuis and Thorns). For others, however, home is signified by intimate familial or community relationships which extend beyond the residence and stretch across a neighbourhood (e.g. Moss). And moreover, without contradiction, we can speak of hometowns and homelands, so that home can be felt at the scale of the town, city, region or nation (e.g. Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora). For others – international migrants and refugees, global workers, communities of mixed descent – home can be stretched into transnational belongings (e.g. Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Home”). But this notion of home as a multi-scalar spatial imaginary is yet more complicated. While the above arenas (house, neighbourhood, nation, globe, etc.) are often simply posited as discrete territories, they also intersect and interact in complex ways (Massey; Marston). Extending this perspective, we can grasp the possibility of personal and collective homemaking processes operating across multiple scales simultaneously. For instance, making a house into a home invariably involves generating a sense of home and familiarity in a wider neighbourhood or nation-state. Indeed, Greg Noble points out that homemaking at the scale of the dwelling can be inflected by broader social and national values which are reflected materially in the house, in “the furniture of everyday life” (“Comfortable and Relaxed”, 55) – landscape paintings and national flags and ornaments, for example. He demonstrates that “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54). For others – those moving internationally between nation-states – domestic practices in dwelling structures are informed by cultural values and social ideals which extend well beyond the nation of settlement. Everyday domestic practices from one’s ‘land of origin’ are integral for ‘making home’ in a new house, neighbourhood and country at the same time (Hage). Many of the papers in this issue reflect upon the multi-scalarity of homemaking processes, showing how home must be generated across the multiple intersecting arenas of everyday life simultaneously. Indeed, given this prominence across the papers, we have chosen to use the scale of home as our organising principle for this issue. We begin with the links between the body – the geography closest to our skin (McDowell) – the home, and other scales, and then wind our way out through evocations of home at the intersecting scales of the house, the neighbourhood, the city, the nation and the diasporic. The rhetoric of home and belonging not only suggests which types of places can be posited as home (e.g. houses, neighbourhoods, nations), but also valorises some social relations and embodied identities as homely and others as unhomely (Blunt and Dowling; Gorman-Murray). The dominant ideology of home in the Anglophonic West revolves around the imaginary ‘ideal’ of white, middle-class, heterosexual nuclear family households in suburban dwellings (Blunt and Dowling). In our lead paper, Melissa Gregg explores how the ongoing normalisation of this particular conception of home in Australian politico-cultural discourse affects two marginalised social groups – sexual minorities and indigenous Australians. Her analysis is timely, responding to recent political attention to the domestic lives of both groups. Scrutinising the disciplinary power of ‘normal homes’, Gregg explores how unhomely (queer and indigenous) subjects and relationships unsettle the links between homely bodies, ideal household forms and national belonging in politico-cultural rhetoric. Importantly, she draws attention to the common experiences of these marginalised groups, urging “queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities”. Our first few papers then continue to investigate intersections between bodies, houses and neighbourhoods. Moving to the American context – but quite recognisable in Australia – Lisa Roney examines the connection between bodies and houses on the US lifestyle program, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in which families with disabled members are over-represented as subjects in need of home renovations. Like Gregg, Roney demonstrates that the rhetoric of home is haunted by the issue of ‘normalisation’ – in this case, EMHE ‘corrects’ and normalises disabled bodies through providing ‘ideal’ houses. In doing so, there is often a disjuncture between the homely ideal and what would be most helpful for the everyday domestic lives of these subjects. From an architectural perspective, Marian Macken also considers the disjuncture between bodily practices, inhabitation and ideal houses. While traditional documentation of house designs in working drawings capture “the house at an ideal moment in time”, Macken argues for post factum documentation of the house, a more dynamic form of architectural recording produced ‘after-the-event’ which interprets ‘the existing’ rather than the ideal. This type of documentation responds to the needs of the body in the inhabited space of domestic architecture, representing the flurry of occupancy, “the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon” the space of the house. Gilbert Caluya also explores the links between bodies and ideal houses, but from a different viewpoint – that of the perceived need for heightened home security in contemporary suburban Australia. With the rise of electronic home security systems, our houses have become extensions of our bodies – ‘architectural nervous systems’ which extend our eyes, ears and senses through modern security technologies. The desire for home security is predicated on controlling the interplay between the house and wider scales – the need to create a private and secure defensible space in hostile suburbia. But at the same time, heightened home security measures ironically connect the mediated home into a global network of electronic grids and military technologies. Thus, new forms of electronic home security stretch home from the body to the globe. Irmi Karl also considers the connections between technologies and subjectivities in domestic space. Her UK-based ethnographic analysis of lesbians’ techo-practices at home also considers, like Gregg, tactics of resistance to the normalisation of the heterosexual nuclear family home. Karl focuses on the TV set as a ‘straightening device’ – both through its presence as a key marker of ‘family homes’ and through the heteronormative content of programming – while at the same time investigating how her lesbian respondents renegotiated the domestic through practices which resisted the hetero-regulation of the TV – through watching certain videos, for instance, or even hiding the TV set away. Susan Thompson employs a similar ethnographic approach to understanding domestic practices which challenge normative meanings of home, but her subject is quite different. In an Australian-based study, Thompson explores meanings of home in the wake of relationship breakdown of heterosexual couples. For her respondents, their houses embodied their relationships in profoundly symbolic and physical ways. The deterioration and end of their relationships was mirrored in the material state of the house. The end of a relationship also affected homely, familiar connections to the wider neighbourhood. But there was also hope: new houses became sources of empowerment for former partners, and new meanings of home were created in the transition to a new life. Brett Mills also explores meanings of home at different scales – the house, neighbourhood and city – but returns to the focus on television and media technologies. His is a personal, but scholarly, response to seeing his own home on the television program Torchwood, filmed in Cardiff, UK. Mills thus puts a new twist on autobiographical narratives of home and identity: he uses this approach to examine the link between home and media portrayals, and how personal reactions to “seeing your home on television” change everyday perceptions of home at the scales of the house, neighbourhood and city. His reflection on “what happens when your home is on television” is solidly but unobtrusively interwoven with scholarly work on home and media, and speaks to the productive tension of home as material and imaginative. As the above suggests, especially with Mills’s paper, we have begun to move from the homely connections between bodies and houses to focus on those between houses, neighbourhoods and beyond. The next few papers extend these wider connections. Peter Pugsley provides a critical analysis of the meaning of domestic settings in three highly-successful Singaporean sitcoms. He argues that the domestic setting in these sitcoms has a crucial function in the Singaporean nation-state, linking the domestic home and national homeland: it is “a valuable site for national identities to be played out” in terms of the dominant modes of culture and language. Thus, in these domestic spaces, national values are normalised and disseminated – including the valorisation of multiculturalism, the dominance of Chinese cultural norms, benign patriarchy, and ‘proper’ educated English. Donna Lee Brien, Leonie Rutherford and Rosemary Williamson also demonstrate the interplay between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces and values in their case studies of the domestic sphere in cyberspace, examining three online communities which revolve around normatively domestic activities – pet-keeping, crafting and cooking. Their compelling case studies provide new ways to understand the space of the home. Home can be ‘stretched’ across public and private, virtual and physical spaces, so that “online communities can be seen to be domesticated, but, equally … the activities and relationships that have traditionally defined the home are not limited to the physical space of the house”. Furthermore, as they contend in their conclusion, these extra-domestic networks “can significantly modify practices and routines in the physical home”. Jennifer Gamble also considers the interplay of the virtual and the physical, and how home is not confined to the physical house. Indeed, the domestic is almost completely absent from the new configurations of home she offers: she conceptualises home as a ‘holding environment’ which services our needs and provides care, support and ontological security. Gamble speculates on the possibility of a holding environment which spans the real and virtual worlds, encompassing email, chatrooms and digital social networks. Importantly, she also considers what happens when there are ruptures and breaks in the holding environment, and how physical or virtual dimensions can compensate for these instances. Also rescaling home beyond the domestic, Alexandra Ludewig investigates concepts of home at the scale of the nation-state or ‘homeland’. She focuses on the example of Germany since World War II, and especially since re-unification, and provides an engaging discussion of the articulation between home and the German concept of ‘Heimat’. She shows how Heimat is ambivalent – it is hard to grasp the sense of longing for homeland until it is gone. Thus, Heimat is something that must be constantly reconfigured and maintained. Taken up in a critical manner, it also attains positive values, and Ludewig suggests how Heimat can be employed to address the Australian context of homeland (in)security and questions of indigenous belonging in the contemporary nation-state. Indeed, the next couple of papers focus on the vexed issue of building a sense home and belonging at the scale of the nation-state for non-indigenous Australians. Lisa Slater’s powerful autobiographical reflection considers how non-indigenous Australians might find a sense of home and belonging while recognising prior indigenous ownership of the land. She critically reflects upon “how non-indigenous subjects are positioned in relation to the original owners not through migrancy but through possession”. Slater urges us to “know our place” – we need not despair, but use such remorse in a productive manner to remake our sense of home in Australia – a sense of home sensitive to and respectful of indigenous rights. Nahid Kabir also provides an evocative and powerful autobiographical narrative about finding a sense of home and belonging in Australia for another group ‘beyond the pale’ – Muslim Australians. Hers is a first-hand account of learning to ‘feel at home’ in Australia. She asks some tough questions of both Muslim and non-Muslim Australians about how to accommodate difference in this country. Moreover, her account shows the homing processes of diasporic subjects – transnational homemaking practices which span several countries, and which enable individuals and social groups to generate senses of belonging which cross multiple borders simultaneously. Our final paper also contemplates the homing desires of diasporic subjects and the call of homelands – at the same time bringing our attention back to home at the scales of the house, neighbourhood, city and nation. As such, Wendy Varney’s paper brings us full circle, lucidly invoking home as a multi-scalar spatial imaginary by exploring the diverse and complex themes of home in popular music. Given the prevalence of yearnings about home in music, it is surprising so little work has explored the powerful conceptions of home disseminated in and through this widespread and highly mobile media form. Varney’s analysis thus makes an important contribution to our understandings of home presented in media discourses in the contemporary world, and its multi-scalar range is a fitting way to bring this issue to a close. Finally, we want to draw attention to the cover art by Rohan Tate that opens our issue. A Sydney-based photographer, Tate is interested in the design of house, home and the domestic form, both in terms of exteriors and interiors. This image from suburban Sydney captures the shifting styles of home in suburban Australia, giving us a crisp juxtaposition between modern and (re-valued) traditional housing forms. Bringing this issue together has been quite a task. We received 60 high quality submissions, and selecting the final 14 papers was a difficult process. Due to limits on the size of the issue, several good papers were left out. We thank the reviewers for taking the time to provide such thorough and useful reports, and encourage those authors who did not make it into this issue to keep seeking outlets for their work. The number of excellent submissions shows that home continues to be a growing and engaging theme in social and cultural inquiry. As editors, we hope that this issue of M/C Journal will make a vital contribution to this important range of scholarship, bringing together 14 new and innovative perspectives on the experience, location, creation and meaning of home in the contemporary world. References Blunt, Alison. “Home and Identity: Life Stories in Text and in Person.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 71-87. ———. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. ———. “Cultural Geographies of Home.” Progress in Human Geography 29.4 (2005): 505-515. ———, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Brown, Michael. Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe. London: Routledge, 2000. Chapman, Tony. Gender and Domestic Life: Changing Practices in Families and Households. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ———, and Jenny Hockey, eds. Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life. London: Routledge, 1999. Cieraad, Irene, ed. At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Dupuis, Ann, and David Thorns. “Home, Home Ownership and the Search for Ontological Security.” The Sociological Review 46.1 (1998): 24-47. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Homeboys: Uses of Home by Gay Australian Men.” Social and Cultural Geography 7.1 (2006): 53-69. 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Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Moss, Pamela. “Negotiating Space in Home Environments: Older Women Living with Arthritis.” Social Science and Medicine 45.1 (1997): 23-33. Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002): 53-66. ———. “Accumulating Being.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.2 (2004): 233-256. Pink, Sarah. Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Wise, J. Macgregor. “Home: Territory and Identity.” Cultural Studies 14.2 (2000): 295-310. Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.” On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 123-154. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Robyn Dowling. "Home." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Gorman-Murray, A., and R. Dowling. (Aug. 2007) "Home," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php>.