Journal articles on the topic 'Lane County (Kan.)'

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Land tenure is considered an important issue of development agenda and this has led to land allocation and titling in developing countries across continents. As a result, a massive transfer of land rights. Land tenure has been considered as one of the key factors that define patterns and changes in land use system. Due to challenges in collective ownership, Kenya has embraced this idea shifted away to individual land tenure system. This paper examines how land tenure change has influenced land use patterns in Katheka-kai Location, Machakos County for 21 years (1988- 2009), Kenya.</p><p> The study area was until 1995 a ranching scheme but transformed to individual farms, providing a niche in studying land use change. Six classes identified as forests, cultivated land, savannah grassland, water bodies, built-up land, rocky areas, and bare land was used for change detection. Thematic change detection for Landsat TM and Landsat ETM+ was established using ENVI EX. This was done by selecting two images of the same scene, with same number of classes and same names at different times.</p><p> During the period of 1988&amp;ndash;2009, the major land use/cover was savannah grassland, bare land, rocky areas, and forest. Cultivated land, built-up areas, and water bodies had the least land cover. The land use/cover change has been dynamic with about 68.6% land changing from one land use to another between 1988 and 2009 (Figure 1 and 2).</p><p> The 24.4% increase recorded in savanna grassland was at the expense of rocky areas, forest cover, bare land and water bodies that lost 18.7, 2.9, 2.1 and 0.7% respectively (Table 1). Despite the loss, forest cover still recorded 2.7% increase between 1988 and 2009 mostly from rocky areas (1.6%) and bare land (1.2%). Apart from becoming savanna grassland, most of the bare land was converted to rocky areas (7.6%), cultivated land (1.8%) and forests (1.2%) and this explains the 7.4% decrease in area under bare land. Cultivated land witnessed a 1.8% increase between 1988 and 2009 and was due to conversion of bare land (1.8%) and forest cover (0.6%) into cultivated land. Increase in percentage area under built-up areas (0.5%) was as result of conversion of bare land (0.2%), rocky areas (0.2%) and savanna grassland (0.1%). Water bodies changed to become savanna grassland (0.7%) and rocky areas (0.4%) and this led to 0.5% decline in land under water bodies.</p><p> Savanna grassland, bare land and rocky areas are the dominating land uses/justified by the fact that the area is a rangeland initially hosting a range of wildlife animals. Increased population leads to high demand for food and housing and this explains the increase cultivation land and built-up areas. A study carried out by Gathaara et. al. (2010) in the same area reported that most of the farmers resulted in agricultural activities to meet increasing food demand as well as for economic gains. Similarly, Mundia and Muranyan (2009) reported that changing land tenure policy resulted in expansion of agricultural land. Furthermore, after subdivision and issuance of title deeds to individual members, the owner gets the rights to make land use decisions based on benefits.</p></p>

<p class="2M-body">Korean casino market is currently in a new turning point and plans to expand more casinos in addition to the 17 casinos and talks about development of the tourism industry through massive investment of foreign capital. Casino market is such a sensitive issue in our country and except for Kang-won Land, all casinos are exclusively for foreigners. However, foreign capital has announced plans to invest substantial capital in terms of allowing locals to enter casino as well. Under these circumstances, Kang-won Land Casino is strongly claiming that allowing locals to casino is illegal under the law, but certain regions confront that amending the law on the investment is necessary for economic growth to attract more casinos. In this study, we grasp the current situation and its development of casino in Korea and set a direction for the future development of casino</p>

Abstract Foreign language didactics is committed to teach the variety of language that is actually used in everyday life. In this article, we study possibilities of working with authentic German dialogues in teaching contexts of German as a Foreign Language. By focusing on regional and national varieties of German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, we examine current textbooks that claim to follow a pluricentric approach and show how they deal with the fact that spoken German is not a homogenous variety. The analysis of the teaching material reveals the problems, that working with artificial dialogues entail under a pluricentric perspective, including phonetics, prosody, lexis, grammatical and interactional structures. Thus, we plead for the use of authentic dialogues in order to create awareness for a pluricentric view on language among students of German as a Foreign Language. Especially for learners, who plan to spend time in a German-speaking country, the work with authentic dialogues from a certain geographical region can have a highly motivating effect as they learn to understand native speakers in their everyday talk. To this end, we present a database that provides audio material in the different national varieties of spoken German, which can be used for didactic purposes in the foreign language classroom. Samenvatting De vreemdetalendidactiek streeft ernaar om die taalvariëteit aan te leren die in het alledaagse leven wordt gebruikt. In dit artikel gaan we na welke mogelijkheden er zijn om met authentieke Duitse dialogen te werken in een onderwijscontext van het Duits als Vreemde Taal. Met een focus op de regionale en nationale variëteiten van het Duits in Duitsland, Oostenrijk en Zwitserland onderzoeken we recente tekstboeken die een pluricentrische benadering beweren te volgen en we laten zien hoe ze omgaan met het feit dat gesproken Duits geen homogene variëteit is. De analyse van het onderwijsmateriaal brengt enkele problemen aan het licht die het werken met artificiële dialogen vanuit een polycentrisch perspectief met zich meebrengt, waaronder fonetiek, prosodie, woordenschat, grammaticale en interactieve structuren. We pleiten dus voor het gebruik van authentieke dialogen om studenten Duits als Vreemde Taal bewust te maken van een pluricentrische kijk op taal. In het bijzonder voor leerders die van plan zijn om enige tijd in een Duitstalig land door te brengen, kan het werken met authentieke dialogen uit een welbepaalde geografische regio bijzonder motiverend zijn omdat ze zo de alledaagse taal van native speakers leren begrijpen. We stellen ook een database voor waar audiomateriaal in verschillende nationale varieteiten van gesproken Duits te vinden is, dat voor didactische doeleinden kan worden gebruikt in de vreemde talenklas.

Urban Design and Planning, being a significant field of architect’s professional activity, science and education, in the Lithuanian classificators of science (1998) and education (2001) is replaced by Land Management which is concerned with another field closely related to engineering management of rural territories. The paper discusses diferences in the conception of these disciplines, and need of correcting the classificators is suggested with intention to create reasonable development conditions for the science and education of urban design and planning corresponding to those existing in the other EU countries. Some of the conceptions and incorrectly used concepts of the Law on Territory Planning requiring changes are indicated. It is stated that during 11–19 years an inadequate approach to a complex and socially urgent matter, related with culture, science and art, has brought the urban development of the country to a situation having evident attributes of chaos. Most damage is done to the architecture of towns, where the role of urban design activity, defining the conceptions of built-up morphostructure, urban complexes and the architecture of public spaces, is essential. Sustainable compositional development of a town defining its individual image and aesthetic attraction also depends on the qualification of a participating architect urbanist and his role in a team of planners. A model of positioning urban design and planning in the systematic conception of architect’s professional activity, science and education as well as possibilities of supplementing the classificators are proposed. Santrauka Lietuvoje priimtuose mokslo (1998 m.) ir studijų (2001 m.) klasifikatoriuose reikšmingos architekto profesinės veiklos, mokslo ir studijų kryptys – urbanistinis projektavimas ir planavimas (Town and Country Planning) – pakeistos į kraštotvarką (Land Management) – kitos srities dalyką, artimą inžinerinio kaimo teritorijų tvarkymo vadybai. Straipsnyje nagrinėjami šių disciplinų sampratos skirtumai ir iškeliama klasifikatorių tikslinimo reikmė, siekiant atkurti urbanistikos mokslui ir studijoms priimtinas plėtojimo sąlygas, adekvačias egzistuojančioms kitose ES šalyse. Nurodomos su tuo susijusios kai kurios keistinos Teritorijų planavimo įstatymo nuostatos, pateikiamas urbanistikos vietos architekto profesinės veiklos, mokslo bei studijų sisteminėje sampratoje modelis ir klasifikatorių papildymo galimybės.

The Žuvintas Lake, located in southern Lithuania in the basin of the Dovine River is one of the biggest lakes and the oldest natural reserves of the country. However, the changes in the hydrology of the Dovine River basin, caused by large‐scale melioration and water management works carried out in the 20th century, have resulted in significant alteration of hydrological regime and decrease in biodiversity of the Žuvintas Lake and surrounding wetlands. In order to prevent the ongoing deterioration of the Lake and wetlands solutions have to be found. Therefore, various scenarios have been analysed to evaluate the impact of water management alternatives. For these scenarios the physically‐based distributed parameter model SIMGRO was used. The results have shown that natural water regime in the Žuvintas Lake is hardly reversible. However, the replacement of sluice‐gates implemented at the outlet of the Žuvintas Lake by overflow weir as well as the blocking of drainage ditches and the removal of scrubs and trees in the wetlands surrounding the Lake can be highly successful measures to improve hydrological conditions. Santrauka Dovinės upės (dešinysis Šešupės upės intakas) baseine yra seniausias Lietuvoje Žuvinto biosferos rezervatas ir kitos europinės svarbos saugomos teritorijos. Tose vietose hidrologinis režimas tiesiogiai reguliuojamas šešiose vietose pastatytais reguliavimo šliuzais. Šiuo metu poreikio reguliuoti nėra, todėl darbe analizuojamos natūralaus vandens režimo atkūrimo galimybės Žuvinto ežere ir aplinkinėse pelkėse. Tam buvo taikytas matematinio modeliavimo metodas naudojant pasiskirsčiusių parametrų SIMGRO modelį. Ankstesni tyrimai parodė, kad atkurti natūralų hidrologinį režimą vien panaikinus reguliavimo šliuzą žemiau Žuvinto ežero, negalima. Tai sunaikintų ežerą ir neigiamai paveiktų požeminio vandens režimą Žuvinto ir Amalvos pelkių komplekse. Siekiant bent dalinio vandens režimo natūralizavimo reguliavimo šliuzą siūloma rekonstruoti į slenkstinę nuopylą įrengiant žuvitakį. Žuvinto ir Amalvos pelkių masyve požeminio vandens režimui pagerinti rekomenduojama pašalinti ten augančią sumedėjusią augaliją ir apypelkio teritorijose patvenkti melioracijos griovius. Pateikiamas tokių priemonių galimas poveikis Žuvinto ežero ir aplinkinių pelkių hidrologiniam režimui. Peзюме Водный режим бассейнa реки Довине в южной части Литвы в прошлом столетии был подвержен важным изменениям. Там находится старый заповедник Литвы – озеро Жувинтас c близлежащими болотaми. В статье представлен сценарий по восстановлению водного режима в озере Жувинтас и окружающих болотах. Для исследования была применена математическая модель SIMGRO. Результаты показали, что полное восстановление гидрологического режима в озере невозможно. Для улучшения водного режима предложен ряд мер.

The present article involves a qualitative study of the framing of dementia in ‘Alzheimer’s and Dementia’, the Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, published in 2016. The aim of this study is to elucidate how dementia is framed qualitatively in the corpus consisting of scientific articles involving dementia published in ‘Alzheimer’s and Dementia’. The results of the qualitative analysis indicate that dementia is represented in ‘Alzheimer’s and Dementia’ in 2016 as the frames associated with gender, age, costs, caregiver and care-recipients, disability and death, health policy, spatial orientation, medical condition, and ethnic groups. These findings are further discussed in the article. References Andrews, J. (2011). We need to talk about dementia. Journal of Research in Nursing, 16(5),397–399. Aronowitz, R. (2008). Framing Disease: An Underappreciated Mechanism for the SocialPatterning Health. Social Science & Medicine, 67, 1–9. Bayles, K. A. (1982). 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The euro crisis in metaphors and frames.Focus on the press in the Low Countries. European Journal of Communication, 29(5),608–617. Kapranov, O. (2016). The Framing of Serbia’s EU Accession by the British Foreign Office onTwitter. Tekst i Dyskurs. Text und Diskurs, 9, 67–80. Kaufman, S. R. (1994). Old age, disease, and the discourse on risk: Geriatric assessment in UShealth care. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 8(4), 430–447. Kunutsor, S., & Laukkanen, J. (2016). Gamma glutamyltranserase and risk of future dementiain middle-aged to older Finnish men: A new prospective cohort study. Alzheimer’s &Dementia, 12, 931–941. Lawless, M., & Augoustinos, M. (2017). Brain health advice in the news: managing notions ofindividual responsibility in media discourse on cognitive decline and dementia. QualitativeResearch in Psychology, 14(1), 62–80. Llorens, F., Schmitz, M., Karch, A., Cramm, M., Lange, P., Gherib, K., Varges, D., Schmidt,C., Zerr, I., & K. Stoeck (2016). Comparative analysis of cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers in thedifferential diagnosis of neurodegenerative dementia. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(5),577–589. Mayeda, E. R., Glymour, M. M., Quesenberry, C. P., & R.A. Whitmer (2016). Inequalities indementia incidence between six racial and ethnic groups over 14 years. Alzheimer’s &Dementia, 12(3), 216–224. Paradis, C. (2010). Good, better and superb antonyms: a conceptual construal approach. Theannual texts by foreign guest professors, 3, 385–402. Parker, J. (2001). Interrogating person-centred dementia care in social work and social carepractice. Journal of Social Work, 1(3), 329–345. Peel, E. (2014). ‘The living death of Alzheimer’s’ versus ‘Take a walk to keep dementia atbay’: representations of dementia in print media and carer discourse. Sociology of health &illness, 36(6), 885–901. Ramirez, J., McNeely, A. A., Scott, C. J., Masellis, M., & S. E. Black (2016). White matterhyperintensity burden in elderly cohort studies: The Sunnybrook Dementia Study, Alzheimer’sThe Framing of Dementia in Scientific Articles Published in Alzheimer’ Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, and Three-City Study. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(2),203–210. Rattinger, G., Fauth, E., Behrens, S., Sanders, C., Schwartz, S., Norton, M. C., Corcoran, C.,Mullins, C. D., Lyketsos, C., & J. T. Tschanz (2016). Closer caregiver and care-recipientrelationships predict lower informal costs of dementia care: The Cache County DementiaProgression Study. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12, 917–924. Shash, D., Kurth, T., Bertrand, M., Dufouil, C., Barberger-Gateau, P., Berr, C., Ritchie, K.,Dartigues, J.-F., Begaud, B., Alperovitch, A., & C. Tzourio (2016). Benzodiazepine,psychotropic medication, and dementia: A population-based cohort study. Alzheimer’s &Dementia, 12(5), 604–613. Swacha, K. Y. (2017). 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Santrauka. Straipsnyje lyginamos tarpukario ir pokomunistinės agrarinių reformų pradinės sąlygos, eiga ir rezultatai, šį diachroninį palyginimą praplečiant ir kontroliuojant sinchroniniais palyginimais su analogiškais procesais kitose Rytų ir Vidurio Europos šalyse tarpukario ir pokomunistiniais laikais. Svarbiausius abiejų reformų panašumus lėmė 1949–51 m. kolektyvizacija, visus Lietuvos žemdirbius pastačiusi į padėtį, kurioje iki 1922 m. reformos buvo dvarų darbininkai kumečiai, kurie dalį atlyginimo gaudavo natūra – ordinarija. Jos dalis buvo dvaro inventoriumi bei gyvuliais dirbamas dvaro žemės sklypas, analogiškas kolūkiečių asmeninių pagalbinių ūkių sklypams. Skirtingai nuo Rusijos, Lietuvos kolūkiečiai nebuvo kolūkių baudžiauninkai, o tik kumečiai. Kaip ir dvarų iki 1922 m. reformos darbininkams, sovietiniams kumečiams buvo taikomas represinis darbo jėgos kontrolės režimas, suteikęs kolektyvinių ūkių vadovams faktinę „raudonųjų baronų“ galią. Pagrindiniai tarpukario reformų Rytų Europos šalyse tikslai buvo anksčiau privilegijuotų tautinių mažumų galios apribojimas ir bolševizmo įtakos slopinimas. Tik Baltijos šalyse ji neturėjo neigiamų ekonominių pasekmių, ką Lietuvoje užtikrino kartu su dvarų parceliacija vykęs kaimų skirstymasis į vienkiemius. Palyginti su tarpukario reforma, pokomunistinė agrarinė reforma buvo mažiau nuosekli, nes jos eigą lėmė interesų konfliktas tarp naujos sovietinių kumečių kartos, suinteresuotų įprastų darbo vietų išsaugojimu, ir išėjusių į miestus buvusių žemės savininkų palikuonių. Kadangi Lietuva buvo viena tų pokomunistinių šalių, kuriose stipresnė buvo antroji stovykla, čia buvo įgyvendinta radikali restitucinė žemės reforma ir šeiminį ūkį restauruojanti de-kolektyvizacija. Dėl sovietmečiu įvykusios vienkiemių likvidacijos ir demografinių pokyčių, ji negrąžino Lietuvos kaimo ir žemės ūkio į 1940 m., bet sukūrė būklę, labiau primenančią Lietuvos kaimo situaciją iki 1922 m. reformos: gausus mažažemių („trihektarininkų“) sluoksnis, gatviniai kaimai (buvusios kolūkinės gyvenvietės), fragmentuota žemės valdų struktūra, iš žemės ūkio bendrovių (ŽŪB) išaugę arba naujai besikuriantys latifundiniai ūkiai, primenantys ikireforminius dvarus. Pačių ŽŪB, įsikūrusių kolūkių gamybiniuose centruose, pokomunistinė raida analogiška 1922 m. reformos apkarpytų dvarų, kurių nuosavybėje liko jų centrai, likimui: dauguma bankrutavo ir buvo išvaržyti, tačiau dalis virto konkurencingomis kapitalistinėms žemės ūkio įmonėmis. Savo ekonominiais rezultatais tarpukario reforma pranoksta pokomunistinę, nes po jos ir bendra žemės ūkio gamybos apimtis, ir jos produktyvumas tik augo, tuo tarpu kai pirmuoju pokomunistinės transformacijos dešimtmečiu abu rodikliai smuko. Ekskomunistinės kairės propaguota nuosaiki agrarinė reforma nebūtų leidusi išvengti gamybos apimties smukimo, nes tą apimtį užtikrino vėlyvuoju sovietmečiu žemės ūkiui sudarytos „ekonominio šiltnamio“ sąlygos (dosnios subsidijos) ir neribota paklausa. Tačiau nuosaikesnė ar palaipsnė reforma veikiausiai būtų leidusi jau pirmajame dešimtmetyje padidinti žemės ūkio gamybos produktyvumą. Lietuvai tapus ES nare ir jos žemės ūkiui vėl patekus į „ekonominį šiltnamį“, žemės ūkio veikla nebegali būti vertinama vien ekonominiais masteliais. Matuojant pokomunistinės agrarinės reformos padarinius Lietuvoje gamtosaugos vertybėmis, jie yra labai pozityvūs.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: 1922 m. žemės reforma Lietuvoje, pokomunistinė agrarinė reforma Lietuvoje, represinė darbo jėgos kontrolė, tarptautinis tarpukario ir pokomunistinių agrarinių reformų palyginimas.Key words: Land reform in Lithuania in 1922, post-communist agrarian reform ir Lithuania, repressive control of labour, international comparison of the interwar and post-communist agrarian reforms.ABSTRACTA COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF AGRARIAN REFORMS IN THE FIRST AND THE SECOND REPUBLIC OF LITHUANIAThe paper compares the initial conditions, the course and the outcomes of the interwar (1922) and the post-communist (since 1989) agrarian reforms in Lithuania, controlling and enlarging these diachronic comparisons with synchronic comparisons of the analoguos processes in other Eastern and Central European countries at the same times. Most important similarities between both reforms were created by the collectivization in 1948–1951, which for all Lithuaniam tillers shaped the condition in which before the 1922 reform the wage workers (kumečiai) at the large estates were living and working. They received in money only part of their salaries. Another part was paid in kind, including a land plot which was cultivated using the inventory and draught animals provided by landlord. This is quite similar to the small plots allocation for personal use to collective farms workers, and how they were cultivated. However, differently from the workers of collective farms in Russia, who untill late 1960s had no passports, Lithuanian collective farmers were not made serfs, because the passportization of Lithuanian countryside population was implemented by Soviet auhorities as part of their efforts to suppress resistance movement. Similarly to agrarian wage workers before 1922, collective farm workers were subject to the repressive labour force control regime, providing for managers of collective farms the de facto power of „red barons“. Main aims of the interwar agrarian reforms were the restriction of power of the formerly privileged minorities and suppression of Communism. However, only in the Baltic States the reforms had no negative economic outcomes. In Lithuania, such outcomes were preempted by the dispersion of villages into individual settlement farms, which proceeded along with the parcellization of large estates. Comparing with interwar reform, post-communist agrarian reform was less consistent, because its course was under heavy impact of the interest conflict between the new generation of the collective farms workers, interested to keep their working places, and those descendants of the former land owners, who left villages for cities. As far as Lithuania was one of those post-communist countries, where second group was stronger, in this country a radical restitutive land reform was implemented along with the de-collectivization which has restored family farming. However, because of the interjacent liquidation of the individual settlements (re-concentration of rural population in the villages) and demographic changes in the Communist time, it did restore in the Lithuanian countryside and agriculture the status quo of 1940. Rather, it has created the state that is more reminiscent of situation in the Lithuanian countryside before the agrarian reform of 1922: broad social stratum of small plots (3 ha) owners; villages; a fragmented land ownership structure; and large farms reminiscent of landed estates before 1922 reform. While some of them are new ventures (e.g. huge swine-breeding farms, operated by foreignly owned agrobusiness), many emerged out of agricultural partnerships, which were the fragments of the former collective farms. They were established by former collective workers to operate technological complexes of former collective farms which were too large for using by family farms. The evolution of these remainders of collective farms is similar to the evolution of the former landlord farms after their landholdings were reduced by agrarian reform of 1922. The reform left in ownership of the landlords the buildings and other estate with part of land (up to 80–150 ha). Most of these residual estates went bankrupt and were sold in parts at auctions, while some of the survived becoming competitive agricultural enterprises. Similarly, most efficient partnerships survived, expanded and became competitive large-scale corporate capitalist agricultural enterprises. The economic outcomes of the interwar reform are superior to those of post-communist reform: after the first reform, both the general agricultural output and the productivity increased, while both indicators decreased during the first decade of the post-communist agrarian reform. Ex-communist Left in Lithuania promoted moderate agrarian reform, involving transformation of collective farms into the private corporate capitalist agricultural companies. The author argues that such reform would not be able to prevent the reduction in output, because the output as of in 1989 was possible only under economic hothouse conditions of the late Soviet time for agriculture (lavish subsidies, unlimited demand, „price scissors“ favouring agriculture). However, most probably, a more gradual reform would help to increase the agricultural productivity already during its first decade. After Lithuania was accepted to EU and its agriculture is in the „economic hothouse“ again, the agricultural activites cannot be assessed only by economic criteria alone. If the outcomes of the post-communist agrarian reform are assessed by values of ecology, they are very positive indeed.

Was Grundtvig’s New Discovery in 1832 A Tragic Event?By Bent ChristensenThe title of this lecture for the Degree of Divinity has been given its provocative wording by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. In his thesis for the Degree of Divinity, published in 1987 and reviewed in Grundtvig Studies in 1988, Bent Christensen has described and evaluated Grundtvig’s attitude in the field of church policy over the years from 1824 to 1832, a critical period of time for himself, in such a way as to give the reader the impression that the writer regards the attitude taken by Grundtvig in the comprehensive Introduction to his ’’Norse Mythology”, 1832, towards the thoughtful people of his time, as a step backward compared to the attitude taken by Grundtvig in his great autobiographical poem, "New Year’s Morning", 1824, and in the preface to it. In this preface Grundtvig wrote that the goal which God "surely wants to be achieved" is "the revival of the heroic spirit of the North to Christian deeds in a direction suited to the needs and conditions of the time."In a book "The Land of the Living 1984", a series of lectures held in the 200th anniversary of Grundtvig’s birth, Professor Aage Henriksen proposed the view that the poem "New Year’s Morning” is the crowning achievement in Grundtvig’s writings. However, already in 1963 Dr. Kaj Thaning had advanced the idea that the Introduction to "Norse Mythology", 1832, was a decisive turningpoint in Grundtvig’s literary career since, from 1832 onwards, human life and the human world acquired an entirely different position and importance in his understanding of Christianity than was the case before that crucial year. Bent Christensen is inspired by both these writers, but adopts a critical attitude to Kaj Thaning.In part 1 of his lecture Bent Christensen describes the entire progress of his Grundtvig studies and the problem he has posed: What is it really that the Introduction has which was not already present in the inspiration behind the poem "New Year's Morning’? In the answer to this question he particularly emphasizes the sermons from 1823 to 1824, which are influenced by Irenaeus, and which are imbued with the thought that man was created in God’s image and has preserved this image of God also after the Fall. According to Bent Christensen they represent "a Grundtvig who is at least as good as the Grundtvig we got".Next he asks "if the ’Grundtvig of 1832* is in any way better than the ’Grundtvig of 1824’"? - Before he answers this question he presents a survey of the development from 1824 to 1832. He agrees with Thaning that "the deeds came to nothing". There was a general atmosphere of stagnation, but in the meantime the situation in the Church came to a head: members of a so-called "godly assembly" in Funen were positively persecuted. And at the University of Copenhagen the popular Professor H.N. Clausen propagated his "Protestant Christianity", diluted beyond recognition. In opposition to this, Grundtvig pointed to "the real Jesus Christ’s Church on Earth" and published his "The Rejoinder of the Church" against Professor Clausen’s latest book. "This was where the tragedy began. For instead of entering into an ecclesiastical discussion, Professor Clausen brought an action for libel against Grundtvig!" According to Bent Christensen the full extent of the tragedy was that the country had a state church which everybody had to be a member of, and which was bound to Lutheran Christianity, but in reality it also had a clergy whose leading circles represented a rationalism and idealism, which was completely at variance with Christianity. This was the situation which Grundtvig described as "the legal Hell", Bent Christensen says. He describes Grundtvig’s writings on church policy in this situation as a development consisting of 3 phases:1. The time from the discovery of the Apostles’ Creed in July 1825 and the Rejoinder in September 1825 until his resignation from office in May 1826. At this time Grundtvig thought that the anomaly could be redressed once it was clearly pointed out.2. The time from September 1826, shortly before the sentence was pronounced, until winter 1830/1831, when Grundtvig presented various proposals for church organization with a Christian state church, while those who did not want to join such a church could leave it in complete freedom of religion.3. The time from April 1831 when Grundtvig declared himself willing to be in charge of the organization of a free-congregation church, thus agreeing to the ’’amicable settlement” which, towards the end of February 1832, led to his permission to function as a free evensong preacher in Frederick’s Church.During the time up to this "amicable settlement”, Grundtvig had worked his way through the numerous drafts for the Introduction to his new ”Norse Mythology”, and in the process, according to Bent Christensen, ’’had managed to construct an entirely new model of church policy”, characterized by peaceful coexistence and competition between the real Christians and those Grundtvig called the "Naturalists”, "within the framework of what Grundtvig continues to term a ’’church”, but what is in reality a common, public religious service system". In the same year he drafted his proposal for "sogneb.ndsl.sning" i.e. abolition of the obligation to use the vicar in the parish where one is a resident, for all church ministrations.According to Kaj Thaning, Grundtvig had now finally "found himself, having learnt to distinguish rightly between what is "human” and what is "Christian”, so he could now call off the ecclesiastical controversy and instead throw himself into a cheerful effort to turn his new view of life to practical use”. ”In my opinion, I have invalidated this evaluation," Bent Christensen says. Grundtvig’s concept of Christianity was optimistic already in 1824, as was the factual distinction between the intrinsic value of life and the salient feature which is Christian salvation. The question now is what it was that Grundtvig managed to free himself from in the years 1831 to 1832. Bent Christensen’s thesis is that he 1) managed to free himself from the ecclesiastical controversy that he could not win, and 2) from the feeling of obligation to be in charge of an illegal organization of free-congregation churches which would isolate him from ordinary public and cultural life.In the context of church policy, Bent Christensen describes what happened with the Introduction to "Norse Mythology" as an emergency solution. - But is this the same, then, as "a tragic event”? - No, he answers. The tragedy was that Grundtvig’s dream from ’’New Year’s Morning” did not come true, but was on the contrary followed by the nightmare of the libel lawsuit and the church controversy. ”But there is another tragedy which we suffer from even today – namely the failure of influential circles to properly understand what it was Grundtvig found himself obliged to do in 1832, so that it has almost come to be regarded as the only right way to practise church organization! In that perspective what happened in 1832 may be seen as a tragic event, Bent Christensen claims in the conclusion of part 1 of his lecture.Part 2 of the lecture is a discussion of key passages in the two main texts, "New Year’s Morning” and the Introduction to ”Norse Mythology”. The intention is to show that the fundamental ideas in the Introduction (and in The Rejoinder of the Church) have been anticipated in the great poem from 1824: ’’Indeed, themythical-biographical descent of this poem through Danish history to the Land of the Living ... stands out as a great "a human being first!'"What the Introduction has ... to a fuller extent and in a clearer form than ’’New Year’s Morning" is the fully developed view of evolution and explanation and the scientific programme connected with it. Thus the Introduction provides a unique contribution to the understanding of what it means that the world exists, and that we exist in it as human beings!”In the concluding part 3 of his lecture, Bent Christensen poses the question "whether what happened in 1831/32 really and truly meant that Grundtvig gained himself, or whether it meant that he lost at least part of himself’. Like Aage Henriksen, Bent Christensen considers "New Year’s Morning" to be a culmination in Grundtvig’s writings, and incidentally the point from which Grundtvig’s comprehensive influence on the Danish people stems, and he sees the Introduction as a point, from where Grundtvig moves on by leaving something behind. Aage Henriksen blames Grundtvig that from being a personal poet he changed into a reformer. Bent Christensen asks instead "from the point of view of the church - whether it was after all the right programme with which Grundtvig attempted to save his dream that had been crushed by the outside world."The alternative he mentions is that Grundtvig could have left the Church with whoever wanted to follow him, and could have worked with unflagging solidarity on this basis for the public life of the people as well as for "universalhistorical scholarship". At least he did not have to make quite so much good fortune of necessity - with the tragic consequences for the Danish Lutheran Christian congregation’s self-conception that it has to this day.He concludes by emphasizing a passage towards the end of Grundtvig’s book, "Elemental Christian Teaching" (Den Christelige B.rnel.rdom), where Grundtvig imagines the situation that church and state were completely separated. In that case the Christians would have to establish their own educational institution for clergymen. But this would have to be a "Christian high school", i.e. a whole university. Bent Christensen finds there is good reason to turn one’s attention to this thought from 1861 - as well as to Grundtvig’s dream from 1824, when one seeks inspiration in Grundtvig.

While the first two chapters of Doucas's historical work present a meagre outline of world history - a sketch which becomes a little more detailed from 1261 on, when the narration reaches the history of the Turks and their conquests in Asia Minor - the third chapter deals with the well-known battle of Kosovo, which took place in 1389. From that point on, the Byzantine historian gives much important information on Serbia, as well as on the Ottoman advances in the Balkans, and thus embarks upon his central theme - the rise of the Turks and the decline of Byzantium. Doucas considers the battle of Kosovo a key event in the subjugation of the Balkan peoples by the Turks, and he shows that after the battle of Kosovo the Serbs were the first to suffer that fate. At the beginning, Doucas says that after the death of Orhan, the ruler (o archgos) of the Turks, his son and successor Murad conquered the Thracian towns, Adrianople and the whole Thessaly, so that he mastered almost all the lands of the Byzantines, and finally reached the Triballi (Triballous). He devastated many of their towns and villages sending the enslaved population beyond Chersonesus, until Lazar, son of King Stefan of Serbia (Serbias), who ruled (kraley?n) in Serbia at that time decided to oppose him with all the might he could muster. The Serbs were often called Triballi by Byzantine authors. For the fourteenth century writers Pachymeres, Gregoras, Metochites and Kantakouzenos the Serbs were Triballi. However, Pachymeres and Gregoras refer to the rulers of the Triballi as the rulers of Serbia. Fifteenth century writers, primarily Chalcondyles and Critobulos, use only that name. It seems, nevertheless, that Doucas makes a distinction between the Triballi and the Serbs. As it is known, the conquest of the Serbian lands by the Turks began after the battle on the river Marica in 1371. By 1387. the Turks had mastered Serres(1388) Bitola and Stip (1385), Sofia (1385), Nis (1386) and several other towns. Thus parts of Macedonia, Bulgaria and even of Serbia proper were reduced by the Turks by 1387. For Doucas, however, this is the territory inhabited by the Triballi. After the exposition of the events on Kosovo, Doucas inserts an account of the dispute of John Kantakouzenos and the regency on behalf of John V, which had taken place, as it is known, long before 1389. At the beginning of his description of the civil war, Doucas says that by dividing the empire Kantakouzenos made it possible for the Turks to devastate not only all the lands under Roman rule, but also the territories of the Triballi Moesians and Albanians and other western peoples. The author goes on to narrate that Kantakouzenos established friendly relations with the king Stefan Du{an, and reached an agreement with him concerning the fortresses towns and provinces of the unlucky Empire of the Romaioi, so that, instead of giving them over to the Roman lords, he surrendered them to barbarians, the Triballi and the Serbs (Triballoys te kai Serbous). When he speaks later how the Tatars treated the captives after the battle of Angora in 1402, Doucas points out that the Divine Law, honored from times immemorial not only among the Romaioi, but also among the Persians, the Triballi and the Scythians (as he calls Timur's Tatars), permitted only plunder, not the taking of captives or any executions outside the battlefield when the enemy belonged to the same faith. Finally, when he speaks of the conflict between Murad II and Juneid in Asia Minor, Doucas mentions a certain Kelpaxis, a man belonging to the people of the Triballi, who took over from Juneid the rule over Ephesus and Ionia. It seems, therefore, that Doucas, when he speaks of the land of the Triballi he has in mind a broad ethnical territory in the Balkans, which was obviously not settled by the Serbs only or even by the Slavs only. According to him Kelpaxis (Kelpaz?sis) also belonged to the Triballi, although the name can hardly be of Slavonic, i.e. Serbian origin. On the other hand, he is definitely aware of Serbia, a state which had left substantial traces in the works of Byzantine authors, particularly from the time when it usurped (according to the Byzantine view) the Empire. Writing a whole century after Dusan's coronation as emperor, Doucas is not willing, as we shall see later to recognize this usurpation. Although he ascribes to Serbia, in conformity with the Byzantine conception of tazis, a different rank, he considers Serbia and the Serbs, as they are generally called in his work (particularly when he describes the events after the Battle of Kosovo) an important factor in the struggle against the Turks. Therefore he makes a fairly accurate distinction between the Serbs and the other Triballi. In his case, the term may in fact serve as a geographical designation for the territory settled by many peoples, including the Serbs. When he uses specific titles and when he speaks of the degrees of authority conveyed by them in individual territories Doucas is anxious to prove himself a worthy scion of the Romaioi, who considered that they had the exclusive right to the primacy in the Christian hierarchy with the Roman emperor at its top. He makes distinctions of rank between individual rulers. The Emperor in Constantinople is for him the only emperor of the Romans (basileys t?n R?mai?n). King Sigismund of Hungary is also styled emperor, but as basileys t?n R?man?n, meaning Latin Christians. The last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Dragas Palaleologus is not recognized as an emperor, and the author calls his rule a despotic rule (despoteia). He has a similar view of the Serbs. Thus he says, erroneously that Lazar was the son of King Stefan of Serbia (yios Stefanoy toy kral? Serbias) and that he ruled Serbia at that time (o tote t?n Serbian kraley?n). Elsewhere, Doucas explains his attitude and says that o t?n Serb?n archgos etolm?sen anadusasthai kratos kai kral?s onomazesthai. Toyto gar to barbaron onoma exell?nizomenon basileys erm?neyetai. Lazar exercises royal power (kraley?n) in Serbia, which is appropriate, for the author thinks erroneously that Lazar was the son and successor of King Stefan Du{an. It is significant that he derives the werb kraley? from the Serbian title 'kralj', i.e. from the title which never existed in the Byzantine Empire. Moreover, there is no mention of this werb in any other Byzantine text. When he narrates how Serbia fell under the Turkish rule in 1439, Doucas says that Despot Djuradj Brankovic seeing his ravaged despotate (despoteian), went to the King of Hungary hoping to get aid from him. There can be no doubt that the term despoteia here refers to the territory ruled by Despot Djuradj Brankovic. Doucas correctly styles the Serbian rulers after 1402 as despots. The space he devotes to Serbia in his work, as well as the manner in which he speaks of it, seems to indicate, however, that he regarded it, together with Hungary as a obstacle of the further Turkish conquests in the Balkans. Doucas's text indicates that Serbia, though incomparably weaker than in the time of Dusan's mighty empire, was in fact the only remaining more or less integral state in the Peninsula. The riches of Serbia and, consequently, of its despots, is stressed in a number of passages. Almost at the very beginning Doucas says that Bayezid seized 'a sufficient quantity of silver talents from the mines of Serbia' after the Battle of Kosovo. When Murad II conducted negotiations with Despot Djuradj for his marriage with the Despot's daughter Mara, Doucas writes, no one could guess how many 'gold and silver talents' he took. Doucas also says that the Despot began to build the Smederevo fortress with Murad's permission. The building of a fortress has never been an easy undertaking and if we bear in mind that Despot Djuradj built the part of the Smederevo fortress called 'Mali Grad' (Small fortress) in two years only, we realize that his economic power was really considerable. When Fadulah, the counselor of Murad II, sought to persuade his lord to occupy Serbia, he stressed the good position of the country, particularly of Smederevo, and the country's abundant sources of silver and gold, which would enable Murad not only to conquer Hungary, but also to advance as far as Italy. After Mehmed II captured Constantinople, the Serbs undertook to pay an annual tribute of 12.000 gold coins, more than the despots of Mistra, the lords of Chios Mitylene or the Emperor of Trebizond. Already in 1454 the Despot's men brought the tribute to Mehmed II and also ransomed their captives. Critobulos's superb description of Serbia is the best testimony that this was not only Doucas's impression: 'Its greatest advantage, in which it surpasses the other countries, is that it produces gold and silver? They are mined everywhere in that region, which has rich veins of both gold and silver, more abundant than those of India. The country of the Triballi was indeed fortunate in this respect from the very beginning and it was proud of its riches and its might. It was a kingdom with numerous flourishing towns and strong and impregnable fortresses. It was also rich in soldiers and armies as well as in good equipment. It had citizens of the noblest rank and it brought up many youths who had the strength of adult men. It was admired and famous, but it was also envied, so that is was not only loved of many, but also disliked by many people who sought to harm It'. It is no wonder that George Sphrantzes once complains that Christians failed to send aid to Constantinople and that he singles out for particular blame that 'miserable despot, who did not realize that once the head is removed, the limbs, too disappear'. It may be said, therefore, that Doucas regarded Serbia as one of the few remaining allies of at least some ability to stem the Turkish advances, and that this opinion was primarily based on its economic resources. Serbia was clearly distinguished as a state structure, as opposed to most of the remaining parts of the Peninsula, inhabited by peoples which Doucas does not seem to differentiate precisely. According to him, the authority over a particular territory issued from the ruler's title, the title of despot, which was first in importance after the imperial title, also determined the rank of Serbia in the Byzantine theory of hierarchy of states. Doucas's testimony also shows that this theory not only endured until the collapse of the Empire, but that it also persisted even in the consciousness of the people who survived its fall.

1. Introduction This Special Issue (Part 2) expands upon the theme “Building Local Capacity for Long-term Disaster Resilience” presented in Special Issue Part 1 (JDR Volume 5, Number 2, April 2010) by examining the evolving concept of disaster resilience and providing additional reflections upon various aspects of its meaning. Part 1 provided a mixed set of examples of resiliency efforts, ranging from administrative challenges of integrating resilience into recovery to the analysis of hazard mitigation plans directed toward guiding local capability for developing resiliency. Resilience was broadly defined in the opening editorial of Special Issue Part 1 as “the capacity of a community to: 1) survive a major disaster, 2) retain essential structure and functions, and 3) adapt to post-disaster opportunities for transforming community structure and functions to meet new challenges.” In this editorial essay we first explore in Section 2 the history of resilience and then locate it within current academic and policy debates. Section 3 presents summaries of the papers in this issue. 2. Why is Resilience a Contemporary Theme? There is growing scholarly and policy interest in disaster resilience. In recent years, engineers [1], sociologists [2], geographers [3], economists [4], public policy analysts [5, 6], urban planners [7], hazards researchers [8], governments [9], and international organizations [10] have all contributed to the literature about this concept. Some authors view resilience as a mechanism for mitigating disaster impacts, with framework objectives such as resistance, absorption, and restoration [5]. Others, who focus on resiliency indicators, see it as an early warning system to assess community resiliency status [3, 8]. Recently, it has emerged as a component of social risk management that seeks to minimize social welfare loss from catastrophic disasters [6]. Manyena [11] traces scholarly exploration of resilience as an operational concept back at least five decades. Interest in resilience began in the 1940s with studies of children and trauma in the family and in the 1970s in the ecology literature as a useful framework to examine and measure the impact of assault or trauma on a defined eco-system component [12]. This led to modeling resilience measures for a variety of components within a defined ecosystem, leading to the realization that the systems approach to resiliency is attractive as a cross-disciplinary construct. The ecosystem analogy however, has limits when applied to disaster studies in that, historically, all catastrophic events have changed the place in which they occurred and a “return to normalcy” does not occur. This is true for modern urban societies as well as traditional agrarian societies. The adoption of “The Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015” (also known as The Hyogo Declaration) provides a global linkage and follows the United Nations 1990s International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction effort. The 2005 Hyogo Declaration’s definition of resilience is: “The capacity of a system, community or society potentially exposed to hazards to adapt by resisting or changing in order to reach and maintain an acceptable level of functioning and structure.” The proposed measurement of resilience in the Hyogo Declaration is determined by “the degree to which the social system is capable of organizing itself to increase this capacity for learning from past disasters for better future protection and to improve risk reduction measures.” While very broad, this definition contains two key concepts: 1) adaptation, and 2) maintaining acceptable levels of functioning and structure. While adaptation requires certain capacities, maintaining acceptable levels of functioning and structure requires resources, forethought, and normative action. Some of these attributes are now reflected in the 2010 National Disaster Recovery Framework published by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) [13]. With the emergence of this new thinking on resilience related to disasters, it is now a good time to reflect on the concept and assess what has recently been said in the literature. Bruneau et al. [1] offer an engineering sciences definition for community seismic resilience: “The ability of social units (e.g., organizations, communities) to mitigate hazards, contain the effects of disasters when they occur, and carry out recovery activities in ways that minimize social disruption and mitigate the effects of future earthquakes.” Rose [4] writes that resiliency is the ability of a system to recover from a severe shock. He distinguishes two types of resilience: (1) inherent – ability under normal circumstances and (2) adaptive – ability in crisis situations due to ingenuity or extra effort. By opening up resilience to categorization he provides a pathway to establish multi-disciplinary approaches, something that is presently lacking in practice. Rose is most concerned with business disruption which can take extensive periods of time to correct. In order to make resource decisions that lower overall societal costs (economic, social, governmental and physical), Rose calls for the establishment of measurements that function as resource decision allocation guides. This has been done in part through risk transfer tools such as private insurance. However, it has not been well-adopted by governments in deciding how to allocate mitigation resources. We need to ask why the interest in resilience has grown? Manyena [11] argues that the concept of resilience has gained currency without obtaining clarity of understanding, definition, substance, philosophical dimensions, or applicability to disaster management and sustainable development theory and practice. It is evident that the “emergency management model” does not itself provide sufficient guidance for policymakers since it is too command-and-control-oriented and does not adequately address mitigation and recovery. Also, large disasters are increasingly viewed as major disruptions of the economic and social conditions of a country, state/province, or city. Lowering post-disaster costs (human life, property loss, economic advancement and government disruption) is being taken more seriously by government and civil society. The lessening of costs is not something the traditional “preparedness” stage of emergency management has concerned itself with; this is an existing void in meeting the expanding interests of government and civil society. The concept of resilience helps further clarify the relationship between risk and vulnerability. If risk is defined as “the probability of an event or condition occurring [14]#8221; then it can be reduced through physical, social, governmental, or economic means, thereby reducing the likelihood of damage and loss. Nothing can be done to stop an earthquake, volcanic eruption, cyclone, hurricane, or other natural event, but the probability of damage and loss from natural and technological hazards can be addressed through structural and non-structural strategies. Vulnerability is the absence of capacity to resist or absorb a disaster impact. Changes in vulnerability can then be achieved by changes in these capacities. In this regard, Franco and Siembieda describe in this issue how coastal cities in Chile had low resilience and high vulnerability to the tsunami generated by the February 2010 earthquake, whereas modern buildings had high resilience and, therefore, were much less vulnerable to the powerful earthquake. We also see how the framework for policy development can change through differing perspectives. Eisner discusses in this issue how local non-governmental social service agencies are building their resilience capabilities to serve target populations after a disaster occurs, becoming self-renewing social organizations and demonstrating what Leonard and Howett [6] term “social resilience.” All of the contributions to this issue illustrate the lowering of disaster impacts and strengthening of capacity (at the household, community or governmental level) for what Alesch [15] terms “post-event viability” – a term reflecting how well a person, business, community, or government functions after a disaster in addition to what they might do prior to a disaster to lessen its impact. Viability might become the definition of recovery if it can be measured or agreed upon. 3. Contents of This Issue The insights provided by the papers in this issue contribute greater clarity to an understanding of resilience, together with its applicability to disaster management. In these papers we find tools and methods, process strategies, and planning approaches. There are five papers focused on local experiences, three on state (prefecture) experiences, and two on national experiences. The papers in this issue reinforce the concept of resilience as a process, not a product, because it is the sum of many actions. The resiliency outcome is the result of multiple inputs from the level of the individual and, at times, continuing up to the national or international organizational level. Through this exploration we see that the “resiliency” concept accepts that people will come into conflict with natural or anthropogenic hazards. The policy question then becomes how to lower the impact(s) of the conflict through “hard or soft” measures (see the Special Issue Part 1 editorial for a discussion of “hard” vs. “soft” resilience). Local level Go Urakawa and Haruo Hayashi illustrate how post-disaster operations for public utilities can be problematic because many practitioners have no direct experience in such operations, noting that the formats and methods normally used in recovery depend on personal skills and effort. They describe how these problems are addressed by creating manuals on measures for effectively implementing post-disaster operations. They develop a method to extract priority operations using business impact analysis (BIA) and project management based business flow diagrams (BFD). Their article effectively illustrates the practical aspects of strengthening the resiliency of public organizations. Richard Eisner presents the framework used to initiate the development and implementation of a process to create disaster resilience in faith-based and community-based organizations that provide services to vulnerable populations in San Francisco, California. A major project outcome is the Disaster Resilience Standard for Community- and Faith-Based Service Providers. This “standard” has general applicability for use by social service agencies in the public and non-profit sectors. Alejandro Linayo addresses the growing issue of technological risk in cities. He argues for the need to understand an inherent conflict between how we occupy urban space and the technological risks created by hazardous chemicals, radiation, oil and gas, and other hazardous materials storage and movement. The paper points out that information and procedural gaps exist in terms of citizen knowledge (the right to know) and local administrative knowledge (missing expertise). Advances and experience accumulated by the Venezuela Disaster Risk Management Research Center in identifying and integrating technological risk treatment for the city of Merida, Venezuela, are highlighted as a way to move forward. L. Teresa Guevara-Perez presents the case that certain urban zoning requirements in contemporary cities encourage and, in some cases, enforce the use of building configurations that have been long recognized by earthquake engineering as seismically vulnerable. Using Western Europe and the Modernist architectural movement, she develops the historical case for understanding discrepancies between urban zoning regulations and seismic codes that have led to vulnerable modern building configurations, and traces the international dissemination of architectural and urban planning concepts that have generated vulnerability in contemporary cities around the world. Jung Eun Kang, Walter Gillis Peacock, and Rahmawati Husein discuss an assessment protocol for Hazard Mitigation Plans applied to 12 coastal hazard zone plans in the state of Texas in the U.S. The components of these plans are systematically examined in order to highlight their respective strengths and weaknesses. The authors describe an assessment tool, the plan quality score (PQS), composed of seven primary components (vision statement, planning process, fact basis, goals and objectives, inter-organizational coordination, policies & actions, and implementation), as well as a component quality score (CQS). State (Prefecture) level Charles Real presents the Natural Hazard Zonation Policies for Land Use Planning and Development in California in the U.S. California has established state-level policies that utilize knowledge of where natural hazards are more likely to occur to enhance the effectiveness of land use planning as a tool for risk mitigation. Experience in California demonstrates that a combination of education, outreach, and mutually supporting policies that are linked to state-designated natural hazard zones can form an effective framework for enhancing the role of land use planning in reducing future losses from natural disasters. Norio Maki, Keiko Tamura, and Haruo Hayashi present a method for local government stakeholders involved in pre-disaster plan making to describe performance measures through the formulation of desired outcomes. Through a case study approach, Nara and Kyoto Prefectures’ separate experiences demonstrate how to conduct Strategic Earthquake Disaster Reduction Plans and Action Plans that have deep stakeholder buy-in and outcome measurability. Nara’s plan was prepared from 2,015 stakeholder ideas and Kyoto’s plan was prepared from 1,613 stakeholder ideas. Having a quantitative target for individual objectives ensures the measurability of plan progress. Both jurisdictions have undertaken evaluations of plan outcomes. Sandy Meyer, Eugene Henry, Roy E. Wright and Cynthia A. Palmer present the State of Florida in the U.S. and its experience with pre-disaster planning for post-disaster redevelopment. Drawing upon the lessons learned from the impacts of the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, local governments and state leaders in Florida sought to find a way to encourage behavior that would create greater community resiliency in 2006. The paper presents initial efforts to develop a post-disaster redevelopment plan (PDRP), including the experience of a pilot county. National level Bo-Yao Lee provides a national perspective: New Zealand’s approach to emergency management, where all hazard risks are addressed through devolved accountability. This contemporary approach advocates collaboration and coordination, aiming to address all hazard risks through the “4Rs” – reduction, readiness, response, and recovery. Lee presents the impact of the Resource Management Act (1991), the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act (2002), and the Building Act (2004) that comprise the key legislation influencing and promoting integrated management for environment and hazard risk management. Guillermo Franco and William Siembieda provide a field assessment of the February 27, 2010, M8.8 earthquake and tsunami event in Chile. The papers present an initial damage and life-loss review and assessment of seismic building resiliency and the country’s rapid updating of building codes that have undergone continuous improvement over the past 60 years. The country’s land use planning system and its emergency management system are also described. The role of insurance coverage reveals problems in seismic coverage for homeowners. The unique role of the Catholic Church in providing temporary shelter and the central government’s five-point housing recovery plan are presented. A weakness in the government’s emergency management system’s early tsunami response system is noted. Acknowledgements The Editorial Committee extends its sincere appreciation to both the contributors and the JDR staff for their patience and determination in making Part 2 of this special issue possible. Thanks also to the reviewers for their insightful analytic comments and suggestions. Finally, the Committee wishes to again thank Bayete Henderson for his keen and thorough editorial assistance and copy editing support.

On the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International, 89.6% of Sub-Saharan African countries received scores below 50, where a score of zero signifies that the country is highly corrupt and a score of 100 declares a country free of corruption. From these results, it seems as if Sub-Saharan African countries are quite vulnerable to corruption. In this article, the question whether certain traits in the Sub-Saharan African culture such as communalism, gift giving and a shame culture could in some situations influence people’s perception of, and their possible openness towards, certain forms of corruption was investigated. The research showed that cultural traits do influence people’s behaviour and that there are certain traits in the Sub-Saharan African culture that might sanction corruption. In response to these findings, some preliminary suggestions were proposed as to how Christians living in Africa could evaluate their cultural practices in the light of God’s Word and from a reformed theological paradigm. Instead of succumbing to the pressure posed by their culture to participate in immoral or corrupt activities, they could contribute to a moral regeneration on the African continent.Volgens Transparency International se 2012-CorruptionPerceptions Index het 89.6% van Afrikalande suid van die Sahara ’n telling van minder as 50 gekry, waar ’n telling van nul op hoë korrupsie dui en ’n telling van 100 aandui dat ’n land vry van korrupsie is. Hieruit blyk dat hierdie lande kwesbaar is vir korrupsie. In hierdie artikel word die moontlikheid ondersoek dat daar sekere eienskappe in die kultuur van hierdie lande is wat mense se persepsie van, en moontlike deelname aan, sekere vorme van korrupsie kan beïnvloed. Aandag word aan aspekte soos kommunalisme, die gee van geskenke en ’n ‘skandekultuur’ gegee. Die navorsing toon dat kultuur wel mense se gedrag beïnvloed en dat daar sekere eienskappe in die kultuur van Afrikalande suid van die Sahara is wat korrupsie kan versterk. Op grond van hierdie bevindinge word ’n paar voorlopige voorstelle gemaak oor hoe Christene wat in Afrika woon aspekte van hulle kultuur in die lig van God se Woord en vanuit ’n gereformeerde teologiese paradigma kan evalueer. In plaas daarvan om toe te gee aan die druk van hulle kultuur om aan immorele of korrupte aktiwiteite deel te neem, kan Christene tot ’n morele herlewing op die Afrika-kontinent bydra.

The Kah-hah-ko-wha site (41CE354) is an Historic Caddo Allen phase (ca. A.D. 1650-1800) habitation site situated in an upland saddle landform in the Flat Creek valley in the upper Neches River basin of East Texas. Flat Creek flows west a few kilometers to its confluence with the Neches River, not far downstream of Lake Palestine. The site was found and investigated as part of survey and test excavation investigations for a proposed U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-permitted lake on Flat Creek in northwestem Cherokee County. During those 2006 investigations, a large assemblage of Allen phase Caddo ceramics were recovered from household areas in the North and Alley parts of the site, making it one of the very few upper Neches Historic Caddo Allen phase domestic sites ever studied. As such, a detailed analysis of the domestic ceramics found at the Kah-hah-ko-wha site provides a unique opportunity to document the ceramic practices and traditions of these Caddo peoples. Ceramic vessel sherds are abundant at the Kahhah- ko-wha site, with 474 decorated sherds and 94 plain sherds from at least 36 vessels (based on the number of recovered rim sherds). The density of ceramic vessel sherds is 16.9 per m2 in the North area excavation units (n=213) and 37.0 per m2 in the Alley area (n=314 ). The plain/decorated sherd ratio (P/DR) for the site as a whole is only 0.20, quite comparable with the Allen phase component at the Deshazo site (Story 1995; Fields 1995), where the P/DR is 0.29, and the 18th century Nabedache Azul and Nabedache Blanco sites in the Neches River basin, Houston County; the P/DR ranges from 0.3 1-0.32 at these sites. By area, the P/DR in the North area is 0.31, compared to 0.13 from the Alley area. The lower P/DR from the Alley area suggests this occupation may be slightly younger than the North area occupation, even though the calibrated radiocarbon dates from the site do not suggest this. Table 1 provides comparative sherd assemblage data from nearby Lake Palestine sites on the Neches River and the Lang Pasture site, about five miles southwest from the Kah-hah-ko-wha site. In this particular seriation, the Kah-hah-kowha site falls in Group 1 of the seriation, and is interpreted as the youngest or most recent known Caddo occupation of the Lake Palestine area sites. By the late 17th and 18th centuries other Caddo sites are known in the Neches and Angelina river basins where brushed sherds account for ca. 50-90% of all the decorated sherds, which is consistent with the fact that more than 82% of the sherds at the Kahhah- ko-wha site are brushed.

<p>Mål for kvalitetsindikatorene er å belyse kvaliteten av tjenestene, gi styringsinformasjon og bidra til forbedring. Kvalitetsindikatorene som er i bruk i Norge publiseres på fylkesnivå med god kvalitet på dataene. Denne statistikken gir også mulighet for epidemiologisk forskning. De nordiske kvalitetsindikatorene gir mindre mulighet for sammenlignbarhet og analysering da de er basert på ulike datakilder og innsamlingsmetoder. Det er fotnote til hver indikator om hvordan dataene er fremskaffet i hvert land, og her fremkommer ulikheter i datakildene. Arbeidet med utvikling og forbedring av både de norske og de nordiske kvalitetsindikatorene er kontinuerlig. Det er ønskelig med flere indikatorer som kan måle eller gi en indikasjon på kvalitet på tannhelsetjenester. Mange punkter kan per i dag ikke måles på grunn av mangelfull datakvalitet og få rapporteringskrav for privat tannhelsetjeneste.</p><p>Wilberg MM. Quality indicators in dental health in Norway and the Nordic countries. Nor J Epidemiol 2012; 22 (1): 55-58.</p><p>ENGLISH SUMMARY</p><p>Quality indicators are used to provide management information and contribute to improvement. The quality indicators used in Norway are based on sound data and published at the county level. This statistic allows for epidemiological research. The Nordic quality indicators provide less opportunity for comparability and analysis because there are a lot of different data collection methods. The footnote to each indiator on how the data is provided in each country shows the differences in data sources. Development and improvement of both the Norwegian and Nordic quality indicators is a continuous process. More indicators that can measure or give an indication of the quality of dental services are desirable. Many items can not currently be measured due to sub-optimal data quality and little reporting requirements for private dental services.</p>

The Nordic countries are known to have small differences between schools, and educational policies that promote equity. However, there are indications that in many Nordic countries, the influence of students’ socio-economic status (SES) on achievement, has increased over the last decades. To promote equity, there is need to identify factors that may reduce this strong relation. Teacher competence (TC) is the foundation of instruction and learning, and studies from the US and Germany have shown that competent teachers may reduce the strong influence of students’ home background on achievement. However, few studies have investigated the relation between TC and equity in Nordic countries. This study investigates whether TC may mediate and/or moderate the relation between SES and achievement in these countries.Analyses of TIMSS grade 8 data from Norway, Sweden and Finland (N = 13 345 students) were conducted using multi-group, multi-level mediation and moderation structural equation models. Results across the three Nordic countries show that only in Norway were some aspects of TC (specialization in mathematics, and self-efficacy in mathematical pedagogical content knowledge and mathematical content knowledge) associated with higher levels of equity. In all three countries, there were indications of unequal distributions of competent teachers to high-SES schools. These findings could have implications for educational policy and are discussed in light of the context and previous research in each country. Keywords: teacher competence, mathematics achievement, equity, TIMSS, moderation models, mediation models Lærerkompetanse og likeverd i Norden. Mediering og moderering av sammenhengen mellom SES og faglige prestasjoner SammendragDe nordiske landene er kjent for å ha små forskjeller mellom skoler og en utdanningspolitikk som promoterer likeverd. Likevel, forskning indikerer at betydningen av elevens hjemmebakgrunn eller sosio-økonomiske status (SES) for deres faglige prestasjoner, har økt de siste tiår i mange Nordiske land. For å kunne motvirke en slik utvikling, er det behov for å identifisere faktorer som kan redusere den sterke relasjonen mellom SES og faglige prestasjoner. Lærerkompetanse danner grunnlaget for undervisning og læring, og forskning fra USA og Tyskland har vist at lærere med høy kompetanse kan redusere den sterke påvirkningen av elevers hjemmebakgrunn på deres faglige prestasjoner. Få studier har imidlertid undersøkt relasjonen mellom lærerkompetanse og likeverd i nordiske land. Denne studien undersøker om lærerkompetanse kan mediere og/eller moderere relasjonen mellom SES og prestasjoner i disse landene.Analyser av TIMSS data fra Norge, Sverige og Finland (N = 13 345 elever) på åttende trinn ble utført med fler-gruppe, fler-nivå strukturelle ligningsmodellering med mediering- og modereringsmodeller.Resultatene for de tre nordiske landene viste at aspekter av lærerkompetanse (spesialisering i matematikk og selvtillit i matematikkdidaktikk og matematikk) var assosiert med høyere likeverd kun i Norge. I alle tre land var det indikasjoner på en forfordeling av høy lærerkompetanse til skoler med høy SES. Disse funnene kan ha implikasjoner for utdanningspolitikk, og diskuteres i lys av konteksten samt tidligere forskning innen hvert land. Nøkkelord: lærerkompetanse, matematikkprestasjoner, likeverd, TIMSS, modereringsmodeller, medieringsmodeller

Hvert år tar en rekke mennesker livet sitt i Norge ved å hoppe fra et høyt sted. I perioden 2000-2011 har til sammen 324 mennesker tatt sitt eget liv på denne måten. I den statistikken som er tilgjengelig er det ikke spesifisert hvor disse personene har hoppet fra. Rapporter om enkeltstående hendelser gir imidlertid grunn til å anta at selvmord ved hopp fra bruer representerer en betydelig andel av alle selvmord ved utsprang. Et viktig spørsmål er derfor om vi, ved å installere høye gjerder eller andre sikringstiltak på utsatte bruer, kan forebygge selvmord? Internasjonal forskning tyder på dette, og spørsmålet om brusikring diskuteres både i den offentlige debatten og hos vegmyndighetene i Norge. Men det er uklart i hvilken grad kunnskap og erfaringer fra andre land kan overføres til vårt land. I artikkelen tar vi opp relevant forskning, drøfter arbeid med sikring av bruer i Norge, samt orienterer om et igangsatt forskningsprosjekt som vil belyse muligheten til å forebygge selvmord ved sikring av utsatte bruer i Norge. Every year many Norwegians commit suicide by jumping. In the period 2000–2011 suicide by jumping accounted for 324 deaths. The available statistics does not specify the type of site from which the jumping occurs; however reports of several single incidents give reasons to believe that bridges are commonly used. An important question is, therefore: could we, by installing barriers on bridges which are commonly used, reduce the risk of suicide? International research suggests that erecting fences on popular bridges do in fact reduce risk of suicide. Both the general public and Norwegian road authorities are concerned about the question whether we should do so in Norway. However, we might question whether available knowledge transfers to our country. In this article we refer to international research, what has been done in Norway to erect suicide barriers on bridges, and describe a research project undertaken to answer important questions regarding the possibility of saving lives by securing popular bridges in Norway with anti-suicide barriers.

The major forms of Chinese utopia include “the Land of Bliss”, the Taoist “small country with few inhabitants”, the Confucian “Great Unity”, Tao Yuanming’s “Peach Blossom Spring”, Kang Youwei’s “World of Great Unity” and its modern variations. Chinese utopia has evolved from reactive poetic retreat to active political remolding. It has developed from pastness to nowness in terms of temporal orientation, and from “nowhere” to “somewhere” and then to hereness in terms of spatial orientation. Chinese utopia has strong poetic anchorage, which is determined by the Heaven-Earth-man unity. Through the mechanism of texperience shift, Chinese utopia in the modern context is often transformed into a usable cultural or spiritual icon, or national political vision, policies, blueprints and concrete social practice. A comprehensive insight into the Chinese utopian tradition helps to understand the utopian-poetic-political entanglement in China.

Vir ’n eeu (1888–1988) het daar ’n groeiende en florerende Gereformeerde jeugbeweging, die Jongeliedeverenigings op Gereformeerde grondslag (afgekort as JV), in Suid-Afrika bestaan. Hierdie min of meer onafhanklike beweging het ’n belangrike rol gespeel om by jongmense ’n Christelike lewensvisie tuis te bring en hulle daardeur te inspireer. Hierdie artikel beginmet ’n motivering, waarna dit ’n kort historiese skets oor die ontstaan en ontwikkeling van die beweging bied gevolg deur ’n oorsig oor die bronne wat nog beskikbaar is en hieroor geraadpleeg kan word. Die volgende gedeelte van die artikel bevat twee gevallestudies. Die eerste bied ’n oorsig oor die breë spektrum van aktiwiteite van ’n spesifieke JV (nl. JV Gideon). Die spesifieke aktiwiteite van hierdie JV het dit in staat gestel om sy lede met ’n wye koninkryksperspektief toe te rus. In die tweede geval toon die bedrywighede van die Transvaalse Bond van JV’s (bv. deur sy leierskampe en verdere publikasies) dieselfde omvattende formatiewe waarde. In die lig van die voorafgaande gegewens, kan die besluit van die sinode (1988) van die Gereformeerde Kerke in Suid-Afrika (GKSA) om finaal die jeugwerk van die JV’s te termineer en met kerklike jeugsorg te vervang, bevraagteken word. Die skrywer van hierdie artikel is van mening dat sowel kerklike jeugsorg as selfstandige jeugwerk elkeen ’n eie, unieke bydrae tot die vorming van Christelike jongmense kan maak en dus langs mekaar mag bestaan. In die lig van die steeds groeiende sekularisasie in die land word ten slotte die dringende noodsaaklikheid van iets soortgelyks aan die destydse JV’s vir vandag beklemtoon.A century of Reformed youth movement (1888–1988): A historical-evaluative reconnaissance. For a century (1888–1988) a growing and flourishing Reformed youth movement, called the ‘Jongeliedeverenigings op Gereformeerde grondslag’ (abbreviated as JV) existed in South Africa. This more or less independent movement played an important role in shaping the Christian worldview of its members. This article starts with a motivation for this reflection; it then provides a brief historical sketch of the origin and development of the movement, followed by a review of the sources consulted. The next section of the article presents two case studies. Firstly, it provides an overview of the broad spectrum of the activities of a specific JV (viz. JV Gideon). Its activities enabled it to equip its members with a wide kingdom perspective. In the second case, activities (e.g. leadership camps and added publications) of the then ‘Transvaalse Bond’ (Alliance) testifies to the same encompassing formative power. In the light of the preceding information, the decision of the synod of the Reformed Churches of South Africa (1988) to terminate the JV’s youth work to be replaced by the youth care of the churches is queried. The writer of this article is of the opinion that ecclesiastical care for its young members, as well as an independent youth movement, have a unique role to fulfil in the moulding and equipping of young Christians. It should therefore not exclude but rather complement each other. In the light of the growing secularisation in our country the conclusion emphasises the urgent need of re-establishing something similar to the erstwhile JV movement.

Indonesia as a developing country is doing a lot of activities in Pesisir Selatan that is being actively growing. In this skripsi, the formulation of the problem are: a) how the government of Kab.Pesisir Selatan manage the investation in tourism of small islands. b) what is the government challange involved in investment in tourism of small Islands in Kab. Pesisir Selatan. Research methods used are juridical empirical, that is the existing approach with an understanding positif law of an object and how reality in the field. Then analyzed qualitatively and described descriptively. The results showed that: a) The basic investigation in Kab.Pessel has been implemented in accordance with UU Penanaman Modal and UU Kepariwisataan. In practice it finds one investment company and more than 12 domestic investors who invest in insland tourism. Activity that involved in investing in small islands tourism are tourist attraction transportation, tourism and travel agency, food and beverage, providing accommodatin and other tourism bussiness activity. b) in the implementation there is obstacles such as: whether unregistered land, potential investors who do not meet the requirements, lack of people awareness about investation commonly in tourism field, and low in facility in Pesisir Selatan. The government's ongoing solution is to counseling and coaching local communities to register their land, take care of permits and be open to investing activities and tourism, make it easier permit service and non permit service and coordinating inter-sectoral services to improve facilities.

In an earlier article, the psychometrics of various fair selection models that had been proposed in the United States of America in the late 1960s, early 1970s were presented. The purpose of the present article is to discuss the subsequent history of the application of these models in personnel selection in that country and to view its implications for the South African situation. Because the question of fair selection models ties in with the issue of affirmative action, a brief history of this issue as it pertains to personnel selection is also given. Key decisions of the American Supreme Court that have a bearing on this matter are also reviewed. The failure to widely apply these fair selection models may be attributed to the prevalent socio-political context which favours the preferential treatment of certain groups but is hesitant to specify the particulars and limits of such treatment. Opsomming 'n Vorige artikel het die psigometi-ika onderliggend aan verskeie billike keuringsmodelle wat in die laat sestigerjare, vroee sewentigerjare in die Verenigde State van Amerika voorgestel is, behandel. Die doel met die onderhawige artikel is om 'n oorsig te verskaf van die daaropvolgende geskiedenis van die toepassing van daardie modelle in personeelkeuring in daardie land, en om die implikasies daarvan vir die Suid-Afrikaanse situasie te belig. Omdat die aangeleentheid van billike keuringsmodelle verband hou met die kwessie van regstellende aksie, word 'n bondige geskiedenis van hierdie kwessie soos dit op personeelkeuring van toepassing is, ook verskaf. Sleutel-uitsprake van die Amerikaanse Hooggeregshof wat betrekking het op hierdie aangeleentheid word ook beskou. Die beperkte toepassing van hierdie billike keuringsmodelle kan toegeskryf word aan die heersende sosio-politieke konteks wat die voorkeurbehandeling van bepaalde groepe voorstaan, maar wat huiwerig is om die besonderhede en perke van sodanige behandeling te spesifiseer.

This article describes the measurement and comparison of different levels of consumer awareness in an empirical study carried out in South Africa during 1994. The study investigates the role of various demographic variables on the construct, compares the results with those of a previous study and analyses the implications of the findings for the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), launched by the Government of National Unity. Findings confirm the reliability of the instrument to measure the five factors of consumer awareness identified in previous studies. Different levels of consumer awareness emerged from the sample. These differences can be attributed to demographic variables such as household size, income, education and area. Findings further suggest that levels of consumer awareness have changed by area since 1992. These changes imply a need for consumer education to be incorporated into the RDP, should the government wish to enhance levels of consumer awareness in the country. Opsomming Hierdie artikel beskryf die meting en vergelyking van verskillende vlakke van verbruikersbewustheid in 'n empiriese studie uitgevoer in Suid-Afrika gedurende 1994. Die rol van verskeie demografiese faktore op die konstruk word ondersoek, die resultate vergelyk met die van 'n vorige studie en die implikasies daarvan ontleed in terme van die Heropbou en Ontwikkelingsprogam (HOP) deur die Regering van Nasionale Eenheid ingestel. Bevindinge bevestig die betroubaarheid van die instrument om die vyf faktore van verbruikersbewustheid soos geidentifiseer in vorige studies, te meet. Verskeie vlakke van verbruikersbewustheid het na vore getree uit die steekproef. Hierdie verskille kan toegeskryf word aan demografiese faktore soos huishouding grootte, inkome, opvoedingspeil en woongebied. Bevindinge suggereer verder dat vlakke van verbruikersbewustheid verander het sedert 1992, volgens gebied. Hierdie veranderinge impliseer 'n behoefte om verbruikersopvoeding in die HOP in te sluit, sou die regering vlakke van verbruikersbewustheid in die land wil verhoog.

Thailand is an agricultural country. However, agricultural productivity relies on the heavy use of herbicides, especially paraquat. Paraquat accumulation is emerging as a problem in an ever-growing portion of agricultural land. Paraquat residues are toxic to plants, animals, and aquatic organisms in the environment. Biological remediation is a process that can mitigate agricultural chemical contaminants. One of the interesting bioremediators is bacteria. Not only do certain soil bacteria remediate paraquat, but some of them also possess plant growth-promoting properties, which provide advantages in field application. Thus, this study aimed to screen soil bacteria that could degrade paraquat and, at the same time, promote plant growth. Bacteria were isolated from paraquat-treated agricultural soil in Mueang Kaen Pattana municipality, Chiang Mai province, Thailand. On the basis of morphological and 16S rDNA sequence analyses, the selected bacterium was identified as Bacillus aryabhattai strain MoB09. It is capable of growing in nitrogen-free media. B. aryabhattai growth and paraquat degradation were found to be optimum at pH 7 and 30°C. This selected strain also possessed plant growth-promoting abilities, including indole production, siderophore production, phosphate solubilization, and 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid deaminase activity. Paraquat degradation was also evaluated in pot experiments of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata). It was found that this strain could remediate the paraquat residue in both sterilized and non-sterilized soils. The cowpea plants grown in paraquat-contaminated soil with B. aryabhattai showed longer root and shoot lengths than those grown in soil without bacterial inoculation. In addition, B. aryabhattai also promoted the growth of cowpea under induced drought stress. These results suggested that B. aryabhattai could be applied to mitigate paraquat residue in soil and also to promote plant productivity for the organic crop production.

Facilitator training. Since the last visit to South Africa by Carl Rogers and Ruth Sanford in 1986, many businesses in the country showed enthusiasm to train person-centered facilitators as change agents for the post-apartheid South Africa. Unfortunately, this training never really got momentum because of (amongst other reasons) the misconception about the nature of the process and skills of facilitation. This research can be seen as a continuation of Rogers and Sanford's work in an effort to explain facilitation to management, train facilitators working in cross-cultural communication situations in South African organisations and evaluate this training. Facilitation is conceptualised from the person-centered approach and operationalised by making use of different training models from the human potential movement. A facilitation training model and an experiential learning workshop were constructed. Fifty personnel and training officers attended the workshop. The evaluation battery included the Carkhuff scales, the Personal Orientation Inventory and the Selfactualising characteristics question- naire. The difference between a pre and post measurement indicates a statistical significant development in the interpersonal skills of facilitation namely respect, empathy, realness and concreteness; as well as the intrapersonal characteristics of awareness, emotional maturity and internal locus of control. Suggestions towards accelerated training of facilitators in South Africa are recommended. Opsomming Sedert die laaste besoek van Carl Rogers en Ruth Sanford aan Suid-Afrika in 1986, het verskeie organisasies in die land met entoesiasme begin om fasiliteerders op te lei as veranderingsagente vir die post-apartheid Suid- Afrika. Ongelukkig het hierdie opieiding nooit werklik momentum bereik nie as gevolg van (onder andere) die misverstand oor die aard van die proses en vaardighede van fasilitering. Hierdie navorsing kan beskou word as 'n voortsetting van Rogers en Sanford se werk in 'n poging om fasilitering aan bestuur te verduidelik, om fasiliteerders op te lei in die veld van kruiskulturele kommunikasie binne Suid-Afrikaanse organisasies en om hierdie opieiding te evalueer. Fasilitering word vanuit die persoonsgesentreerde benadering gekonseptualiseer, en geoperasionaliseer deur gebruik te maak van verskillende opieidingsmodelle uit die menslikepotensiaal-beweging. 'n Fasiliteringsopleidingsmodel en 'n ervaringsleerwerkswinkel is saamgestel. Vyftig personeel- en opieidingsbeamptes het die werkswinkel bygewoon. Die evalueringsbattery het bestaan uit die Carkhuffskale, die Persoonlikeorientasievraelys en die Selfaktualiseringskenmerkevraelys. Die verskil tussen 'n pre- en post-meting dui op 'n statisties beduidende ontwikkeling van die interpersoonlike vaardighede van fasilitering naamlik respek, empatie, egtheid en konkreetheid; asook ten opsigte van die intrapersoonlike kenmerke van bewustheid, emosionele volwassenheid en interne lokus van kontrole. Versnelde opieiding van fasiliteerders in Suid-Afrika word aanbeveel.

Abstract This article presents a study of how Swedish pre-service history teachers narrated their nation’s past. Previous research on national history education has generally focused on the treatment of conflicts in national history and what challenges that poses for history education. The present study seeks to complement and broaden this research through its focus on a country where national history is generally perceived as uncontroversial and the debate on national history is generally characterised by consensus, and on what strategies future history teachers use when recounting the national history of Sweden. Using a qualitative approach, we asked our respondents to “Tell us the history of Sweden in your own words” in writing. The study finds that the vast majority of the respondents approach their national history in a way that reinforces a traditional view of Swedish national history. These narratives are generally presented in a way that does not engage with or show how perspective and position affects our rendering of history, which has often been regarded as problematic in history educational research. At the same time, these results also show that our respondents are well familiar with the dominant way of perceiving the Swedish past, something that could also be argued to be valuable in history education, depending on how we choose to approach national history. Keywords: national history, history education, historical consciousness, uses of history Kontroversiellt okontroversiellt? Om svenska historielärarstudenters relation till deras nationella förflutna Sammandrag Artikeln presenterar en studie av hur svenska historielärarstudenter skildrade Sveriges historia. Tidigare forskning om nationell historieundervisning har främst närmat sig ämnet från ett konfliktperspektiv och undersökt vilka utmaningar detta innebär för historieundervisningen. Föreliggande studie söker att komplementera tidigare forskning genom att fokusera på ett land vars nationella historia generellt uppfattas som okontro­versiell och där debatten om den nationella historieskrivningen i stor utsträckning präglas av konsensus, samt på vilka strategier historielärarstudenter använder när de skildrar Sveriges historia. Genom en kvalitativ forskningsansats bad vi våra respond­enter att skriftligen”Berätta Sveriges historia med dina egna ord”. Studien visar att majoriteten av respondenterna skildrar den svenska historien på ett sätt som återger en traditionell syn på Sveriges historia. Dessa narrativ är generellt skrivna på ett sådant sätt att de inte visar hur perspektiv och positionering påverkar hur vi skildrar det förflutna, något som ofta ansetts vara problematiskt i historiedidaktisk forskning. Samtidigt visar studiens resultat att respondenterna är välbekanta med det dominerande sättet att skildra den svenska historien, något som även kan vara värdefullt för historieundervisningen, beroende på hur vi väljer att närma oss den nationella historien. Nyckelord: nationell historia, historiedidaktik, historiemedvetande, historiebruk

In this article the the ministry of hope to women without hope are investigated in the South African context of hope and reconciliation. Since apartheid ended 19 years ago, a democratic policy has been followed. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was assigned the task to lead the population of South Africa to hope and reconciliation. The question may truly be asked whether the current picture could be that of a healed country. On the one hand, a large part of the population demonstrates a negative attitude regarding future expectations of South Africa; on the other hand, there are people at grassroots level who strive daily to bring about reconciliation in society by trying to make life easier for others. Utilising the available resources, which are minimal, the women called Mamas Africa are examples of people who serve the hopeless with hope every day. The central theoretical argument is that the Mamas Africa phenomenon has the potential of bringing hope, should it branch out widely. The concept of Mamas Africa refers to women from all races who promote mutual commitment based on their faith, and also make a difference in the South African society. In this article, an empirical investigation was made into the motivation behind the Mamas Africa phenomenon in the first place. Secondly, a normative investigation was conducted into the theology of hope from the perspective of reformed theology; and finally, pragmatic guidelines have been provided for the ministry of hope to the hopeless in the South African society.In hierdie artikel word die bediening van hoop en versoening aan oënskynlik hooplose vroue ondersoek in die Suid-Afrikaanse konteks van hoop en versoening. Dit is reeds 19 jaar sedert apartheid afgeskaf is en ’n demokratiese beleid in Suid-Afrika gevolg word. Die Waarheids- en Versoeningskommissie (WVK) is getaak om die bevolking van Suid-Afrika na hoop en versoening te lei. Dit wil egter voorkom asof die bevolking van Suid-Afrika tans verder van rekonsiliasie is as direk na 1994. Die vraag kan tereg gevra word of dit ’n beeld is van ’n land wat genesing beleef. Ondanks die staking van die WVK se werksaamhede en die oorwegend negatiewe ingesteldheid van ’n groot deel van die bevolking rakende die toekomsverwagtinge in Suid-Afrika, is daar diegene op grondvlak wat elke dag daarna streef om versoening in die samelewing te bewerkstellig deur die lewe van ander te probeer vergemaklik. Die vroue genaamd ‘Mamas Afrika’ is voorbeelde van diegene wat, met die minimum hulpbronne tot hulle beskikking, daagliks die hooploses met hoop bedien. Die konsep Mamas Afrika verwys na vroue van alle rasse wat hulle, as uitvloeisel van hulle geloof en vertroue in God, beywer tot onderlinge versoening. Die vraag wat hier ter sprake is, is die volgende: Wat is die relevansie van die Christelike hoop en versoening as dryfveer vir morele aksie in die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing se groei na versoening en nasiewording soos toegepas deur die Mamas Afrika?

A politician’s political and personal selves have been in the spotlight of academic scholarship for hundreds of years, but only in recent years has a political ‘persona’ obtained new modes of mediation via networked media. New advancements in politics, technology, and media brought challenges to the traditional politics and personal self-representation of major leaders. Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement in June 2013, posed a new challenge for his political self-mediation. A rather reserved leader (Loshak), he nonetheless broadcast his personal news to the large audience and made it in a very peculiar way, causing the media professionals and public to draw parallels with Soviet-era mediated politics and thereby evoke collective memories. This paper studies how Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement was constructed and presented and also what response and opinion threads—satirical and humorous, ignorant and informed feedback—it achieved via media professionals and the general Twitter audience. Finally, this study aims to evaluate how Vladimir Putin’s political ‘persona’ was represented and perceived via these mixed channels of communication.According to classic studies of mediated political persona (Braudy; Meyrowitz; Corner), any public activity of a political persona is considered a part of their political performance. The history of political marketing can be traced back to ancient times, but it developed through the works of Renaissance and Medieval thinkers. Of particular prominence is Machiavelli’s The Prince with its famous “It is unnecessary for the prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them” (cited in Corner 68). All those centuries-built developments and patterns of political self-representation have now taken on new forms as a result of the development of media industry and technology. Russian mediated politics has seen various examples of new ways of self-representation exercised by major politicians in the 2010s. For instance, former president Dmitry Medvedev was known as the “president with an iPad” (Pronina), as he was advocating technology and using social networks in order to seem more approachable and appear to be responsive to collecting feedback from the nation. Traditional media constantly highlighted Medvedev’s keen interest in Facebook and Twitter, which resulted in a growing public assumption that this new modern approach to self-representation may signify a new approach to governance (see Asmolov).Goffman’s classic study of the distinction between public and private life helps in linking political persona to celebrity persona. In his view the political presentation of self differs from the one in popular culture because politicians as opposed to entertainers have to conform to a set of ideals, projections, social stereotypes and cultural/national archetypes for their audience of voters (Goffman; Corner). A politician’s public persona has to be constantly reaffirming and proving the values he or she is promoting through their campaigns. Mediations of a political personhood can be projected in three main modes: visual, vocal, and kinetic (Ong; Mayhew; Corner). Visual representation follows the iconic paintings and photography in displaying the position, attitude, and associative contexts related to that. Vocal representation covers both content and format of a political speech, it is not only the articulated message, but also more important the persona speaking. Ong describes this close relation of the political and personal along with the interrelation of the message and the medium as “secondary orality”—voice, tone and volume make the difference. The third mode is kinetic representation and means the political persona in action and interaction. Overlapping of different strategies and structures of political self-representation fortifies the notion of performativity (Corner and Pels) in politics that becomes a core feature of the multidimensional representation of a mediated political self.The advancement of electronic media and interactive platforms has influenced political communication and set the new standard for the convergence of the political and personal life of a politician. On its own, the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair raised the level of public awareness of the politician’s private life. It also allowed for widely distributed, contested, and mediated judgments of a politician’s personal actions. Lawrence and Bennett in their study of Lewinsky case’s academic and public response state that although the majority of American citizens did not expect the president to be the moral leader, they expressed ambivalence in their rendition of the importance of “moral leadership” by big politicians (438). The President Clinton/Lewinsky case adds a new dimension to Goffman and Corner’s respective discussions on the significance of values in the political persona self-representation. This case proves that values can not only be reinforced by one’s public persona, but those values can be (re)constructed by the press or public opinion. Values are becoming a contested trait in the contemporary mediated political persona. This view can be supported by Dmitry Medvedev’s case: although modern technology was known as his personal passion, it was publicised only with reference to his role as a public politician and specifically when Medvedev appeared with an iPad talking about modernisation at major meetings (Pronina). However, one can argue that one’s charisma can affect the impact of values in public self-representation of the politician. In addition, social networks add a new dimension to personified publicity. From Barack Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ networked campaign in 2008 and through many more recent examples, we are witnessing the continuing process of the personalisation of politics (Corner and Pels). From one point of view, audiences tend to have more interest and sympathy in political individuals and their lifestyles rather than political parties and their programmes (Lawrence and Bennett; Corner and Pels). It should be noted that the interest towards political individuals does not fall apart from the historical logics of politics; it is only mediated in a new way. Max Weber’s notion of “leadership democracy” proves that political strategy is best distributed through the charismatic leadership imposing his will on the audience. This view can be strengthened by Le Bon’s concept of emotive connection of the leader and his crowd, and Adorno’s writings on the authoritarian personality also highlight the significance of the leader’s own natural and mediated persona in politics. What is new is the channels of mediation—modern audiences’ access to a politician’s private life is facilitated by new forms of media interactivity (Corner and Pels). This recent development calls for the new understanding of “persona” in politics. On one hand, the borderline between private and public becomes blurred and we are more exposed to the private self of a leader, but on the other hand, those politicians aware of new media literacy can create new structures of proximity and distance and construct a separate “persona” online, using digital media for their benefit (Corner and Pels). Russian official politics has developed a cautious attitude towards social networks in the post-Medvedev era - currently, President Vladimir Putin is not known for using social networks personally and transmits his views via his spokesperson. However, his personal charisma makes him overly present in digital media - through the images and texts shared both by his supporters and rivals. As opposed to Medvedev’s widely publicised “modernisation president” representation, Putin’s persona breaks the boundaries of limited traditional publicity and makes him recognised not only for his political activity, but looks, controversial expression, attitude to employees, and even personal life. That brings us back to Goffman, Corner and Lawrence and Bennett’s discussions on the interrelation of political values and personal traits in one’s political self-representation, making it evident that one’s strong personality can dominate over his political image and programme. Moreover, an assumption can be made that a politician’s persona may be more powerful than the narrative suggested by the constructed self-representation and new connotations may arise on the crossroads of this interaction.Russian President Divorce Announcement and Collective MemoryVladimir Putin’s divorce announcement was broadcast via traditional media on 6 June 2013 as a simple news story. The state broadcasting company Vesti-24 sent a journalist Polina Yermolayeva from their news bulletin to cover Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putin’s visit to a ballet production, Esmeralda, at the state Kremlin theatre. The news anchor’s introduction to the interview was ordinarily written and had no hints of the upcoming sensation. After the first couple and the journalist had discussed their opinion of the ballet (“beautiful music,” “flawless and light moves”), the reporter Yermolayeva suddenly asked: “You and Lyudmila are rarely seen together in public. Rumour has it that you do not live together. It is true?” Vladimir Putin and his wife exchanged a number of rather pre-scripted speeches stating that the first couple was getting a divorce as the children had grown old enough, and they would still stay friends and wished each other the best of luck. The whole interview lasted 3:25 minutes and became a big surprise for the country (Loshak; Sobchak).When applying the classification of three modes of political personhood (Corner; Ong) to Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement, it becomes evident that all three modes—visual, vocal, and kinetic—were used. Television audiences watched their president speak freely to the unknown reporter, explain details of his life in his own words so that body language also was visible and conveyed additional information. The visual self-representation harkens back to classic, Soviet-style announcements: Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina are dressed in classic monochrome suit and costume with a skirt respectively. They pose in front of the rather dull yet somewhat golden decorations of the Kremlin Theatre Hall, the walls themselves reflecting the glory and fanfare of the Soviet leadership and architecture. Vladimir Putin and his wife both talk calmly while Lyudmila appears even more relaxed than her husband (Sobchak). Although the speech looks prepared in advance (Loshak), it uses colloquial expressions and is delivered with emotional pauses and voice changes.However, close examination of not only the message but the medium of the divorce announcement reveals a vast number of intriguing symbols and parallels. First, although living in the era of digital media, Vladimir Putin chose to broadcast his personal news through a traditional television channel. Second, it was broadcast in a news programme making the breaking news of the president’s divorce, paradoxically, quite a mundane news event. Third, the semiotic construction of the divorce announcement bore a lot of connotations and synergies to the conservative, Soviet-style information distribution patterns. There are a few key symbols here that evoke collective memories: ballet, conservative political report on the government, and the stereotype of a patriarchal couple with a submissive wife (see Loshak; Rostovskiy). For example, since the perestroika of the 1990s, ballet has been widely perceived as a symbol of big political change and cause of public anxiety (Kachkaeva): this connotation was born in the 1990s when all channels were broadcasting Swan Lake round the clock while the White House was under attack. Holden reminds us that this practice was applied many times during major crises in Soviet history, thus creating a short link in the public subconscious of a ballet broadcast being symbolic of a political crisis or turmoil.Vladimir Putin Divorce: Traditional and Social Media ReceptionIn the first day after the divorce announcement Russian Twitter generated 180,000 tweets about Vladimir Putin’s divorce, and the hashtag #развод (“divorce”) became very popular. For the analysis that follows, Putin divorce tweets were collected by two methods: retrieved from traditional media coverage of Twitter talk on Putin’s divorce and from Twitter directly, using Topsy engine. Tweets were collected for one week, from the divorce announcement on 6 June to 13 June when the discussion declined and became repetitive. Data was collected using Snob.ru, Kommersant.ru, Forbes.ru, other media outlets and Topsy. The results were then combined and evaluated.Some of those tweets provided a satirical commentary to the divorce news and can be classified as “memes.” An “Internet meme” is a contagious message, a symbolic pattern of information spread online (Lankshear and Knobel; Shifman). Memes are viral texts that are shared online after being adjusted/altered or developed on the way. Starting from 1976 when Richard Dawkins coined the term, memes have been under media scholarship scrutiny and the term has been widely contested in various sciences. In Internet research studies, memes are defined as “condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others” (Pickerel, Jorgensen, and Bennett). The open character of memes makes them valuable tools for political discourse in a modern highly mediated environment.Qualitative analysis of the most popular and widely shared tweets reveals several strong threads and themes round Putin’s divorce discussion. According to Burzhskaya, many users created memes with jokes about the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. For instance, “He should have tied up his relationship with Dmitry Anatolyevich long ago” or “So actually Medvedev is the case?” were among popular memes generated. Another collection of memework contained a comment that, according to the Russian legislation, Putin’s ex-wife should get half of their wealth, in this case—half of the country. This thread was followed by the discussion whether the separation/border of her share of Russia should use the Ural Mountains as the borderline. Another group of Twitter users applied the Russian president’s divorce announcement to other countries’ politics. Thus one user wrote “Take Yanukovich to the ballet” implying that Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich (who was still a legitimate president in June 2013) should also be taken to the ballet to trigger changes in the political life in Ukraine. Twitter celebrity and well-known Russian actress and comedian Tatiana Lazareva wrote “In my opinion, it is a scam”, punning on the slang meaning of the word “razvod” (“divorce”) in Russian that can also mean “fraud” or “con”. Famous Russian journalist Dmitry Olshansky used his Twitter account to draw a historical parallel between Putin and other Russian and Soviet political leaders’ marital life. He noted that such Russian leaders as Tsar Nikolay the Second and Mikhail Gorbachev who loved their wives and were known to be good husbands were not successful managers of the state. In contrast, lone rulers of Russia such as Joseph Stalin proved to be leaders who loved their country first and gained a lot of support from their electorate because of that lonely love. Popular print and online journalist Oleg Kashin picked up on that specific idea: he quoted Vladimir Putin’s press secretary who explained that the president had declared that he would now spend more time working for the prosperity of the country.Twitter users were exchanging not only 140 symbol texts but also satirical images and other visual memes based on the divorce announcement. Those who suggested that Vladimir Putin should have divorced the country instead portrayed Lyudmila Putina and Vladimir holding candles and wearing funereal black with various taglines discussing how the country would now be split. Other users contributed visual memes jamming the television show Bachelor imagery and font with Vladimir Putin’s face and an announcement that the most desirable bachelor in the country is now its president. A similar idea was put into jammed images of the Let’s Get Married television show using Vladimir Putin’s face or name linked with a humorous comment that he could try those shows to find a new wife. One more thread of Twitter memes on Putin’s divorce used the name of Alina Kabaeva, Olympic gymnast who is rumoured by the press to be in relationship with the leader (Daily Mail Reporter). She was mentioned in plenty of visual and textual memes. Probably, the most popular visual meme (Burzhskaya; Topsy) used the one-liner from a famous Soviet comedy Ivan Vasylievich Menyaet Professiyu: it uses a joyful exclamation of an actress who learns that her love interest, a movie director, is leaving his wife so that the lovers can now fly to a resort together. Alina Kabaeva, the purported love interest of Putin, was jammed to be that actress as she announced the “triumphal” resort vacation plan to a girlfriend over the phone.Vladimir Putin’s 2013 divorce announcement presented new challenges for his personal and political self-representation and revealed new traits of the Russian president’s interaction with the nation. As the news of Vladimir and Lyudmila Putin’s divorce was broadcast via traditional media in a non-interactive television format, commentary on the event advanced only through the following week’s media coverage and the massive activity on social networks. It has still to be examined whether Vladimir Putin’s political advisors intentionally included many symbols of collective memory in the original and staid broadcast announcement. However, the response from traditional and social media shows that both Russian journalists and regular Twitter users were inclined to use humour and satire when discussing the personal life of a major political leader. Despite this appearance of an active counter-political sphere via social networks, the majority of tweets retrieved also revealed a certain level of respect towards Vladimir Putin’s privacy as few popular jokes or memes were aggressive, offensive or humiliating. Most popular memes on Vladimir Putin’s divorce linked this announcement to the political life of Russia, the political situation in other countries, and television shows and popular culture. Some of the memes, though, advanced the idea that Vladimir Putin should have divorced the country instead. The analysis also shows how a charismatic leader can affect or reconstruct the “values” he represents. In Vladimir Putin’s divorce event, his personality is the main focus of discussion both by traditional and new media. However, he is not judged for his personal choices as the online social media users provide rather mild commentary and jokes about them. The event and the subsequent online discourse, images and texts not only identify how Putin’s politics have become personified, the research also uncovers how the audience/citizenry online often see the country as a “persona” as well. Some Internet users suggested Putin’s marriage to the country; this mystified, if not mythologised view reinforces Vladimir Putin’s personal and political charisma.Conclusively, Vladimir Putin’s divorce case study shows how political and private persona are being mediated and merged via mixed channels of communication. 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This paper seeks to explore environmental, social and governance issues arising from investment in special economic zones (SEZs) in the mainland Southeast Asian region through a mixture of thick analytical description and multiple case study approach. All the states studied here have embraced the SEZ approach as it offers rapid economic development without any implications for the political settlement, which is considered beneficial by current administrations. Particular emphasis is placed on environmental, social and governance issues in the region covered and some complex issues that have emerged. It is shown that the situation is complex and continually evolving and that there are limited constraints on the actions of corporations. Consequently, there is an opportunity for investors to set precedents and protocols on a progressive basis. 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IntroductionFirmly located within the discourse of visible culture as the lofty preserve of art exhibitions and museum artefacts, the noun “curate” has gradually transformed into the verb “to curate”. Williams writes that “curate” has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded to describe a creative activity. Designers no longer simply sell clothes; they “curate” merchandise. Chefs no longer only make food; they also “curate” meals. Chosen for their keen eye for a particular style or a precise shade, it is their knowledge of their craft, their reputation, and their sheer ability to choose among countless objects which make the creative process a creative activity in itself. Writing from within the framework of “curate” as a creative process, this article discusses how the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II, hosted by Irish President Mary McAleese at Dublin Castle in May 2011, was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity. The paper will focus in particular on how the menu for the banquet was created and how the banquet’s brief, “Ireland on a Plate”, was fulfilled.History and BackgroundFood has been used by nations for centuries to display wealth, cement alliances, and impress foreign visitors. Since the feasts of the Numidian kings (circa 340 BC), culinary staging and presentation has belonged to “a long, multifaceted and multicultural history of diplomatic practices” (IEHCA 5). According to the works of Baughman, Young, and Albala, food has defined the social, cultural, and political position of a nation’s leaders throughout history.In early 2011, Ross Lewis, Chef Patron of Chapter One Restaurant in Dublin, was asked by the Irish Food Board, Bord Bía, if he would be available to create a menu for a high-profile banquet (Mahon 112). The name of the guest of honour was divulged several weeks later after vetting by the protocol and security divisions of the Department of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Lewis was informed that the menu was for the state banquet to be hosted by President Mary McAleese at Dublin Castle in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland the following May.Hosting a formal banquet for a visiting head of state is a key feature in the statecraft of international and diplomatic relations. Food is the societal common denominator that links all human beings, regardless of culture (Pliner and Rozin 19). When world leaders publicly share a meal, that meal is laden with symbolism, illuminating each diner’s position “in social networks and social systems” (Sobal, Bove, and Rauschenbach 378). The public nature of the meal signifies status and symbolic kinship and that “guest and host are on par in terms of their personal or official attributes” (Morgan 149). While the field of academic scholarship on diplomatic dining might be young, there is little doubt of the value ascribed to the semiotics of diplomatic gastronomy in modern power structures (Morgan 150; De Vooght and Scholliers 12; Chapple-Sokol 162), for, as Firth explains, symbols are malleable and perfectly suited to exploitation by all parties (427).Political DiplomacyWhen Ireland gained independence in December 1921, it marked the end of eight centuries of British rule. The outbreak of “The Troubles” in 1969 in Northern Ireland upset the gradually improving environment of British–Irish relations, and it would be some time before a state visit became a possibility. Beginning with the peace process in the 1990s, the IRA ceasefire of 1994, and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, a state visit was firmly set in motion by the visit of Irish President Mary Robinson to Buckingham Palace in 1993, followed by the unofficial visit of the Prince of Wales to Ireland in 1995, and the visit of Irish President Mary McAleese to Buckingham Palace in 1999. An official invitation to Queen Elizabeth from President Mary McAleese in March 2011 was accepted, and the visit was scheduled for mid-May of the same year.The visit was a highly performative occasion, orchestrated and ordained in great detail, displaying all the necessary protocol associated with the state visit of one head of state to another: inspection of the military, a courtesy visit to the nation’s head of state on arrival, the laying of a wreath at the nation’s war memorial, and a state banquet.These aspects of protocol between Britain and Ireland were particularly symbolic. By inspecting the military on arrival, the existence of which is a key indicator of independence, Queen Elizabeth effectively demonstrated her recognition of Ireland’s national sovereignty. On making the customary courtesy call to the head of state, the Queen was received by President McAleese at her official residence Áras an Uachtaráin (The President’s House), which had formerly been the residence of the British monarch’s representative in Ireland (Robbins 66). The state banquet was held in Dublin Castle, once the headquarters of British rule where the Viceroy, the representative of Britain’s Court of St James, had maintained court (McDowell 1).Cultural DiplomacyThe state banquet provided an exceptional showcase of Irish culture and design and generated a level of preparation previously unseen among Dublin Castle staff, who described it as “the most stage managed state event” they had ever witnessed (Mahon 129).The castle was cleaned from top to bottom, and inventories were taken of the furniture and fittings. The Waterford Crystal chandeliers were painstakingly taken down, cleaned, and reassembled; the Killybegs carpets and rugs of Irish lamb’s wool were cleaned and repaired. A special edition Newbridge Silverware pen was commissioned for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to sign the newly ordered Irish leather-bound visitors’ book. A new set of state tableware was ordered for the President’s table. Irish manufacturers of household goods necessary for the guest rooms, such as towels and soaps, hand creams and body lotions, candle holders and scent diffusers, were sought. Members of Her Majesty’s staff conducted a “walk-through” several weeks in advance of the visit to ensure that the Queen’s wardrobe would not clash with the surroundings (Mahon 129–32).The promotion of Irish manufacture is a constant thread throughout history. Irish linen, writes Kane, enjoyed a reputation as far afield as the Netherlands and Italy in the 15th century, and archival documents from the Vaucluse attest to the purchase of Irish cloth in Avignon in 1432 (249–50). Support for Irish-made goods was raised in 1720 by Jonathan Swift, and by the 18th century, writes Foster, Dublin had become an important centre for luxury goods (44–51).It has been Irish government policy since the late 1940s to use Irish-manufactured goods for state entertaining, so the material culture of the banquet was distinctly Irish: Arklow Pottery plates, Newbridge Silverware cutlery, Waterford Crystal glassware, and Irish linen tablecloths. In order to decide upon the table setting for the banquet, four tables were laid in the King’s Bedroom in Dublin Castle. The Executive Chef responsible for the banquet menu, and certain key personnel, helped determine which setting would facilitate serving the food within the time schedule allowed (Mahon 128–29). The style of service would be service à la russe, so widespread in restaurants today as to seem unremarkable. Each plate is prepared in the kitchen by the chef and then served to each individual guest at table. In the mid-19th century, this style of service replaced service à la française, in which guests typically entered the dining room after the first course had been laid on the table and selected food from the choice of dishes displayed around them (Kaufman 126).The guest list was compiled by government and embassy officials on both sides and was a roll call of Irish and British life. At the President’s table, 10 guests would be served by a team of 10 staff in Dorchester livery. The remaining tables would each seat 12 guests, served by 12 liveried staff. The staff practiced for several days prior to the banquet to make sure that service would proceed smoothly within the time frame allowed. The team of waiters, each carrying a plate, would emerge from the kitchen in single file. They would then take up positions around the table, each waiter standing to the left of the guest they would serve. On receipt of a discreet signal, each plate would be laid in front of each guest at precisely the same moment, after which the waiters would then about foot and return to the kitchen in single file (Mahon 130).Post-prandial entertainment featured distinctive styles of performance and instruments associated with Irish traditional music. These included reels, hornpipes, and slipjigs, voice and harp, sean-nόs (old style) singing, and performances by established Irish artists on the fiddle, bouzouki, flute, and uilleann pipes (Office of Public Works).Culinary Diplomacy: Ireland on a PlateLewis was given the following brief: the menu had to be Irish, the main course must be beef, and the meal should represent the very best of Irish ingredients. There were no restrictions on menu design. There were no dietary requirements or specific requests from the Queen’s representatives, although Lewis was informed that shellfish is excluded de facto from Irish state banquets as a precautionary measure. The meal was to be four courses long and had to be served to 170 diners within exactly 1 hour and 10 minutes (Mahon 112). A small army of 16 chefs and 4 kitchen porters would prepare the food in the kitchen of Dublin Castle under tight security. The dishes would be served on state tableware by 40 waiters, 6 restaurant managers, a banqueting manager and a sommélier. Lewis would be at the helm of the operation as Executive Chef (Mahon 112–13).Lewis started by drawing up “a patchwork quilt” of the products he most wanted to use and built the menu around it. The choice of suppliers was based on experience but also on a supplier’s ability to deliver perfectly ripe goods in mid-May, a typically black spot in the Irish fruit and vegetable growing calendar as it sits between the end of one season and the beginning of another. Lewis consulted the Queen’s itinerary and the menus to be served so as to avoid repetitions. He had to discard his initial plan to feature lobster in the starter and rhubarb in the dessert—the former for the precautionary reasons mentioned above, and the latter because it featured on the Queen’s lunch menu on the day of the banquet (Mahon 112–13).Once the ingredients had been selected, the menu design focused on creating tastes, flavours and textures. Several draft menus were drawn up and myriad dishes were tasted and discussed in the kitchen of Lewis’s own restaurant. Various wines were paired and tasted with the different courses, the final choice being a Château Lynch-Bages 1998 red and a Château de Fieuzal 2005 white, both from French Bordeaux estates with an Irish connection (Kellaghan 3). Two months and two menu sittings later, the final menu was confirmed and signed off by state and embassy officials (Mahon 112–16).The StarterThe banquet’s starter featured organic Clare Island salmon cured in a sweet brine, laid on top of a salmon cream combining wild smoked salmon from the Burren and Cork’s Glenilen Farm crème fraîche, set over a lemon balm jelly from the Tannery Cookery School Gardens, Waterford. Garnished with horseradish cream, wild watercress, and chive flowers from Wicklow, the dish was finished with rapeseed oil from Kilkenny and a little sea salt from West Cork (Mahon 114). Main CourseA main course of Irish beef featured as the pièce de résistance of the menu. A rib of beef from Wexford’s Slaney Valley was provided by Kettyle Irish Foods in Fermanagh and served with ox cheek and tongue from Rathcoole, County Dublin. From along the eastern coastline came the ingredients for the traditional Irish dish of smoked champ: cabbage from Wicklow combined with potatoes and spring onions grown in Dublin. The new season’s broad beans and carrots were served with wild garlic leaf, which adorned the dish (Mahon 113). Cheese CourseThe cheese course was made up of Knockdrinna, a Tomme style goat’s milk cheese from Kilkenny; Milleens, a Munster style cow’s milk cheese produced in Cork; Cashel Blue, a cow’s milk blue cheese from Tipperary; and Glebe Brethan, a Comté style cheese from raw cow’s milk from Louth. Ditty’s Oatmeal Biscuits from Belfast accompanied the course.DessertLewis chose to feature Irish strawberries in the dessert. Pat Clarke guaranteed delivery of ripe strawberries on the day of the banquet. They married perfectly with cream and yoghurt from Glenilen Farm in Cork. The cream was set with Irish Carrageen moss, overlaid with strawberry jelly and sauce, and garnished with meringues made with Irish apple balsamic vinegar from Lusk in North Dublin, yoghurt mousse, and Irish soda bread tuiles made with wholemeal flour from the Mosse family mill in Kilkenny (Mahon 113).The following day, President McAleese telephoned Lewis, saying of the banquet “Ní hé go raibh sé go maith, ach go raibh sé míle uair níos fearr ná sin” (“It’s not that it was good but that it was a thousand times better”). The President observed that the menu was not only delicious but that it was “amazingly articulate in terms of the story that it told about Ireland and Irish food.” The Queen had particularly enjoyed the stuffed cabbage leaf of tongue, cheek and smoked colcannon (a traditional Irish dish of mashed potatoes with curly kale or green cabbage) and had noted the diverse selection of Irish ingredients from Irish artisans (Mahon 116). Irish CuisineWhen the topic of food is explored in Irish historiography, the focus tends to be on the consequences of the Great Famine (1845–49) which left the country “socially and emotionally scarred for well over a century” (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher 161). Some commentators consider the term “Irish cuisine” oxymoronic, according to Mac Con Iomaire and Maher (3). As Goldstein observes, Ireland has suffered twice—once from its food deprivation and second because these deprivations present an obstacle for the exploration of Irish foodways (xii). Writing about Italian, Irish, and Jewish migration to America, Diner states that the Irish did not have a food culture to speak of and that Irish writers “rarely included the details of food in describing daily life” (85). Mac Con Iomaire and Maher note that Diner’s methodology overlooks a centuries-long tradition of hospitality in Ireland such as that described by Simms (68) and shows an unfamiliarity with the wealth of food related sources in the Irish language, as highlighted by Mac Con Iomaire (“Exploring” 1–23).Recent scholarship on Ireland’s culinary past is unearthing a fascinating story of a much more nuanced culinary heritage than has been previously understood. This is clearly demonstrated in the research of Cullen, Cashman, Deleuze, Kellaghan, Kelly, Kennedy, Legg, Mac Con Iomaire, Mahon, O’Sullivan, Richman Kenneally, Sexton, and Stanley, Danaher, and Eogan.In 1996 Ireland was described by McKenna as having the most dynamic cuisine in any European country, a place where in the last decade “a vibrant almost unlikely style of cooking has emerged” (qtd. in Mac Con Iomaire “Jammet’s” 136). By 2014, there were nine restaurants in Dublin which had been awarded Michelin stars or Red Ms (Mac Con Iomaire “Jammet’s” 137). Ross Lewis, Chef Patron of Chapter One Restaurant, who would be chosen to create the menu for the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II, has maintained a Michelin star since 2008 (Mac Con Iomaire, “Jammet’s” 138). Most recently the current strength of Irish gastronomy is globally apparent in Mark Moriarty’s award as San Pellegrino Young Chef 2015 (McQuillan). As Deleuze succinctly states: “Ireland has gone mad about food” (143).This article is part of a research project into Irish diplomatic dining, and the author is part of a research cluster into Ireland’s culinary heritage within the Dublin Institute of Technology. The aim of the research is to add to the growing body of scholarship on Irish gastronomic history and, ultimately, to contribute to the discourse on the existence of a national cuisine. If, as Zubaida says, “a nation’s cuisine is its court’s cuisine,” then it is time for Ireland to “research the feasts as well as the famines” (Mac Con Iomaire and Cashman 97).ConclusionThe Irish state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II in May 2011 was a highly orchestrated and formalised process. From the menu, material culture, entertainment, and level of consultation in the creative content, it is evident that the banquet was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity.The effects of the visit appear to have been felt in the years which have followed. Hennessy wrote in the Irish Times newspaper that Queen Elizabeth is privately said to regard her visit to Ireland as the most significant of the trips she has made during her 60-year reign. British Prime Minister David Cameron is noted to mention the visit before every Irish audience he encounters, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague has spoken in particular of the impact the state banquet in Dublin Castle made upon him. Hennessy points out that one of the most significant indicators of the peaceful relationship which exists between the two countries nowadays was the subsequent state visit by Irish President Michael D. Higgins to Britain in 2013. This was the first state visit to the United Kingdom by a President of Ireland and would have been unimaginable 25 years ago. The fact that the President and his wife stayed at Windsor Castle and that the attendant state banquet was held there instead of Buckingham Palace were both deemed to be marks of special favour and directly attributed to the success of Her Majesty’s 2011 visit to Ireland.As the research demonstrates, eating together unites rather than separates, gathers rather than divides, diffuses political tensions, and confirms alliances. It might be said then that the 2011 state banquet hosted by President Mary McAleese in honour of Queen Elizabeth II, curated by Ross Lewis, gives particular meaning to the axiom “to eat together is to eat in peace” (Taliano des Garets 160).AcknowledgementsSupervisors: Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire (Dublin Institute of Technology) and Dr Michael Kennedy (Royal Irish Academy)Fáilte IrelandPhotos of the banquet dishes supplied and permission to reproduce them for this article kindly granted by Ross Lewis, Chef Patron, Chapter One Restaurant ‹http://www.chapteronerestaurant.com/›.Illustration ‘Ireland on a Plate’ © Jesse Campbell BrownRemerciementsThe author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.ReferencesAlbala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. 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Although I'm a rich white guy, I'm also a feminist anti-racism activist who fights for the rights of the poor and oppressed. (Carl Kenner)Systemic bias is a scourge to the pillar of neutrality. (Cerejota)Count me in. Let's leave the bias to the mainstream media. (Orcar967)Because this is so important. (CuttingEdge)These are a handful of comments posted by online editors who have banded together in a virtual coalition to combat Western bias on the world’s largest digital encyclopedia, Wikipedia. This collective action by Wikipedians both acknowledges the inherent inequalities of a user-controlled information project like Wikpedia and highlights the potential for progressive change within that same project. These community members are taking the responsibility of social change into their own hands (or more aptly, their own keyboards).In recent years much research has emerged on Wikipedia from varying fields, ranging from computer science, to business and information systems, to the social sciences. While critical at times of Wikipedia’s growth, governance, and influence, most of this work observes with optimism that barriers to improvement are not firmly structural, but rather they are socially constructed, leaving open the possibility of important and lasting change for the better.WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) considers one such collective effort. Close to 350 editors have signed on to the project, which began in 2004 and itself emerged from a similar project named CROSSBOW, or the “Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias on Wikipedia.” As a WikiProject, the term used for a loose group of editors who collaborate around a particular topic, these editors work within the Wikipedia site and collectively create a social network that is unified around one central aim—representing the un- and underrepresented—and yet they are bound by no particular unified set of interests. The first stage of a multi-method study, this paper looks at a snapshot of WP:CSB’s activity from both content analysis and social network perspectives to discover “who” geographically this coalition of the unrepresented is inserting into the digital annals of Wikipedia.Wikipedia and WikipediansDeveloped in 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and academic Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is an online collaborative encyclopedia hosting articles in nearly 250 languages (Cohen). The English-language Wikipedia contains over 3.2 million articles, each of which is created, edited, and updated solely by users (Wikipedia “Welcome”). At the time of this study, Alexa, a website tracking organisation, ranked Wikipedia as the 6th most accessed site on the Internet. Unlike the five sites ahead of it though—Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube (owned by Google), and live.com (owned by Microsoft)—all of which are multibillion-dollar businesses that deal more with information aggregation than information production, Wikipedia is a non-profit that operates on less than $500,000 a year and staffs only a dozen paid employees (Lih). Wikipedia is financed and supported by the WikiMedia Foundation, a charitable umbrella organisation with an annual budget of $4.6 million, mainly funded by donations (Middleton).Wikipedia editors and contributors have the option of creating a user profile and participating via a username, or they may participate anonymously, with only an IP address representing their actions. Despite the option for total anonymity, many Wikipedians have chosen to visibly engage in this online community (Ayers, Matthews, and Yates; Bruns; Lih), and researchers across disciplines are studying the motivations of these new online collectives (Kane, Majchrzak, Johnson, and Chenisern; Oreg and Nov). The motivations of open source software contributors, such as UNIX programmers and programming groups, have been shown to be complex and tied to both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, including online reputation, self-satisfaction and enjoyment, and obligation to a greater common good (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann; Osterloh and Rota). Investigation into why Wikipedians edit has indicated multiple motivations as well, with community engagement, task enjoyment, and information sharing among the most significant (Schroer and Hertel). Additionally, Wikipedians seem to be taking up the cause of generativity (a concern for the ongoing health and openness of the Internet’s infrastructures) that Jonathan Zittrain notably called for in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Governance and ControlAlthough the technical infrastructure of Wikipedia is built to support and perhaps encourage an equal distribution of power on the site, Wikipedia is not a land of “anything goes.” The popular press has covered recent efforts by the site to reduce vandalism through a layer of editorial review (Cohen), a tightening of control cited as a possible reason for the recent dip in the number of active editors (Edwards). A number of regulations are already in place that prevent the open editing of certain articles and pages, such as the site’s disclaimers and pages that have suffered large amounts of vandalism. Editing wars can also cause temporary restrictions to editing, and Ayers, Matthews, and Yates point out that these wars can happen anywhere, even to Burt Reynold’s page.Academic studies have begun to explore the governance and control that has developed in the Wikipedia community, generally highlighting how order is maintained not through particular actors, but through established procedures and norms. Konieczny tested whether Wikipedia’s evolution can be defined by Michels’ Iron Law of Oligopoly, which predicts that the everyday operations of any organisation cannot be run by a mass of members, and ultimately control falls into the hands of the few. Through exploring a particular WikiProject on information validation, he concludes:There are few indicators of an oligarchy having power on Wikipedia, and few trends of a change in this situation. The high level of empowerment of individual Wikipedia editors with regard to policy making, the ease of communication, and the high dedication to ideals of contributors succeed in making Wikipedia an atypical organization, quite resilient to the Iron Law. (189)Butler, Joyce, and Pike support this assertion, though they emphasise that instead of oligarchy, control becomes encapsulated in a wide variety of structures, policies, and procedures that guide involvement with the site. A virtual “bureaucracy” emerges, but one that should not be viewed with the negative connotation often associated with the term.Other work considers control on Wikipedia through the framework of commons governance, where “peer production depends on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized rather than hierarchically assigned. Individuals make their own choices with regard to resources managed as a commons” (Viegas, Wattenberg and McKeon). The need for quality standards and quality control largely dictate this commons governance, though interviewing Wikipedians with various levels of responsibility revealed that policies and procedures are only as good as those who maintain them. Forte, Larco, and Bruckman argue “the Wikipedia community has remained healthy in large part due to the continued presence of ‘old-timers’ who carry a set of social norms and organizational ideals with them into every WikiProject, committee, and local process in which they take part” (71). Thus governance on Wikipedia is a strong representation of a democratic ideal, where actors and policies are closely tied in their evolution. Transparency, Content, and BiasThe issue of transparency has proved to be a double-edged sword for Wikipedia and Wikipedians. The goal of a collective body of knowledge created by all—the “expert” and the “amateur”—can only be upheld if equal access to page creation and development is allotted to everyone, including those who prefer anonymity. And yet this very option for anonymity, or even worse, false identities, has been a sore subject for some in the Wikipedia community as well as a source of concern for some scholars (Santana and Wood). The case of a 24-year old college dropout who represented himself as a multiple Ph.D.-holding theology scholar and edited over 16,000 articles brought these issues into the public spotlight in 2007 (Doran; Elsworth). Wikipedia itself has set up standards for content that include expectations of a neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and the publishing of no original research, but Santana and Wood argue that self-policing of these policies is not adequate:The principle of managerial discretion requires that every actor act from a sense of duty to exercise moral autonomy and choice in responsible ways. When Wikipedia’s editors and administrators remain anonymous, this criterion is simply not met. It is assumed that everyone is behaving responsibly within the Wikipedia system, but there are no monitoring or control mechanisms to make sure that this is so, and there is ample evidence that it is not so. (141) At the theoretical level, some downplay these concerns of transparency and autonomy as logistical issues in lieu of the potential for information systems to support rational discourse and emancipatory forms of communication (Hansen, Berente, and Lyytinen), but others worry that the questionable “realities” created on Wikipedia will become truths once circulated to all areas of the Web (Langlois and Elmer). With the number of articles on the English-language version of Wikipedia reaching well into the millions, the task of mapping and assessing content has become a tremendous endeavour, one mostly taken on by information systems experts. Kittur, Chi, and Suh have used Wikipedia’s existing hierarchical categorisation structure to map change in the site’s content over the past few years. Their work revealed that in early 2008 “Culture and the arts” was the most dominant category of content on Wikipedia, representing nearly 30% of total content. People (15%) and geographical locations (14%) represent the next largest categories, while the natural and physical sciences showed the greatest increase in volume between 2006 and 2008 (+213%D, with “Culture and the arts” close behind at +210%D). This data may indicate that contributing to Wikipedia, and thus spreading knowledge, is growing amongst the academic community while maintaining its importance to the greater popular culture-minded community. Further work by Kittur and Kraut has explored the collaborative process of content creation, finding that too many editors on a particular page can reduce the quality of content, even when a project is well coordinated.Bias in Wikipedia content is a generally acknowledged and somewhat conflicted subject (Giles; Johnson; McHenry). The Wikipedia community has created numerous articles and pages within the site to define and discuss the problem. Citing a survey conducted by the University of Würzburg, Germany, the “Wikipedia:Systemic bias” page describes the average Wikipedian as:MaleTechnically inclinedFormally educatedAn English speakerWhiteAged 15-49From a majority Christian countryFrom a developed nationFrom the Northern HemisphereLikely a white-collar worker or studentBias in content is thought to be perpetuated by this demographic of contributor, and the “founder effect,” a concept from genetics, linking the original contributors to this same demographic has been used to explain the origins of certain biases. Wikipedia’s “About” page discusses the issue as well, in the context of the open platform’s strengths and weaknesses:in practice editing will be performed by a certain demographic (younger rather than older, male rather than female, rich enough to afford a computer rather than poor, etc.) and may, therefore, show some bias. Some topics may not be covered well, while others may be covered in great depth. No educated arguments against this inherent bias have been advanced.Royal and Kapila’s study of Wikipedia content tested some of these assertions, finding identifiable bias in both their purposive and random sampling. They conclude that bias favoring larger countries is positively correlated with the size of the country’s Internet population, and corporations with larger revenues work in much the same way, garnering more coverage on the site. The researchers remind us that Wikipedia is “more a socially produced document than a value-free information source” (Royal & Kapila).WikiProject: Countering Systemic BiasAs a coalition of current Wikipedia editors, the WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) attempts to counter trends in content production and points of view deemed harmful to the democratic ideals of a valueless, open online encyclopedia. WP:CBS’s mission is not one of policing the site, but rather deepening it:Generally, this project concentrates upon remedying omissions (entire topics, or particular sub-topics in extant articles) rather than on either (1) protesting inappropriate inclusions, or (2) trying to remedy issues of how material is presented. Thus, the first question is "What haven't we covered yet?", rather than "how should we change the existing coverage?" (Wikipedia, “Countering”)The project lays out a number of content areas lacking adequate representation, geographically highlighting the dearth in coverage of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe. WP:CSB also includes a “members” page that editors can sign to show their support, along with space to voice their opinions on the problem of bias on Wikipedia (the quotations at the beginning of this paper are taken from this “members” page). At the time of this study, 329 editors had self-selected and self-identified as members of WP:CSB, and this group constitutes the population sample for the current study. To explore the extent to which WP:CSB addressed these self-identified areas for improvement, each editor’s last 50 edits were coded for their primary geographical country of interest, as well as the conceptual category of the page itself (“P” for person/people, “L” for location, “I” for idea/concept, “T” for object/thing, or “NA” for indeterminate). For example, edits to the Wikipedia page for a single person like Tony Abbott (Australian federal opposition leader) were coded “Australia, P”, while an edit for a group of people like the Manchester United football team would be coded “England, P”. Coding was based on information obtained from the header paragraphs of each article’s Wikipedia page. After coding was completed, corresponding information on each country’s associated continent was added to the dataset, based on the United Nations Statistics Division listing.A total of 15,616 edits were coded for the study. Nearly 32% (n = 4962) of these edits were on articles for persons or people (see Table 1 for complete coding results). From within this sub-sample of edits, a majority of the people (68.67%) represented are associated with North America and Europe (Figure A). If we break these statistics down further, nearly half of WP:CSB’s edits concerning people were associated with the United States (36.11%) and England (10.16%), with India (3.65%) and Australia (3.35%) following at a distance. These figures make sense for the English-language Wikipedia; over 95% of the population in the three Westernised countries speak English, and while India is still often regarded as a developing nation, its colonial British roots and the emergence of a market economy with large, technology-driven cities are logical explanations for its representation here (and some estimates make India the largest English-speaking nation by population on the globe today).Table A Coding Results Total Edits 15616 (I) Ideas 2881 18.45% (L) Location 2240 14.34% NA 333 2.13% (T) Thing 5200 33.30% (P) People 4962 31.78% People by Continent Africa 315 6.35% Asia 827 16.67% Australia 175 3.53% Europe 1411 28.44% NA 110 2.22% North America 1996 40.23% South America 128 2.58% The areas of the globe of main concern to WP:CSB proved to be much less represented by the coalition itself. Asia, far and away the most populous continent with more than 60% of the globe’s people (GeoHive), was represented in only 16.67% of edits. Africa (6.35%) and South America (2.58%) were equally underrepresented compared to both their real-world populations (15% and 9% of the globe’s population respectively) and the aforementioned dominance of the advanced Westernised areas. However, while these percentages may seem low, in aggregate they do meet the quota set on the WP:CSB Project Page calling for one out of every twenty edits to be “a subject that is systematically biased against the pages of your natural interests.” By this standard, the coalition is indeed making headway in adding content that strategically counterbalances the natural biases of Wikipedia’s average editor.Figure ASocial network analysis allows us to visualise multifaceted data in order to identify relationships between actors and content (Vego-Redondo; Watts). Similar to Davis’s well-known sociological study of Southern American socialites in the 1930s (Scott), our Wikipedia coalition can be conceptualised as individual actors united by common interests, and a network of relations can be constructed with software such as UCINET. A mapping algorithm that considers both the relationship between all sets of actors and each actor to the overall collective structure produces an image of our network. This initial network is bimodal, as both our Wikipedia editors and their edits (again, coded for country of interest) are displayed as nodes (Figure B). Edge-lines between nodes represents a relationship, and here that relationship is the act of editing a Wikipedia article. We see from our network that the “U.S.” and “England” hold central positions in the network, with a mass of editors crowding around them. A perimeter of nations is then held in place by their ties to editors through the U.S. and England, with a second layer of editors and poorly represented nations (Gabon, Laos, Uzbekistan, etc.) around the boundaries of the network.Figure BWe are reminded from this visualisation both of the centrality of the two Western powers even among WP:CSB editoss, and of the peripheral nature of most other nations in the world. But we also learn which editors in the project are contributing most to underrepresented areas, and which are less “tied” to the Western core. Here we see “Wizzy” and “Warofdreams” among the second layer of editors who act as a bridge between the core and the periphery; these are editors with interests in both the Western and marginalised nations. Located along the outer edge, “Gallador” and “Gerrit” have no direct ties to the U.S. or England, concentrating all of their edits on less represented areas of the globe. Identifying editors at these key positions in the network will help with future research, informing interview questions that will investigate their interests further, but more significantly, probing motives for participation and action within the coalition.Additionally, we can break the network down further to discover editors who appear to have similar interests in underrepresented areas. Figure C strips down the network to only editors and edits dealing with Africa and South America, the least represented continents. From this we can easily find three types of editors again: those who have singular interests in particular nations (the outermost layer of editors), those who have interests in a particular region (the second layer moving inward), and those who have interests in both of these underrepresented regions (the center layer in the figure). This last group of editors may prove to be the most crucial to understand, as they are carrying the full load of WP:CSB’s mission.Figure CThe End of Geography, or the Reclamation?In The Internet Galaxy, Manuel Castells writes that “the Internet Age has been hailed as the end of geography,” a bold suggestion, but one that has gained traction over the last 15 years as the excitement for the possibilities offered by information communication technologies has often overshadowed structural barriers to participation like the Digital Divide (207). Castells goes on to amend the “end of geography” thesis by showing how global information flows and regional Internet access rates, while creating a new “map” of the world in many ways, is still closely tied to power structures in the analog world. The Internet Age: “redefines distance but does not cancel geography” (207). The work of WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias emphasises the importance of place and representation in the information environment that continues to be constructed in the online world. This study looked at only a small portion of this coalition’s efforts (~16,000 edits)—a snapshot of their labor frozen in time—which itself is only a minute portion of the information being dispatched through Wikipedia on a daily basis (~125,000 edits). Further analysis of WP:CSB’s work over time, as well as qualitative research into the identities, interests and motivations of this collective, is needed to understand more fully how information bias is understood and challenged in the Internet galaxy. The data here indicates this is a fight worth fighting for at least a growing few.ReferencesAlexa. “Top Sites.” Alexa.com, n.d. 10 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.alexa.com/topsites>. Ayers, Phoebe, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. 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Kane, Gerald C., Ann Majchrzak, Jeremaih Johnson, and Lily Chenisern. A Longitudinal Model of Perspective Making and Perspective Taking within Fluid Online Collectives. Paper presented at the 2009 International Conference on Information Systems, Phoenix, AZ, 2009.Kittur, Aniket, Ed H. Chi, and Bongwon Suh. What’s in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure. Paper presented at the 2009 CHI Annual Conference, Boston, MA.———, and Robert E. Kraut. Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through Collaboration. Paper presented at the 2008 Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer Supported Cooperative Work Annual Conference, San Diego, CA.Konieczny, Piotr. “Governance, Organization, and Democracy on the Internet: The Iron Law and the Evolution of Wikipedia.” Sociological Forum 24 (2009): 162-191.———. “Wikipedia: Community or Social Movement?” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 1 (2009): 212-232.Langlois, Ganaele, and Greg Elmer. “Wikipedia Leeches? The Promotion of Traffic through a Collaborative Web Format.” New Media & Society 11 (2009): 773-794.Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution. New York, NY: Hyperion, 2009.McHenry, Robert. “The Real Bias in Wikipedia: A Response to David Shariatmadari.” OpenDemocracy.com 2006. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/wikipedia_bias_3621.jsp>. 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Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Viegas, Fernanda B., Martin Wattenberg, and Matthew M. McKeon. “The Hidden Order of Wikipedia.” Online Communities and Social Computing (2007): 445-454.Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003Wikipedia. “About.” n.d. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About>. ———. “Welcome to Wikipedia.” n.d. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>.———. “Wikiproject:Countering Systemic Bias.” n.d. 12 Feb. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias#Members>. Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008.

Introduction How do we measure intimacy? What are its impacts on our social, political and personal lives? Can we claim a politics to our intimate lives that escapes the normative confines of archaic institutions, while making social justice claims for relationship recognition? Negotiating some of these disparate questions requires us to think more broadly in contemporary public debates on equality and relationship recognition. Specifically, by outlining the impacts of the popular "gay marriage" debate, this paper examines the impacts of queer theory in association with public policy and community lobbying for relationship equality. Much of the debate remains polarised: eliminating discrimination is counterposed to religious or reproductive narratives that suggest such recognition undermines the value of the "natural" heterosexual family. Introducing queer theory into advocacy that oscillates between rights and reproduction problematises indexing intimacy against normative ideas of monogamy and family. While the arguments circulated by academics, lawyers, politicians and activists have disparate political and ethical impacts, when taken together, they continue to define marriage as a public regulation of intimacy and citizenship. Citizenship, measured in democratic participation and choice, however, can only be realised through reflexive politics that value difference. Encouraging critical dialogue across disparate areas of the marriage equality debate will have a significant impact on how we make ethical claims for recognising intimacy. (Re)defining Marriage In legislative terms, marriage remains the most fundamental means through which the relationship between citizenship and intimacy is crystallised in Australia. For example, in 2004 the Federal Liberal Government in Australia passed a legislative amendment to the Marriage Act 1961 and expressly defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. By issuing a public legislative amendment, the Government intended to privilege monogamous (in this case understood as heterosexual) intimacy by precluding same-sex or polygamous marriage. Such an exercise had rhetorical rather than legal significance, as common law principles had previously defined the scope of marriage in gender specific terms for decades (Graycar and Millbank 41). Marriage as an institution, however, is not a universal or a-historical discourse limited to legal or political constructs. Socialist feminist critiques of marriage in the 1950s conceptualised the legal and gender specific constructs in marriage as a patriarchal contract designed to regulate female bodies (Hannam 146). However, Angela McRobbie notes that within a post-feminist context, these historical realities of gendered subjugation, reproduction or domesticity have been "disarticulated" (26). Marriage has become a more democratic and self-reflexive expression of intimacy for women. David Shumway elaborates this idea and argues that this shift has emerged in a context of "social solidarity" within a consumer environment of social fragmentation (23). What this implies is that marriage now evokes a range of cultural choices, consumer practices and affective trends that are incommensurable to a singular legal or historical term of reference. Debating the Politics of Intimacy and Citizenship In order to reflect on this shifting relationship between choice, citizenship and marriage as a concept, it is necessary to highlight that marriage extends beyond private articulations of love. It is a ritualised performance of heterosexual individual (or coupled) citizenship as it entrenches economic and civil rights and responsibilities. The private becomes public. Current neo-liberal approaches to same-sex marriage focus on these symbolic and economic questions of how recognising intimacy is tied to equality. In a legal and political context, marriage is defined in s5 Marriage Act as "the union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life." While the Act does not imbue marriage with religious or procreative significance, such a gender dichotomous definition prevents same-sex and gender diverse partners from entering into marriage. For Morris Kaplan, this is a problem because "full equality for lesbian and gay citizens requires access to the legal and social recognition of our intimate associations" (201). Advocates and activists define the quest for equal citizenship by engaging with current religious dogma that situates marriage within a field of reproduction, whereby same-sex marriage is seen to rupture the traditional rubric of monogamous kinship and the biological processes of "gender complementarity" (Australian Christian Lobby 1). Liberal equality arguments reject such conservative assertions on the basis that desire, sexuality and intimacy are innate features of human existence and hence always already implicated in public spheres (Kaplan 202). Thus, legal visibility or state recognition becomes crucial to sustaining practices of intimacy. Problematising the broader social impact of a civil rights approach through the perspective of queer theory, the private/public distinctions that delineate citizenship and intimacy become more difficult to negotiate. Equality and queer theory arguments on same-sex marriage are difficult to reconcile, primarily because they signify the different psychic and cultural investments in the monogamous couple. Butler asserts that idealisations of the couple in legal discourse relates to norms surrounding community, family and nationhood (Undoing 116). This structured circulation of sexual norms reifies the hetero-normative forms of relationships that ought to be recognised (and are desired) by the state. Butler also interrogates this logic of marriage, as a heterosexual norm, and suggests it has the capacity to confine rather than liberate subjects (Undoing 118-20). The author's argument relies upon Michel Foucault's notion of power and subjection, where the subject is not an autonomous individual (as conceived in neo liberal discourses) but a site of disciplined discursive production (Trouble 63). Butler positions the heterosexuality of marriage as a "cultural and symbolic foundation" that renders forms of kinship, monogamy, parenting and community intelligible (Undoing 118). In this sense, marriage can be a problematic articulation of state interests, particularly in terms of perpetuating domesticity, economic mobility and the heterosexual family. As former Australian Prime Minister John Howard opines: Marriage is … one of the bedrock institutions of our society … marriage, as we understand it in our society, is about children … providing for the survival of the species. (qtd. in Wade) Howard's politicisation of marriage suggests that it remains crucial to the preservation of the nuclear family. In doing so, the statement also exemplifies homophobic anxieties towards non-normative kinship relations "outside the family". The Prime Ministers' words characterise marriage as a framework which privileges hegemonic ideas of monogamy, biological reproduction and gender dichotomy. Butler responds to these homophobic terms by alluding to the discursive function of a "heterosexual matrix" which codes and produces dichotomous sexes, genders and (hetero)sexual desires (Trouble 36). By refusing to accept the binary neo-liberal discourse in which one is either for or against gay marriage, Butler asserts that by prioritising marriage, the individual accepts the discursive terms of recognition and legitimacy in subjectifying what counts as love (Undoing 115). What this author's argument implies is that by recuperating marital norms, the individual is not liberated, but rather participates in the discursive "trap" and succumbs to the terms of a heterosexual matrix (Trouble 56). In contradistinction to Howard's political rhetoric, engaging with Foucault's broader theoretical work on sexuality and friendship can influence how we frame the possibilities of intimacy beyond parochial narratives of conjugal relationships. Foucault emphasises that countercultural intimacies rely on desires that are relegated to the margins of mainstream (hetero)sexual culture. For example, the transformational aesthetics in practices such as sadomasochism or queer polyamorous relationships exist due to certain prohibitions in respect to sex (Foucault, History (1) 38, and "Sex" 169). Foucault notes how forms of resistance that transgress mainstream norms produce new experiences of pleasure. Being "queer" (though Foucault does not use this word) becomes identified with new modes of living, rather than a static identity (Essential 138). Extending Foucault, Butler argues that positioning queer intimacies within a field of state recognition risks normalising relationships in terms of heterosexual norms whilst foreclosing the possibilities of new modes of affection. Jasbir Puar argues that queer subjects continue to feature on the peripheries of moral and legal citizenship when their practices of intimacy fail to conform to the socio-political dyadic ideal of matrimony, fidelity and reproduction (22-28). Puar and Butler's reluctance to embrace marriage becomes clearer through an examination of the obiter dicta in the recent American jurisprudence where the proscription on same-sex marriage was overturned in California: To the extent proponents seek to encourage a norm that sexual activity occur within marriage to ensure that reproduction occur within stable households, Proposition 8 discourages that norm because it requires some sexual activity and child-bearing and child-rearing to occur outside marriage. (Perry vs Schwarzenegger 128) By connecting the discourse of matrimony and sex with citizenship, the court reifies the value of marriage as an institution of the family, which should be extended to same-sex couples. Therefore, by locating the family in reproductive heterosexual terms, the court forecloses other modes of recognition or rights for those who are in non-monogamous relationships or choose not to reproduce. The legal reasoning in the case evinces the ways in which intimate citizenship or legitimate kinship is understood in highly parochial terms. As Kane Race elaborates, the suturing of domesticity and nationhood, with the rhetoric that "reproduction occur within stable households", frames heterosexual nuclear bonds as the means to legitimate sexual relations (98). By privileging a familial kinship aesthetic to marriage, the state implicitly disregards recognising the value of intimacy in non-nuclear communities or families (Race 100). Australia, however, unlike most foreign nations, has a dual model of relationship recognition. De facto relationships are virtually indistinguishable from marriage in terms of the rights and entitlements couples are able to access. Very recently, the amendments made by the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws - General Reform) Act 2008 (Cth) has ensured same-sex couples have been included under Federal definitions of de facto relationships, thereby granting same-sex couples the same material rights and entitlements as heterosexual married couples. While comprehensive de facto recognition operates uniquely in Australia, it is still necessary to question the impact of jurisprudence that considers only marriage provides the legitimate structure for raising children. As Laurent Berlant suggests, those who seek alternative "love plots" are denied the legal and cultural spaces to realise them ("Love" 479). Berlant's critique emphasises how current "progressive" legal approaches to same-sex relationships rely on a monogamous (heterosexual) trajectory of the "love plot" which marginalises those who are in divorced, single, polyamorous or multi-parent situations. For example, in the National Year of Action, a series of marriage equality rallies held across Australia over 2010, non-conjugal forms of intimacy were inadvertently sidelined in order to make a claim for relationship recognition. In a letter to the Sydney Star Observer, a reader laments: As a gay man, I cannot understand why gay people would want to engage in a heterosexual ritual called marriage … Why do gay couples want to buy into this ridiculous notion is beyond belief. The laws need to be changed so that gays are treated equal under the law, but this is not to be confused with marriage as these are two separate issues... (Michael 2) Marriage marks a privileged position of citizenship and consumption, to which all other gay and lesbian rights claims are tangential. Moreover, as this letter to the Sydney Star Observer implies, by claiming sexual citizenship through the rubric of marriage, discussions about other campaigns for legislative equality are effectively foreclosed. Melissa Gregg expands on such a problematic, noting that the legal responses to equality reiterate a normative relationship between sexuality and power, where only couples that subscribe to dyadic, marriage-like relationships are offered entitlements by the state (4). Correspondingly, much of the public activism around marriage equality in Australia seeks to achieve its impact for equality (reforming the Marriage Act) by positioning intimacy in terms of state legitimacy. Butler and Warner argue that when speaking of legitimacy a relation to what is legitimate is implied. Lisa Bower corroborates this, asserting "legal discourse creates norms which universalise particular modes of living…while suppressing other practices and identities" (267). What Butler's and Bower's arguments reveal is that legitimacy is obtained through the extension of marriage to homosexual couples. For example, Andrew Barr, the current Labor Party Education Minister in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), noted that "saying no to civil unions is to say that some relationships are more legitimate than others" (quoted in "Legal Ceremonies"). Ironically, such a statement privileges civil unions by rendering them as the normative basis on which to grant legal recognition. Elizabeth Povinelli argues the performance of dyadic intimacy becomes the means to assert legal and social sovereignty (112). Therefore, as Jenni Millbank warns, marriage, or even distinctive forms of civil unions, if taken alone, can entrench inequalities for those who choose not to participate in these forms of recognition (8). Grassroots mobilisation and political lobbying strategies around marriage equality activism can have the unintentional impact, however, of obscuring peripheral forms of intimacy and subsequently repudiating those who contest the movement towards marriage. Warner argues that those who choose to marry derive pride from their monogamous commitment and "family" oriented practice, a privilege afforded through marital citizenship (82). Conversely, individuals and couples who deviate from the "normal" (read: socially palatable) intimate citizen, such as promiscuous or polyamorous subjects, are rendered shameful or pitiful. This political discourse illustrates that there is a strong impetus in the marriage equality movement to legitimate "homosexual love" because it mimics the norms of monogamy, stability, continuity and family by only seeking to substitute the sex of the "other" partner. Thus, civil rights discourse maintains the privileged political economy of marriage as it involves reproduction (even if it is not biological), mainstream social roles and monogamous sex. By defining social membership and future life in terms of a heterosexual life-narrative, same-sex couples become wedded to the idea of matrimony as the basis for sustainable intimacy and citizenship (Berlant and Warner 557). Warner is critical of recuperating discourses that privilege marriage as the ideal form of intimacy. This is particularly concerning when diverse erotic and intimate communities, which are irreducible to normative forms of citizenship, are subject to erasure. Que(e)rying the Future of Ethics and Politics By connecting liberal equality arguments with Butler and Warner's work on queer ethics, there is hesitation towards privileging marriage as the ultimate form of intimacy. Moreover, Butler stresses the importance of a transformative practice of queer intimacy: It is crucial…that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will not count as intelligible and recognisable alliance and kinship. (Undoing 117) Here the author attempts to negotiate the complex terrain of queer citizenship and ethics. On one hand, it is necessary to be made visible in order to engage in political activism and be afforded rights within a state discourse. Simultaneously, on the other hand, there is a need to transform the prevailing hetero-normative rhetoric of romantic love in order to prevent pathologising bodies or rendering certain forms of intimacy as aberrant or deviant because, as Warner notes, they do not conform to our perception of what we understand to be normal or morally desirable. Foucault's work on the aesthetics of the self offers a possible transformational practice which avoids the risks Warner and Butler mention because it eludes the "normative determinations" of moralities and publics, whilst engaging in an "ethical stylization" (qtd. in Race 144). Whilst Foucault's work does not explicitly address the question of marriage, his work on friendship gestures to the significance of affective bonds. Queer kinship has the potential to produce new ethics, where bodies do not become subjects of desires, but rather act as agents of pleasure. Negotiating the intersection between active citizenship and transformative intimacy requires rethinking the politics of recognition and normalisation. Warner is quite ambivalent as to the potential of appropriating marriage for gays and lesbians, despite the historical dynamism of marriage. Rather than acting as a progressive mechanism for rights, it is an institution that operates by refusing to recognise other relations (Warner 129). However, as Alexander Duttmann notes, recognition is more complex and a paradoxical means of relation and identification. It involves a process in which the majority neutralises the difference of the (minority) Other in order to assimilate it (27). However, in the process of recognition, the Other which is validated, then transforms the position of the majority, by altering the terms by which recognition is granted. Marriage no longer simply confers recognition for heterosexual couples to engage in reproduction (Secomb 133). While some queer couples may subscribe to a monogamous relationship structure, these relationships necessarily trouble conservative politics. The lamentations of the Australian Christian Lobby regarding the "fundamental (anatomical) gender complementarity" of same-sex marriage reflect this by recognising the broader social transformation that will occur (and already does with many heterosexual marriages) by displacing the association between marriage, procreation and parenting (5). Correspondingly, Foucault's work assists in broadening the debate on relationship recognition by transforming our understanding of choice and ethics in terms of "queer friendship." He describes it as a practice that resists the normative public distinction between romantic and platonic affection and produces new aesthetics for sexual and non-sexual intimacy (Foucault, Essential 170). Linnell Secomb argues that this "double potential" alluded to in Foucault and Duttman's work, has the capacity to neutralise difference as Warner fears (133). However, it can also transform dominant narratives of sexual citizenship, as enabling marriage equality will impact on how we imagine traditional heterosexual or patriarchal "plots" to intimacy (Berlant, "Intimacy" 286). Conclusion Making an informed impact into public debates on marriage equality requires charting the locus of sexuality, intimacy and citizenship. Negotiating academic discourses, social and community activism, with broader institutions and norms presents political and social challenges when thinking about the sorts of intimacy that should be recognised by the state. The civil right to marriage, irrespective of the sex or gender of one's partner, reflects a crucial shift towards important democratic participation of non-heterosexual citizens. However, it is important to note that the value of such intimacy cannot be indexed against a single measure of legal reform. While Butler and Warner present considered indictments on the normalisation of queer intimacy through marriage, such arguments do not account for the impacts of que(e)rying cultural norms and practices through social and political change. Marriage is not a singular or a-historical construction reducible to state recognition. Moreover, in a secular democracy, marriage should be one of many forms of diverse relationship recognition open to same-sex and gender diverse couples. In order to expand the impact of social and legal claims for recognition, it is productive to rethink the complex nature of recognition, ritual and aesthetics within marriage. 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