Journal articles on the topic 'Microfinance information exchanges (MIX)'

<strong>Purpose of the Study:&nbsp;</strong>This study aims to assess the effect of microfinance provisions on poverty reduction in some developing and few developed countries across different regions and assess the effect of regions and time on the performance of the microfinance industry.<strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;</strong> <strong>Methodology:</strong>&nbsp;A panel data model and pooled OLS are used to estimate the effect of microfinance indicators; the number of microfinance institutions, gross loan portfolio, microfinance intensity (gross loan % GDP), along with other control variables; inflation, employment, population growth, trade openness, agriculture and industry shares in GDP, on the three poverty headcount ratios ($1.9, $3.2 &amp; $5.5 a day). The empirical model is estimated using panel data of 91 countries across six different regions from 2000 till 2018. The study depends on World Development Indicators and Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) Market data. <strong>Main Findings</strong>: The study findings reveal a significant effect of the three microfinance indicators and some control variables on reducing poverty. And that enhancing the performance of this sector will help governments in their goals towards poverty reduction. <strong>Research limitations:&nbsp;</strong>Literature covering the effect and performance of microfinance in developed and many developing countries are still to be considered insufficient thus, studying the impact of microfinance and its performance in such economies is challenging. Further, enhanced studies are needed for better assessments and identifying the gaps and means of improvements required. <strong>Novelty/Originality of the study:&nbsp;</strong>This empirical study estimated the effect of microfinance variables, along with other control variables, on the three poverty headcount ratios across many developing and developed countries in different regions over nearly two decades, which is not tested before.

This research examines how transformation affects the outreach performance of microfinance NGOs in Kenya. Specifically, it analyzes the impact of various transformation indicators on outreach performance. Utilizing a quantitative research approach, the study utilizes unbalanced panel data spanning 19 years (1997 to 2015) obtained from the Microfinance Information Exchange (Mix) Market databank, focusing on six surveyed transformed microfinance NGOs in Kenya. Panel data regression models and instrumental variables estimation methods are employed for model specification. The findings reveal that outreach, measured by the average loan balance per borrower, is significantly and negatively influenced by the debt-to-asset ratio but not significantly affected by the debt-to-equity ratio or deposits-to-total assets ratio. The percentage of female borrowers is significantly influenced by the debt-to-equity ratio and debt-to-asset ratio, while the number of active borrowers is significantly influenced by the debt-to-asset ratio, deposits-to-total assets ratio, institutional size, and institutional age. These results suggest a necessity for microfinance NGOs facing capital funding challenges to devise policies that facilitate the utilization of commercial capital sources to expand outreach to impoverished individuals. Nonetheless, the management of transformed microfinance NGOs must implement safeguards ensuring that the pursuit of commercial funding options and public deposits does not compromise their mission of serving the most vulnerable populations.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the empirical relationship between microsavings and the financial performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Design/methodology/approach The approach in this paper is decidedly empirical, and employs data obtained from Microfinance Information eXchange (MIX). The data set consists of 350 microfinance MFIs domiciled in 36 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period covering 1998–2012. Findings The panel estimation results consistently show that there exists a negative and statistically significant relationship between microsavings and the financial performance of MFIs in SSA. This is perhaps surprising, albeit rational considering the exceedingly elevated operating expenses that ascend from mobilizing and managing microsavings, ceteris paribus, that could erode firm profitability. The paper draws policy implications from these important findings. Research limitations/implications Even though generalized method of moment estimation technique was employed and robustness checks, the issue of endogeneity cannot be eliminated entirely. Practical implications Microfinance industry is one of the fastest growing segments of the financial sector in SSA. The industry is increasingly becoming the core of financial inclusion in the region where two-thirds of the adult population lack access to formal financial services. Therefore, gaining an in-depth understanding of the role microsavings play in the financial performance of MFIs can contribute to the growth of the industry. Originality/value This study is timely considering the significant growth in the number of microsavings – there are currently twice as many microsavings accounts in SSA as there are microcredits. More importantly, based on 400 MFIs, that reported data to MIX in 2016, the total microsavings stood at about US$11bn against an aggregate loan portfolio of about US$10.5bn. The remarkable growth of microsavings in SSA, from less than US$100m in 2000 to US$11bn in 2016, is the main motivation of undertaking this study.

Executive Summary The Indian microfinance sector has experienced fundamental changes in the structure of ownership and management of microfinance institutions (MFIs). The current study seeks to evaluate the competition level of the Indian microfinance sector during the period 2005–2017 and attempts to find the cause-and-effect relationship between concentration and competition. Furthermore, it analyzes the performance of leading MFIs to explore if there is evidence of exploitation of clients by these institutions. The study is the first of its kind with explicit focus on the market structure of the Indian microfinance market. The study uses unbalanced panel data sets generated from the microfinance information exchange (MIX) data source. The representative sample includes firm specific data of 127 MFIs of different legal statuses and sizes. The dynamic equation model is estimated applying the difference generalized methods of moments (GMM). The results of the empirical investigation find a rise in the concentration with a decrease in competition in the Indian microfinance market during recent years. Intense competition in the past and introduction of new regulations in the wake of sectoral crisis are responsible for this transition. High concentration gives large MFI market powers to exploit the customers. However, the study fails to find any evidence of any such exploitation from the conduct of the leading MFIs. The survey highlights the potential connection between the drop in the competitiveness of the sector and the first appearance of new regulations in light of the sectoral crisis. It is imperative that regulators keep a tight vigil on the operations of leading MFIs and take necessary actions to ensure a healthy competitive environment in the sector. Furthermore, existing rules should be modified to help small MFIs as they play a very crucial role in the fulfilment of the primary objective of the microfinance.

Many microfinance institutions (MFIs) are currently drifting away from their original mission of alleviating poverty. The objective of this article is to identify and update significant social performance (SP) for micro-finance institutions (MFIs) by viewing social performance measures as a way to address the development of MFIs. Unlike traditional performance measurements, social performance measurements are more allied with the organisation’s social and development goals. This study has therefore reviewed prior empirical studies and consultancy reports dealing with poverty alleviation to determine important social performance measurements for MFIs to achieve their social goals. Further, this study scrutinises 415 MFIs that have reported their social performance in the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) database in 2008 and 2009. The findings have revealed that from 2008 to 2009 the number of MFIs reporting social performance increased by 72 per cent; 80 per cent of them are Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Non-banking Financial Institutions (NFBIs). This study therefore provides direction for future research in performance assessment, balancing social and financial objectives in the microfinance industry. It is also a step in conducting more research and recommending regulation of the social performance of MFIs that will require them to engage in more empirical research work using micro-econometrics techniques in the future to support the available conceptual literature.

AbstractThe aim of this research has been to analyse how the method employed for lending can affect the cost efficiency of microfinance institutions (MFIs) since innovations for lending have been introduced in the sector in the last years and there are not empirical studies to analyse the actual impact of it. The improvement of MFIs' cost efficiency is very important for these institutions to achieve their financial self‐sufficiency and be sustainable in the long run. The data employed in this analysis have been an unbalanced panel composed of a sample of 1017 MFIs for the 2008–2018 period and collected from the microfinance information exchange (MIX) database. Our results also show that community or group‐lending methods, as village banking and solidarity groups, have a positive effect on the MFIs’ cost efficiency versus traditional methods based on individual lending. In addition, we have found that MFIs with a higher proportion of borrowers in rural areas are more cost efficient than institutions with more borrowers in urban areas, although community or group‐lending methods have a larger positive effect on MFIs’ cost efficiency in urban than in rural areas.

Purpose Uncontrollable brain drain (employees’ turnover) has been found to hamper humanitarian and sustainable objectives of socially oriented organizations. Hence, this study aims to explore the roles of gender and organizational-level factors on the rate of employees’ turnover in microfinance institutions (MFIs). Design/methodology/approach The study used an unbalanced panel data of 235 MFIs spanning the period 2010–2019. Based on the availability of the required data set on the World Bank catalogue (in collaboration with Microfinance Information Exchange-MIX Market), this study covers four South Asian countries, namely, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Then, the authors analyzed the data using the conventional panel data regression techniques (e.g. fixed effects model and random effects model). Findings The regression results revealed that women leaders (board members) could significantly reduce the employee turnover rate of MFIs. Although the efficiency wage hypothesis is supported in this study, it depends on the profit orientation of the MFIs. This study also confirmed that financial sustainability and donations have helped MFIs to reduce their employees’ turnover, which reiterates the image and brand value effect of MFIs. Moreover, the overall gender development and legal status (e.g. Bank and Non-Bank Financial Institutions) have also been found to have an effect on employees’ turnover based on the sub-sample analysis. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is among the first to investigate the impact of gender and institutional characteristics on employees’ turnover based on a large and recent panel dataset from selected South Asian countries.

Em evolução recente, o microcrédito segue em uma interseção teórico-pragmática a partir de duas principais correntes, que se distinguem principalmente por suas definições, âmbitos e focos estratégicos para superação da pobreza – objeto comum de intervenção. Face à identificação destas linhas, que divergem quanto a fundamentos teóricos importantes, este trabalho se propõe entender em que posição se assenta a oferta do microcrédito no Brasil. Trata-se de uma pesquisa descritiva, de caráter quantitativo. A principal fonte utilizada para coleta de dados desta pesquisa foi a plataforma eletrônica de dados online, Microfinance Information Exchange – THE MIX (2016). Os dados coletados referem-se às instituições de microfinanças brasileiras, constantes nesta base de dados nos anos 2008-2011-2014. A identificação da eficiência destas instituições foi realizada mediante aplicação do modelo não paramétrico: Análise Envoltória de Dados – DEA. As configurações utilizadas possibilitaram a identificação de duas perspectivas que, em diferentes medidas, denotaram a prevalência da ênfase financeira. Entretanto, algumas instituições apresentaram eficiência concomitante em todo o período do estudo, destacando-se sob todos os âmbitos dos cenários de análise considerados. Nesta perspectiva, em razão de sua importância no contexto da oferta nacional, viabilizam uma condição de equilíbrio em relação às dimensões financeira e social.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors affecting the financial sustainability of the Indian Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) post-Andhra Pradesh (AP) crisis Design/methodology/approach – Regression analysis is used to test the significance of the independent variables on the variable of interest, i.e. the operational self-sustainability. Three-stage regression analysis, i.e. Partial F-test, residual analysis and Box–Cox-type transformations is applied to see the impact of the variables on financial sustainability of the Indian MFIs. The study is based on the data of the Indian MFIs during three fiscal years from 2010-2011 to 2012-2012 reported in the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX). Findings – The authors’ results indicate that in 2010-2011, the linear regression model seems to be good fit to the data, whereas in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, the appropriateness of the linear regression models seems questionable (the error distribution seems to be skewed). It is observed that square root of the dependent variable exhibits adequate fit for 2011 and 2012. Therefore, a substantial change in the model for estimating sustainability of Indian MFIs is observed in the post-AP crisis era. It is observed that portfolio quality and capital management are important determinants for the financial sustainability of the MFIs. Practical implications – This study identifies the factors affecting the sustainability of the Indian MFIs, especially after the reforms following the AP crisis in India. The study suggests that from 2012-2013, the factors such as write-off ratio, capital-to-asset ratio, ratio of financial revenue to assets and provision for loan impairment-to-asset ratio are the main factors which have significant impact on the operational self-sufficiency (OSS) of Indian MFIs. This indicates that the quality of portfolio must be improved to reduce the vulnerability of the Indian MFIs. Social implications – After the AP crisis, the performance of Indian MFIs is stabilized to a greater extent. The various performance indicators are improving. Originality/value – The paper provides a detailed comparative analysis of the factors effecting financial sustainability of the Indian MFIs, before and after the regulatory reforms in 2011. A substantial change is observed after 2011-2012. Such a study on the Indian microfinance sector seems to be new (to the best of the authors’ knowledge).

In recent times, microfinance has emerged as a major innovation in the rural financial marketplace. Microfinance largely addresses the issue of access to financial services. In trying to understand the innovation of microfinance and how it has proved to be effective, the author looks at certain design features of microfinance. He first starts by identifying the need for financial service institutions which is basically to bridge the gap between the need for financial services across time, geographies, and risk profiles. In providing services that bridge this gap, formal institutions have limited access to authentic information both in terms of transaction history and expected behaviour and, therefore, resort to seeking excessive information thereby adding to the transaction costs. The innovation in microfinance has been largely to bridge this gap through a series of trustbased surrogates that take the transaction-related risks to the people who have the information — the community through measures of social collateral. In this paper, the author attempts to examine the trajectory of institutional intermediation in the rural areas, particularly with the poor and how it has evolved over a period of time. It identifies a systematic breach of trust as one of the major problems with the institutional interventions in the area of providing financial services to the poor and argues that microfinance uses trust as an effective mechanism to address one of the issues of imperfect information in financial transactions. The paper also distinguishes between the different models of microfinance and identifies which of these models use trust in a positivist frame and as a coercive mechanism. The specific objectives of the paper are to: Superimpose the role of trust in various types of exchanges and see how it impacts the effectiveness of repeated transactions. While greater access to information fosters trust and thus helps social networks to reduce transaction costs, there could be limits to which exchanges could solely depend on networks and trust. Look at the frontiers where mutual trust cannot work as a surrogate for lower appraisal costs. Use an example in the Canadian context and see how an entity that started on the basis of social networks and trust had to morph into using the techniques used by other formal nonneighbourhood institutions as it grew in size and went beyond a threshold. Using the Canadian example, the author argues that as the transactions get sophisticated, it is possible to achieve what informal networks have achieved through the creative use of information technology. While we find that the role of trust both in the positivist and the coercive frame does provide some interesting insights into how exchanges with the poor could be managed, there still could be breaches in the assumptions. This paper identifies the conditions under which the breaches could possibly happen and also speculates on the effect of such breaches.

Now Microfinance Institutions reach thousands of customers and have the opportunity to send out messages, get fast feedback, and experiment with offers at relatively low costs. Social media establish closer connections between consumers as more trustworthy sources of information regarding products and services than business-sponsored communications transmitted via the traditional elements of the promotion mix. Social media channels help to communicate and organize themselves together and allow them to reach out and relay their messages to a larger group of people to create awareness and promote a brand. This paper aims to investigate about social media platforms are being used by microfinance institutions as well as a communication tool with their customers and to identify how microfinance institutions use social media efforts to expand their opportunities in reaching their target market. This study also tries to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing in the development of microfinance institutions. Keywords: Microfinance market, social media marketing, customer attractiveness.

The objective of this study is to identify how the policies of financing influence the performance of Microfinance institutions (MFI). In this study, we used the MIX Market database in order to bring out information relating to the variables of financing and performance structures. The data used was obtained from eight Institutions of Microfinance in Cameroon, and were collected over a period of eight years going from 2006 to 2013. An analysis of the regressions based on a sample of 64 observations collected on 8 Cameroonian MFIs for 8 years, on the one hand, shows that the level of indebtedness also influences financial and social performance negatively

In the last few years, considerable attention has been paid to microfinance as a relevant participant in the formal financial system, whose target audience is people who are otherwise at risk of financial exclusion. In parallel, sustainability and the promotion of Sustainable Development (SD) are imposed as the theoretical frame when facing any study. This, connected with cultural and organizational dimensions theories, are the analytical framework for the analysis of the relationship between the context of performance in which Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) operate and their activity in promoting sustainability. A holistic approach is necessary to make operational these concepts; for that reason, financial, environmental, social and governance dimensions (FESG), and the balance among them, have to be considered. The main objective of the paper is to explore to what extent MFIs are fostering SD, and how this promotion is performed by region. For the analysis, two different sources of information have been studied: sectoral academic literature that focuses on the different sustainability dimensions, and MIX Market sustainability data obtained from the MFIs. A keyword analysis of the selected papers has been executed to be conscious of the most investigated aspects by region; on the data provided by the institutions, a Kruskal-Wallis H test has been performed to learn what the main Sustainability Indicators (SIs) are that are reported affirmatively. To obtain comprehensive research, a comparative study of the results offers the convergences, divergences and gaps of information in each of the regions. The findings show significant differences depending on the region, and confirm that operationalization should be adjusted at the regional context of the MFIs. The paper, with the inherent limitations due to data quality, also offers recommendations for the better promotion of sustainability in each of the regions.

Life risks can happen to anyone, including low-income people who are vulnerable to the risk of death and loss of property due to unexpected events. This research uses SWOT analysis, marketing strategy, 7P marketing mix, and Business Model Canvas to find out the causes of sales failure and solutions that can be used as a reference for the sale of Si Bijak microinsurance in the future. This research method uses qualitative methods through literature analysis, data, and information from interviews with 4 (four) subjects directly conducted in November 2023-January 2024 and verified through repeated checks so that it can be analyzed. The results showed the need for repricing and the number of insurance benefits, the addition of diverse marketing communication channels and media, massive sales activities through cooperation with microfinance institutions, social institutions, and communities, development of microinsurance application technology, increasing education/literacy to the public, promotional activities for ease of sales, and supervision and support from regulators.

Rare earth elements (REEs) have been intentionally used in Chinese agriculture since the 1980s to improve crop yields. Around the world, REEs are also involuntarily applied to soils through phosphate fertilizers. These elements are known to alleviate damage in plants under abiotic stresses, yet there is no information on how these elements act in the physiology of plants. The REE mode of action falls within the scope of the hormesis effect, with low-dose stimulation and high-dose adverse reactions. This study aimed to verify how REEs affect rice plants’ physiology to test the threshold dose at which REEs could act as biostimulants in these plants. In experiment 1, 0.411 kg ha−1 (foliar application) of a mixture of REE (containing 41.38% Ce, 23.95% La, 13.58% Pr, and 4.32% Nd) was applied, as well as two products containing 41.38% Ce and 23.95% La separately. The characteristics of chlorophyll a fluorescence, gas exchanges, SPAD index, and biomass (pot conditions) were evaluated. For experiment 2, increasing rates of the REE mix (0, 0.1, 0.225, 0.5, and 1 kg ha−1) (field conditions) were used to study their effect on rice grain yield and nutrient concentration of rice leaves. Adding REEs to plants increased biomass production (23% with Ce, 31% with La, and 63% with REE Mix application) due to improved photosynthetic rate (8% with Ce, 15% with La, and 27% with REE mix), favored by the higher electronic flow (photosynthetic electron transport chain) (increase of 17%) and by the higher Fv/Fm (increase of 14%) and quantum yield of photosystem II (increase of 20% with Ce and La, and 29% with REE Mix), as well as by increased stomatal conductance (increase of 36%) and SPAD index (increase of 10% with Ce, 12% with La, and 15% with REE mix). Moreover, adding REEs potentiated the photosynthetic process by increasing rice leaves’ N, Mg, K, and Mn concentrations (24–46%). The dose for the higher rice grain yield (an increase of 113%) was estimated for the REE mix at 0.72 kg ha−1.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of governance structure and composition and other institution-specific attributes in disclosure practices of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in an emerging market contest. Bangladesh is a country which is considered to be a pioneer in providing micro-finance to the underprivileged people to improve their entrepreneurial capacity. Design/methodology/approach The paper utilises a survey of three groups of users to elicit their opinions and the recommendation of the donor and regulatory agencies to construct a disclosure index. Further ordinary least squares regressions, both parametric and non-parametric, are used to analyse the association between disclosure levels and governance mechanisms and other MFI characteristics. Findings Using a large sample of 564 MFI firm-year reports in Bangladesh, the results show that the overall disclosure levels were around 70 per cent in 2010 and have not improved since 2004. The results also show that the frequency of board meetings, qualifications of MFIs’ board members and MFI size are positively associated with MFIs disclosures. However, board size, board independence, audit firm and other control variables have no such effect on disclosure. This implies that MFIs should focus in board effectiveness rather than its composition. Research limitations/implications Using a general purpose financial reporting framework, the paper examines how effective boards can improve financial reporting standards of MFIs for better monitoring by international donor agencies, regulatory bodies and depositors. Originality/value This is the first substantive study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, that uses data based on a questionnaire survey and the annual financial statements of a large sample of MFIs from Bangladesh that has been at the forefront of microfinance in emerging countries. Prior studies only used Web-based information, namely, Mix-Market, which ranks country on the basis of its disclosure criteria supplied voluntarily by MFIs, and thus suffer from selection bias. In this study, an attempt has been made to develop an empirical model to explain the role of governance quality in disclosure practices of MFIs.

The aim of the current work is to predict the impact of MFI specific internal factors on the social performance of Indian microfinance institutions (MFIs) by using machine learning techniques. Social performance index (SPI) is designed by taking data of 73 Indian MFIs for 10 years with the help of an indexing technique where six different factors (operational self sufficiency, number of women borrowers, number of rural borrowers, gross loan portfolio, average loan balance per borrower / GNI per capita and cost per borrower) representing different dimensions of functioning of MFIs are considered. The data is taken from MIX data repository. Pooled OLS regression model is used for analyzing impact of various MFI specific factors on SPI. For predicting the SPI, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) machine learning model is considered that takes all independent variables as input. The results of regression model indicate that size, legal status, outreach and service provisions significantly affect SPI. ANN analysis result indicates that social performance of MFIs gets determined by MFI specific internal factors. The experimental result indicates that the proposed ANN prediction model is providing better result for predicting the SPI. The findings suggest that MFIs can contribute for development of the society by adopting suitable policies keeping in view certain internal factors.

The socio-economic events of the latest years and uncertainties in the vectors of development of the economic environment cause the need for robust statistical assessment. An important area of studies of the modern economy is determining the type of economic growth. The shift-share method is applied to determine the effect of the impact of national, industrial and regional factors on the dynamics of economic growth. The shares of effects (effects of the impact) caused by national economy trends, industry mix and region-specific factors are identified and analyzed.&#x0D; The position of economic activities in the industry mix of the Kyiv economy is analyzed and assessed by indicators of gross value added and number of employees with consideration to three components. The impact of each of them caused by the national factors, the established industry mix of the national economy and the internal competitiveness of a specific industry of the region are characterized. Factor decomposition of the change in the indicators caused by the national component, industry-specific and region-specific effects reveals that the overall growth in the gross value added by economic activity in Kyiv is to a large extent conditional on the effective industry policy and to the least extent on regional factors. However, the employment reduction in the Ukrainian capital was caused by the impact of national and industry factors, and was not compensated by the positive local effect.&#x0D; It is revealed that the stable flagship position is taken by financial and insurance activities, in spite of recent reforms in the bank sector with cleansing the bank system from ineffective and nontransparent entities. Kyiv remains to be the core center for concentration of financial services. The progressive growth in the construction market meets the needs of the megalopolis with its increasing population. The residents’ desire to expand the dwelling size and improve the living conditions helps improve business climate in the construction sector, increase its growth rates and share in the gross regional product (indirectly, through the gross value added). &#x0D; The section “Information and telecommunications” stands steadily on the top positions. Its rapid development, as a signal of the digital economy, enables for momentary exchanges of information and services on the domestic and external market, thus creating favorable prospects. &#x0D; The analysis of the composition of the problem group and the outsider group among the economic activities reveals the stable presence of manufacturing and social industries. Enterprises of the sections “Manufacturing”, “Supply of electricity, gas, steam and conditioned air”, “Supply of water, sanitation, treatment of wastes” have a stock of problems and system drawbacks; they suffer from lack of investment and innovation, they have no strong orientation on the challenges of modernity and market needs, which weakens the positions of the Ukrainian capitals’ economy as the industrial center.&#x0D; It is proposed to use the graphic method for illustrating the distribution of economic activities in Kyiv by quality characteristics of operation. The factors accelerating or hampering the development of economic activities in the region are determined. Recommendations on management decisions related with future operation of industries referred to as “leaders”, “regulars”, problematic industries and outsiders are given.

Cowpea is one of the most important vegetable that ranks third among pulses and top five leafy vegetables consumed in Sub Saharan Africa. In Kenya cowpea contributes to cheap supply of nutritious food, revenue and food security. Despite its importance, cowpea production levels are a fraction of the potential due to low technical efficiency of production which affects the revenue levels and food security of the smallholder farmers. This study aimed to determine the production, socio-economic and institutional factors affecting the level of technical efficiency among smallholder cowpea farmers in Chuka Sub County, Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya. Using semi structured questionnaire in a population of 12905 households and using multistage sampling technique from 389 households cross-sectional data on production factors, socioeconomic and institutional characteristics was collected. Data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics and stochastic frontier production function. The results indicated that production factors, socioeconomic and institutional characteristics significantly affected cowpea production. The mean technical efficiency index was 0.34. The stochastic frontier analysis revealed that production factor coefficients of labour (0.825), topdressing fertilizer (0.635), manure (0.325), agrochemicals (0.221) and land size (0.628) were all positive and statistically significant at 5% level. The inefficiency model revealed that the coefficients of socio-economic factors age (0.038), education (-0.156) and farming experience (-0.053), and the institutional factors, information sources/extension contact (-0.669) and access to digital financial services (1.527) were negative but statistically significant, except for age and access to digital service that were positive and significant. These variables were the determinants of technical efficiency in cowpea production. The results suggest that there is potential for cowpea farmers to increase production and net profits in the long run by efficient utilization of the existing mix of production inputs and technologies. Formulation of policies revolving around the significant variables, input supply, technology transfer and subsidies; extension services, information exchanges and market linkages are recommended to palliate technical inefficiency in cowpea production among farmers.

The stock market is an aggregation of investor sentiment that affects daily changes in stock prices. Investor sentiment remained a mystery and challenge over time, inviting researchers to comprehend the market trends. The entry of behavioral scientists in and around the 1980s brought in the market trading's human dimensions. Shortly after that, due to the digitization of exchanges, the mix of traders changed as institutional traders started using algorithmic trading (AT) on computers. Nevertheless, the effects of investor sentiment did not disappear and continued to intrigue market researchers. Though market sentiment plays a significant role in timing investment decisions, classical finance models largely ignored the role of investor sentiment in asset pricing. For knowing if the market price is value-driven, the investor would isolate components of irrationality from the price, as reflected in the sentiment. Investor sentiment is an expression of irrational expectations of a stock's risk-return profile that is not justified by available information. In this context, the paper aims to predict the next-day trend in the index prices for the centralized Indian National Stock Exchange (NSE) deploying machine learning algorithms like support vector machine, random forest, gradient boosting, and deep neural networks. The training set is historical NSE closing price data from June 1st, 2013-June 30th, 2020. Additionally, the authors factor technical indicators like moving average (MA), moving average convergence-divergence (MACD), K (%) oscillator and corresponding three days moving average D (%), relative strength indicator (RSI) value, and the LW (R%) indicator for the same period. The predictive power of deep neural networks over other machine learning techniques is established in the paper, demonstrating the future scope of deep learning in multi-parameter time series prediction.

IntroductionThe HTAfrica group is an informal network of individuals enthusiastic about health technology assessment (HTA) in Africa. In 2021, a grassroots network was founded to explore HTA issues relevant to African countries. Through webinars and information exchanges, the group aims to cultivate social capital and cohesion among members to co-create knowledge on key HTA issues that are important in the region.MethodsThe HTAfrica group uses a social media platform to convene and deliver programming. Individual users request to join and are approved by the group coordinators. Once joined, users can read and make blog posts and participate in webinars offered on relevant topics. Despite the size of the group (177 members in 2024), engagement in 2021 and 2022 was relatively low (average 3.1 people per session). In 2023, a structured eight-part introductory HTA webinar series was offered to improve engagement, in place of the ad hoc discussions on topics that were offered the previous year.ResultsEight webinars were offered to group members to introduce them to HTA and its potential importance for African countries. They included journal-based case studies of five African countries (Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, and South Africa) and a concluding webinar to summarize learnings. A co-creation approach was taken where the perspectives of all participants contributed to the group’s learnings. The webinar series ended in June 2024 and had a lower participation rate (average of two per session) but = greater cohesion among participants than did the ad hoc topics approach.ConclusionsThe eight-part series was offered from October 2023 to June 2024. While the number of participants per session was lower in the structured series, the individuals formed stronger connections and gained more intangible benefits. To form a strong network, a mix of both ad hoc hot topics and a structured series approach may be optimal for the formation of looser peripheral parts of the network (ad hoc approach) as well as fostering stronger cohesion in the network core (structured series approach).

The aim of the article. The article addresses drivers of digital marketing development as a marketing system at the macro level in the context of digital transformation of the economy. The topic is relatively new and needs attention since most research devoted to digitalization in marketing is usually undertaken on the microlevel. Due to such a bias little is known about ties of digital marketing development with digital transformation on the macrolevel. The article aims at developing of conceptual frameworks of relations thereof. The methodological base of the work is the ternary structure of the digital marketing system. It consists of IT sector, digital marketing and extended digital marketing. IT-sector provides for tools of digital marketing, thus encompassing digital marketing mix. Analyses results. Digital marketing englobes tools and platforms for which digital technology are essential, while extended digital marketing layer embraces the most of marketing activities, which are in the process of digitalisation. The development of digital marketing on the macrolevel is proposed to consider as a process of transformation, like the process of organizational change of Beckhard and Harris. This process is aimed at digital transformation of the entire economy. It applies four major means of digital transformation, namely: digital privatization, digital industrialization, digital investment and reinvestment, and e-governance and paperless. Digital privatization is aimed at ensuring higher efficiency of the economy by correcting existing inefficient models in certain industries by introducing digital platforms and solutions. Digital industrialization is undertaken by the rapid introduction of digital technologies in various sectors of the economy, other than the IT sector, the transition to a new technological mode and thus ensure increased productivity and productivity in the implementation of economic exchanges. The implementation of digital industrialization requires the deployment of digital entrepreneurship, including the renewal of existing and the creation of a new infrastructure of production, management, and support processes. E-governance and paperless can improve the efficiency of management decisions, as they integrate digital data with models that allow simulation and forecasting, eliminate the problem when digital data is not converted into information and does not get into databases needed for management decisions to be made. Digital investment and reinvestment refers to the development of foundations and factors of digital economy development - digital infrastructure, hardware and software, as well as institutional conditions of digitalization, education, training and development of the workforce, creating and maintaining the necessary conditions for its development and reproduction. With the help of digital industrialization, one can expect the development of digital platforms. It should lead to an increase in the number of users and partners - an increase in coverage, both in terms of demand (consumption and penetration rate) and in terms of production and provision of services (number of digital service providers and digital producers). products). The main areas of digital investment and reinvestment are the development of the IT sector and digital platforms, but there are also points of effort at the level of expanded digital marketing - in areas that are being digitized. Efforts should be directed towards the development of digital consumption through the transfer of procurement, including public services to the digital environment. Conclusions and directions for further research. Implementing this strategy requires macroeconomic stability, without which success in long-term macro-level projects seems to be unlikely, especially in projects involving large investments and significant technological transformations. Some directions of further research are defined, such as: driving forces influencing purchasing behaviour on digital platforms, conditions for effective development of digital entrepreneurship, organizational conditions and mechanism of digital industrialization, investment and reinvestment, state economic policy that encourages the development of e-commerce, forms of communication and mechanisms of influence between digital marketing systems at different levels of the economy and the knowledge economy, etc.

Este número especial está dedicado a dos campos de conocimiento que comparten trayectorias históricas de prácticas y múltiples frentes de reflexión y construcción teórica: la contabilidad y las finanzas. La contabilidad, surgida de las prácticas de cálculo en el Estado, la iglesia y el comercio, ha llegado a posicionarse como una pieza clave en la operación e institucionalización de las organizaciones modernas (Chapman, Cooper y Miller, 2009). Las finanzas, constituidas a partir del análisis básico de las cifras contables, como mecanismo de pilotaje y visión sintética de las organizaciones, han evolucionado de la mano de la economía financiera y de la institucionalización de los mercados financieros, hasta llegar a erigirse como campo de conocimiento inter-disciplinario, con una legitimidad y una hegemonía conceptual e instrumental quizás inesperadas (Baskin y Miranti, 1997).Hoy, en el marco de la financiarización económica, las interrelaciones e interacciones entre la contabilidad y las finanzas son más profundas (Demir, 2009) y reclaman un detenido y riguroso escrutinio por parte de los investigadores académicos. En este contexto, recogemos en este número especial diez (10) colaboraciones internacionales, provenientes de profesores e investigadores de España, Chile, México, Estados Unidos, Portugal y Francia. Los temas de los artículos van desde las especificidades de la convergencia a las Normas Internacionales de Contabilidad y de Información Financiera (NIC-NIIF), pasando por los nuevos tipos de información cualitativa y no financiera, hasta incluso retomar el debate sobre la relación causal entre mercados financieros y desarrollo de la economía real. De esta manera, el número está organizado en tres (3) secciones: Contabilidad, Gestión Financiera y Globalización, y Finanzas.En la sección de Contabilidad reunimos cuatro (4) artículos.Las profesoras Belén Álvarez Pérez y Eva Suárez Álvarez, de la Universidad de Oviedo en España, participan con el trabajo titulado Calificación de instrumentos financieros en las sociedades cooperativas a raíz de la NIC 32. La solución española. En este trabajo se estudia conceptualmente la particularidad del tratamiento contable de los instrumentos financieros del patrimonio (fondos propios) y del pasivo, en las cooperativas españolas, en el marco del proceso internacional de convergencia hacia las Normas Internacionales de Información Financiera. A partir de la normativa establecida en España (Plan General de Contabilidad de 2007), se concluye que los nuevos tratamientos contables supondrán costos para las cooperativas, fruto de las operaciones societarias con impactos significativos de reclasificación y valoración.El segundo artículo, titulado Convergencia de normas contables internacionales entre México y Estados Unidos: evidencia empírica, es una colaboración entre profesores de México y España. Sus autores son los profesores Sergio Polo Jiménez, de la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo en México, y Mercedes Palacios Manzano e Isabel Martínez Conesa, de la Universidad de Murcia en España. La investigación buscó evaluar si la convergencia de la normativa mexicana con las normas internacionales de contabilidad e información financiera (NIC-NIIF) incrementó la calidad de las mismas, como producto de la mejora de la comparabilidad con las normas estadounidenses (US-GAAP). Teniendo como referente la Teoría de la Agencia, el trabajo realiza una investigación empírica para contrastar varias hipótesis sobre la comparabilidad de la información financiera preparada, siguiendo las nuevas normas mexicanas (NIF) y las normas americanas (US-GAAP). Para el estudio empírico, se tomaron como referentes todas las compañías mexicanas no financieras cotizadas en la bolsa de Nueva York, entre 1997 y 2008. Los resultados permiten a los autores concluir, entre otros elementos, que se ha generado una aproximación entre las normas mexicanas y americanas en el cálculo del resultado neto.Desde la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela de España, el profesor Óscar Suárez Fernández aporta el artículo La divulgación de buenas y malas noticias por parte de las empresas cotizadas españolas. Este trabajo buscó analizar si las sociedades cotizadas españolas seleccionan las noticias a divulgar, impactando en la neutralidad de la información cualitativa y descriptiva presentada en las revelaciones o notas. La investigación empírica se focalizó en grupos empresariales cotizados en el Índice General de la Bolsa de Madrid, tomando información de los años 2007, 2008 y 2009. Los grupos empresariales estudiados representan el 78% del total de los grupos cotizados en tal índice. Para el tratamiento de la información cualitativa divulgada en las revelaciones (memoria), se utilizó el análisis de contenido. Los resultados permiten al autor concluir que la divulgación de información se orienta hacia las buenas noticias, sean históricas o prospectivas, independientemente del desempeño financiero de las empresas. Con lo anterior se afecta la neutralidad de la información narrativa divulgada.El cuarto artículo, titulado A divulgação dos ativos fixos tangíveis segundo a IAS 16 e o seu grau de cumprimento, es una contribución de los investigadores Fernando Ferreira da Costa y Lídia Alves Morais de Oliveira, de la Universidad de Minho, Portugal. El trabajo buscó contrastar el nivel de cumplimiento de los requerimientos de la Norma Internacional de Contabilidad No. 16, relativa a la propiedad, planta y equipo, en la información financiera divulgada por las empresas cotizadas en el índice Euronext de Lisboa, durante los años 2005 al 2010. A partir de la construcción de un índice de cumplimiento, se concluye que existe un grado medio de cumplimiento que llega al 67,3% de los requisitos de la NIC 16. Al mismo tiempo, se realizó un trabajo empírico para contrastar hipótesis soportadas en la teoría positiva de la contabilidad, que les permitió a los autores concluir que las empresas de mayor tamaño y con mayores niveles de activos fijos (propiedad, planta y equipo) son las más propensas a cumplir con los requerimientos de la NIC 16.En la sección de Gestión Financiera y Globalización de este número especial, recogemos tres (3) artículos.El profesor Rafael Hernández Barros, de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, es el autor del artículo Los riesgos de las entidades aseguradoras en el marco del Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) y el control interno. El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer un marco conceptual para la comprensión de los diversos riesgos que enfrentan las empresas de seguros en un entorno de globalización. Vinculando la gestión del riesgo empresarial y los principios del control interno, el autor realiza un análisis y una integración que le llevan a plantear la propuesta de un marco conceptual para la identificación y la gestión del riesgo de las empresas aseguradoras, recogiendo los riesgos de: suscripción, inversión, crédito, operacional, gastos, liquidez, mismatch y reaseguro. El autor concluye que este marco conceptual puede resultar útil también para la caracterización y gestión del riesgo en otros sectores.El trabajo titulado Integración de los Mercados Accionarios de Chile, Colombia y Perú en el Mercado Integrado Latinoamericano (MILA) es una colaboración internacional entre los profesores Eduardo Sandoval, de la Universidad de Concepción de Chile, Arturo Vásquez-Párraga, de la University of Texas Pan American de Estados Unidos, y Rocío Sabat, también de la Universidad de Concepción en Chile. El objetivo de este artículo fue evaluar el grado de integración de los mercados de acciones de Chile, Colombia y Perú, antes y después del proceso que llevó a la consolidación del MILA. Por tanto, el trabajo es analítico y comparativo. Con base en el modelo de valoración de activos de capital CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) y a partir de diferentes avances de la economía financiera, se plantean modelos multivariados (GARCH in-mean) para contrastar los retornos de los índices accionarios de Chile, Colombia, Perú y Estados Unidos. El periodo observado va desde 1996 hasta el 2013. Los autores concluyen que existe evidencia parcial de que los mercados accionarios integrantes del MILA efectivamente mostraron una mayor integración en los periodos analizados. Los mercados más beneficiados, según los autores, han sido el colombiano y el peruano, lo que se debe a una importante disminución de su riesgo sistemático.Las profesoras Ana Zorio-Grima y María García-Benau, de la Universidad de Valencia, y Laura Sierra-García, de la Universidad Pablo de Olavide de España, participan en este número especial con el artículo Aseguramiento del informe de sostenibilidad en España y Latinoamérica. Esta investigación tuvo como objetivo analizar el estado del mercado de aseguramiento de los informes sostenibilidad en Latinoamérica y España. La tendencia a publicar información de sostenibilidad o Responsabilidad Social por parte de las empresas muestra el auge y la importancia de este tópico. En los últimos años, ha surgido un importante mercado para realizar la evaluación (el aseguramiento) de los informes cualitativos y no financieros dedicados a los aspectos de sostenibilidad. Esta investigación tomó como muestra 783 empresas que emiten informes de sostenibilidad, siguiendo la guía del Global Reporting Iniciative (GRI). Con los informes de los años 2008 y 2009, la investigación contrasta varias hipótesis para establecer las características de las empresas que aseguran estos informes y del mercado de aseguramiento. El trabajo concluye identificando las variables significativas y evidenciando el crecimiento del mercado de aseguramiento, dominado por las grandes firmas de auditoría (Big 4).La tercera y última sección de este número especial es Finanzas y recoge tres (3) artículos de investigación.De la Universidad del País Vasco, España, los profesores Jorge Gutiérrez-Goiria y Koldo Unceta Satrustegui contribuyen con el trabajo titulado Compatibilidad o conflicto entre objetivos sociales y financieros de las microfinanzas: debates teóricos y evidencia empírica. La investigación realiza una importante evaluación teórica de las tensiones entre los objetivos económico-financieros y sociales de las microfinanzas. Al mismo tiempo, realiza un contraste empírico en 1.022 instituciones microfinancieras, con información de la base Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX). El artículo concluye que no existe una contradicción insalvable entre una mayor proyección social de las Instituciones de Microfinanzas y la búsqueda de su solvencia financiera, mostrando que ambos tópicos pueden ser compatibles y complementarios. Al mismo tiempo, el trabajo contribuye a explicar algunos de los interrogantes en los debates teóricos sobre las microfinanzas.El artículo titulado Análisis de los factores de riesgo en el seguro de automóvil mediante ecuaciones estructurales es una contribución de los profesores María Jesús Segovia-Vargas y David Pascual-Ezama, de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, María-del-Mar Camacho-Miñano, de la University College for Financial Studies, y Piedad Tolmos Rodríguez-Piñero, de la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, de España. Esta investigación tuvo como objetivo comprobar empíricamente la validez de la utilización de los niveles de "bonus-malus" para clasificar a los asegurados, utilizando dos modelos de ecuaciones estructurales. El sistema "bonus-malus" es un sistema de ajuste de la prima a pagar por el asegurado, tomando como referente el historial de siniestros y penalizaciones. Este sistema busca inducir a los asegurados a conducir sus vehículos de una manera más cuidadosa. El trabajo empírico tomó como referente variables de 4.365 pólizas de vehículos para realizar la contrastación de los modelos de ecuaciones estructurales. El trabajo concluye que la inclusión del "bonus-malus" aumenta el poder explicativo de los modelos para el establecimiento de las tarifas de los seguros de automóvil, pero no recoge todas las variables posibles o los factores ocultos.Finalmente, los investigadores Osmar Zavaleta Vásquez e Irving Martínez Silva, vinculados al Tecnológico de Monterrey en México y a la compañía de inversiones Quilvest en Francia, aportan el artículo titulado Crecimiento económico y desarrollo del mercado de capitales en México. El objetivo de este trabajo es estimar un modelo econométrico estructural para analizar la influencia del desarrollo del mercado de capitales sobre el crecimiento de la economía mexicana, teniendo en cuenta los principales determinantes del crecimiento de la economía real. El trabajo inicia con una interesante revisión de la literatura que muestra la existencia de dos concepciones o corrientes de opinión para explicar la relación entre el desarrollo del mercado de capitales y la economía real. Posteriormente, se plantea un modelo para contrastar la hipótesis según la cual "el desempeño del mercado de capitales de México influye positivamente en el crecimiento de la economía real", a partir de tomar como variables las determinantes clásicas del crecimiento económico. Los autores concluyen que el desempeño del mercado de capitales de México tiene una relación importante con el crecimiento de la economía nacional.Esperamos que nuestros lectores encuentren aportes en estos trabajos y extendemos nuestra gratitud y felicitación a los autores por sus nuevas contribuciones.

Financial inclusion is crucial for poverty alleviation and sustainable development, especially in developing countries like India. Despite advances in mobile and digital banking, many people remain excluded from formal financial systems. This paper uses the MCDM technique, Weighted Product Methodology (WPM), to evaluate microfinance strategies using indicators such as credit linkage and cost efficiency. It explores how expanding telecommunications infrastructure and fin tech integration can support inclusion, and address challenges such as digital illiteracy, gender gaps, and cybersecurity. This research addresses financial exclusion through an integrated analysis of telecommunications infrastructure, microfinance institutions (MFIs) and a multi-criteria decision-making tool called the Weighted Product Methodology. By assessing indicators such as loan disbursement, default rates and outreach, it provides insights into MFI performance. Using data from Global Findex, MIX and NSS, along with geospatial data, the study provides a nuanced view of inclusion at the micro level. It also highlights risks such as fraud and digital illiteracy, emphasizing the need for inclusive, user-centric FinTech policies and data-driven resource allocation. Alternatives taken as Global Findex Database, Microfinance Information Exchange, IMF Financial Access Survey, National Sample Survey, similar MFI-level data. Evaluation Parameters taken as Loan Disbursement Rate (%), Client Outreach (thousands), Loan Default Rate (%), Operational Costs (% of budget). The results show that National Sample Survey received the highest ranking, whereas Microfinance Information Exchanger received the lowest ranking. According to the WPM method, National Sample Survey ranks highest in terms of its value for Financial Inclusion and Microfinance applications

Historically, most microfinance providers are in the form of cooperatives, while some policies studies recommend shareholders ownership because it can reduce the risk of capital costs and charges opportunism manager. This study aims to analyze the factors in the cost of ownership that distinguishes MFI with the type of cooperative ownership and village banks. The study was conducted by using secondary data from the MIX (Microfinance Information Exchange) market year 2007-2013. The factors Influencing the determinants of MFI ownership costs were Analyzed using multiple logistic regression analysis technique. The study found that the MFI of cooperative has advantages in operational efficiency and credit risk while village banks have advantages in the cost of customer service, cost of debt, cost of capital, social performance and financial performance.

We apply the non-parametric, unconditional, hyperbolic order-α quantile estimator to appraise the relative efficiency of Microfinance Institutions in Africa in terms of outreach. Our purpose is to verify if these institutions, which must constantly try to strike a compromise between their social role and financial sustainability are operationally efficient. Using data on African MFIs extracted from the Microfinance Information eXchange (MIX) database and covering the 2004 to 2006 periods, we find that more efficient MFIs are also the most profitable. This result is in line with the view that social performance is not in contradiction with the pursuit of excellent financial performance. Our results also show that large MFIs in terms of asset and those charging the highest fees are not necessarily the most efficient.

Purpose of the Study: This study aims to assess the effect of microfinance provisions on poverty reduction in some developing and few developed countries across different regions and assess the effect of regions and time on the performance of the microfinance industry. Methodology: A panel data model and pooled OLS are used to estimate the effect of microfinance indicators; the number of microfinance institutions, gross loan portfolio, microfinance intensity (gross loan % GDP), along with other control variables; inflation, employment, population growth, trade openness, agriculture and industry shares in GDP, on the three poverty headcount ratios ($1.9, $3.2 &amp; $5.5 a day). The empirical model is estimated using panel data of 91 countries across six different regions from 2000 till 2018. The study depends on World Development Indicators and Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) Market data. Main Findings: The study findings reveal a significant effect of the three microfinance indicators and some control variables on reducing poverty. And that enhancing the performance of this sector will help governments in their goals towards poverty reduction. Research limitations: Literature covering the effect and performance of microfinance in developed and many developing countries are still to be considered insufficient thus, studying the impact of microfinance and its performance in such economies is challenging. Further, enhanced studies are needed for better assessments and identifying the gaps and means of improvements required. Novelty/Originality of the study: This empirical study estimated the effect of microfinance variables, along with other control variables, on the three poverty headcount ratios across many developing and developed countries in different regions over nearly two decades, which is not tested before.

Purpose of the study: The microfinance industry has been developed significantly last two decades. It is fast becoming a household name globally and one of the key contributors to social-economic development. The Sustainability of the microfinance industry depends on several factors and encounters numerous challenges. The purpose of the study is to examine whether there is a relationship between risk management and the sustainability of the microfinance industry in Sri Lanka. Methodology: A simple regression analysis is used to demonstrate a connection in which one independent variable is predicted to influence one dependent variable. The study included 376 microfinance women borrowers from three districts in Sri Lanka, and the cluster sampling approach was used. Primary data was gathered using surveys, while secondary data was collected from CBSL, MFI annual reports, and the Microfinance Information Exchanger (MIX). Main Findings: The study findings reveal that effective risk Management has a significantly positive relationship with the Suitability of the Microfinance Industry in Sri Lanka. Research limitations/implications: The study was limited to three districts out of 25 districts in Sri Lanka, and the sample frame was selected from three leading MFIs that agreed to participate in the research. The availability of time for this study was limited and could not permit the consideration of all MFIs and the entire country. Novelty/Originality: The study concludes that MFIs should have a proper and effective risk management process, but it should be adequately handled and communicated to borrowers. It implies that proactive risk management is essential to the long-term Sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs).

Studies have found that a small scale of operations could limit the firm performance since they do not enjoy economies of scale. Since the microfinance industry is focused on provision of financial services to the poor, performance is measured both from a social as well as financial perspective. As firms increase their scale of operations, their social performance needs to be on par with their financial performance. To measure the effect of scale on performance, we use data from the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) market consisting of 245 Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) covering a period of 21 years from 1999 to 2019. The dependent variables are outreach, efficiency, and financial performance. The control variables are age and the regulatory status of the firm. We find that while factors like financial performance, client retention, and measures of operational efficiency are dependent on scale; they come at the cost of outreach. The pursuit of economic goals by large MFIs seems to hamper their ability to reach the poorest and/or most needy clients, implying mission drift. This study thus draws the attention of policy makers to the importance of supporting small MFIs to survive and continue to address the social goals of MFIs.

The poverty reduction and financial inclusion of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) by 2030 can be significantly facilitated by the microfinance industry. However, it is pertinent to assess the sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in serving this purpose. The estimation of productivity of MFIs in Bangladesh gives a glimpse of their ability to fulfil the dual objectives of financial sustainability and social outreach. Hence, this study aims to measure the productivity of MFIs in Bangladesh using secondary data obtained from the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) market. The study employs Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI), which is an extension of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate the overall, social and financial productivities of 26 MFIs in Bangladesh during the period from 2009 to 2018. In general, this study revealed that majority of the MFIs’ overall productivity score varies between 0.9 and 1.20. Moreover, we observed that the social and financial productivities of MFIs in Bangladesh progressed during the entire study period, except for the years 2011 and 2017. This development may be attributed to the average growth in catch-up and technological effect witnessed during the study period. The study has also applied sensitivity analysis by changing the output to evaluate the robustness of the overall productivity results; consequently, the new estimates followed a similar pattern (mostly) and further corroborate the outcomes of this study. JEL Codes: C14, O43, G21

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to investigate whether the percentage of female borrowers moderate the effect of female leadership on financial sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs).Design/methodology/approachThe study collected an unbalanced panel data of 821 MFIs between 2007 and 2018 from the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX). MFIs’ financial sustainability was measured as operational self-sufficiency (OSS). The data were analyzed using the fixed effect regression model.FindingsThe study found that having women participation in managerial and board positions has a positive effect on OSS. The results further demonstrated that the proportion of female loan officers and female borrowers had a negative effect on OSS. In addition, the study’s findings revealed that the percentage of female borrowers moderated the relationship between female board members, female managers, female loan officers and OSS.Practical implicationsThese findings may offer important insights to policymakers and practitioners in formulating strategies to improve financial inclusion for women by examining the inherent link between female borrowers and women’s participation in leadership roles within MFIs, which affects the financial sustainability of these entities.Originality/valueThis study is among the few that have examined the interaction between the proportion of female borrowers and other forms of female participation, including loan officers, managers and board members, and its effect on the financial sustainability of MFIs.

Enhanced productivity remains a crucial agenda for firms to attain cost and competitive advantages in the market. Hence, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of efficiency wage (EW) on the productivity of microfinance institutions (MFIs) with respect to their dual objectives, namely, outreach (depth and breadth) and financial sustainability. Unbalanced panel data of 179 Indian MFIs were collected over the period 2010–2018 from the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) market platform (now obtainable from the World Bank catalogue). Under a static model setting (fixed effects model), the observed relationship between EW and MFI’s productivity is mixed. On the one hand, EW exhibits a strong and statistically significant positive relationship with the breadth of outreach, even after considering various control variables and alternative proxies of EW. On the other hand, EW shows no positive influence on the MFIs’ depth of outreach; rather, it results in a mission drift of MFIs, with the poorest of the poor being neglected (weak and insignificant for proxy of EW). Concerning the financial sustainability of MFIs, EW exhibits a positive and statistically significant effect, except for the profitability dimension when an alternative proxy of EW is used. A two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) performed to limit endogeneity problems also validates most of our findings. The outcomes of this study could help MFIs’ managers in designing appropriate financial packages to enhance MFIs’ productivity and subsequently attain the dual objective of outreach and sustainability.

PurposeIn recent years, researchers have shown an increased interest in studying the institutional environment–financial institutions’ performance nexus. However, little attention is paid to investigating the role of institutional quality in the financial sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Consequently, this study explores whether investments in strengthening institutional environment enhance MFIs’ financial sustainability.Design/methodology/approachThe study relies on an unbalanced panel dataset of 136/138 MFIs in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) spanning from 2004 to 2018, which was obtained from the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) Market database under the World Bank catalog. Data for institutional factors are accessed from the World Bank database for World Governance Indicators (WGI). The study applies the two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) to analyze the data.FindingsThe research uncovers that institutional environment matters in the financial sustainability of MFIs. The study shows that institutional quality is, in the aggregate, positively associated with financial sustainability. Different institutional factors also have distinct impacts on financial sustainability. While contemporaneous relationships are discovered between government effectiveness (GOVE), rule of law (RUL) and sustainability, the relationship between control of corruption (CCOR) and sustainability is an intertemporal one. Unlike the others, CCOR impacts sustainability with a one-year lag and not instantaneously. Nevertheless, the effects of the aforementioned institutional factors on financial sustainability are all positive and consistent with the result for the aggregate measure.Practical implicationsThe practical implication of our findings to MFI managers is that strategies should be developed and instituted to manage MFI-specific factors appropriately and counterbalance the negative effect of a weak institutional environment (in SSA) on financial sustainability, as MFIs have no or less control over the institutional quality. For policymakers, our findings underscore the significance of policy documents that assist developing economies in improving their institutional environment, as strong institutions are vital for MFIs in the attainment of financial sustainability, which is crucial for sustainable poverty reduction.Originality/valueWhile the extant literature provides valuable insights that different MFI-specific factors drive the financial sustainability of MFIs, the previous studies fail to address the role of institutional quality in the financial sustainability of MFIs. This study examines the nexus between institutional quality and financial sustainability, which has been ignored in the previous literature.

Purpose: Pricing transparency has long been advanced as a critical client protection measure in microfinance. It is also regarded as an important mechanism to drive interest rates downward by addressing information asymmetries and empowering clients to make informed choices, thereby increasing competition between providers. The need for clear pricing has become even more pronounced as institutions struggle to regain financial sustainability in the aftermath of the pandemic and as digital credit proliferates. Yet, little is known about its antecedents, especially institutional characteristics and country contextual factors. Study design: In this paper, we investigate the relationship between microfinance institution (MFI) characteristics (i.e., profit status, religious affiliation, social vs. commercial orientation), as well as macro context factors (i.e., country level financial market structures, financial literacy), and pricing transparency. We use data collected through MFTransparency.org and test our hypotheses using 517 unique microfinance institutions. Findings: We find that for-profit MFI’s and those with stronger commercial orientations price more transparently, but there is no significant difference between faith-based and secular institutions. We also find that institutions that belong to an external reporting agency (i.e., The MIX Market) and that operate in countries with higher levels of financial literacy and deeper financial markets price more clearly. Contributions: Our research sheds light on characteristics that are likely to belong to institutions with more transparent pricing and on the importance of country financial context. Implications: While commercialization in microfinance is often associated with negative effects on social outcomes, the finding that for-profit MFIs tend to be more transparent in pricing should be considered by policy makers, donors and investors. Attempts to reduce the influence of pecuniary motives in microfinance, whether by regulation or funding decisions, must be carefully weighed and precisely targeted. Moreover, the importance of contextual factors implies that institutions that are committed to favorable client outcomes should join external reporting agencies and increase their efforts to enhance client financial literacy.

AbstractWhile transnational social ties and exchanges are a core concern within migration studies, health researchers have often overlooked their importance. Continuous and circular exchanges of information within transnational networks, also defined as social remittances, facilitate the diffusion of innovations, potentially driving contemporary social and cultural change. Influences on health, wellbeing, and care-seeking are important, but under-researched, dimensions for consideration. We undertook a systematic narrative evidence synthesis to describe the current state of knowledge in this area and to identify gaps and future directions for health researchers to take. Between April 2017 and May 2019, an iterative series of searches in Medline, Embase, PsycINFO and PubMed, plus backward and forward citation searches identified 1173 potential papers. Screening resulted in 36 included papers, eighteen focused on migrant populations and eighteen on those who remain behind. The top three health topics were health-seeking strategies, sexual and reproductive health issues, and healthcare support. And, while not always explicitly identified, mental health and wellbeing was a further prominent, cross-cutting theme. Articles on migrant populations were all conducted in the global North and 13 out of 18 used qualitative methods. Five main themes were identified: therapeutic effect of the continuing social relationships, disrupted social relationships, hybridisation of healthcare, facilitation of connections to healthcare providers, and factors encouraging or undermining transnational social exchanges. Papers concerned with those who remain behind were mainly focused on the global South and used a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Four main themes were identified: transnational transfer of health-related advice, norms, and support; associations between migrant linkages and health behaviours/outcomes; transnational collective transfer of health knowledge; and power and resistance in exchanges. Findings suggest that transnational social exchanges can both support and undermine the health of migrants and those who remain behind. This review confirms that the volume and quality of research in this area must be increased so that health policy and practice can be informed by a better understanding of these important influences on the health of both migrants and those who remain behind.

PurposeThe authors study the explanatory power of investor rationality and irrationality for value and momentum portfolios. We also examine the relationships during financial crisis events, namely, the US subprime mortgage crisis (2007–2009) and the European debt crisis (2011–2013).Design/methodology/approachThis study examines the influence of investors’ rationality and irrationality on the US stock market, using the multiple linear regression model and the stepwise regression model. Technically, the stepwise regression uses the machine-learning technique, with specific testing methods — forward selection, backward selection and stepwise selection — to find the best-fit model, according to Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC). Thus, in this study, we will show the best model, as tested by the stepwise regression model.FindingsOur empirical results contribute to the importance of reasons and emotions for stock-market returns and conclude that rationality and irrationality simultaneously explain the value and momentum portfolios, as well as the ETF portfolios. Also, the rational and irrational explanatory powers differ, depending on portfolios and different periods. Rational factors usually explain the volatility of the return to a greater extent than irrational factors. Moreover, during a financial crisis, the irrational factors remarkably increase their importance in explaining returns, especially for the ETF portfolios.Originality/valueWe expect this study’s contribution will show not only academic contribution but also benefit many stakeholders in the financial market. Investors and traders can identify various irrational factors of trading — for example, taking a long position during the panic in the market following the indicators in the models. Managers also reconsider the cost of the company by adding irrational factors when computing the equity’s expected return. Similarly, stock exchanges can adequately adjust their circuit breaker during a pessimistic-investor period. Finally, regulators can evaluate a complete picture of the stock market by adding irrational factors into their considerations.

AbstractIn a developing country like Bangladesh, Members' satisfaction with stock exchanges was examined in this study based on the quality of e‐trading services. Five specific objectives were set to accomplish the main objective. This study further used a tangibility dimension, empathy factor, and responsiveness dimension to define E‐trading service quality. We conducted a descriptive and explanatory survey with 192 participants and 186 respondents (96.8%). The research design consisted of a mix of descriptive and explanatory methods. Data were collected through survey questionnaires with Likert scales using the SPSS (version 25) software program. Data analysis and interpretation were carried out using both descriptive and inferential statistics. It was found that both the Dhaka e‐trading center and stock exchange moderately practiced all study variables. The level of member satisfaction with stock exchange services is significantly influenced by the level of reliability, tangibility, empathy, assurance, and responsiveness of that service. Using regression analysis, it has been found that the dimensions of E‐trading service quality can explain 57.5% of the variation in stock exchange members' satisfaction. There is a positive statistically significant relationship between members' satisfaction with reliability, assurance, tangibility, and empathy, and no statistically significant relationship between members' satisfaction with responsiveness. Thus, exchange management bodies should improve practices regarding these dimensions of E‐trading service quality to increase member satisfaction.

A motivação principal para realização do presente estudo foi avaliar a existência de influência de características qualitativas de tipo de instituição, local de atuação e tamanho do ativo nas informações contábeis das IMFs na América Latina e Caribe. Os estudos sobre microfinanças se baseiam nas teorias da intermediação financeira, na teoria do Welfare State e na teoria institucional. Esta pesquisa se situa no campo das análises acerca dos indicadores contábeis de instituições financeiras. As demonstrações contábeis de uma IMF se assemelham às de qualquer instituição financeira, no entanto, há algumas especificidades neste tipo de organização, sobretudo, no que se refere ao tipo, bastante diversificado. Para validação da hipótese metodológica de que os indicadores contábeis de IMFs da América Latina e Caribe são influenciados pelas suas características qualitativas, fez-se um estudo empírico-analítico, utilizando-se das ferramentas estatísticas Análise de Cluster e Análise de Correspondências – ANACOR. Os dados foram coletados no site da Microfinance Information Exchenge–MIX, a qual disponibiliza dados secundários com características qualitativas (tipo, região) e quantitativa (indicadores contábeis). De acordo com os resultados, embora em magnitudes diferentes, todas as características qualitativas tiveram influências significativas nos Clusters formados a partir da similaridade dos indicadores contábeis. Desse modo, a hipótese metodológica foi confirmada. Os achados da pesquisa sinalizam que estudos futuros bem como ações e/ou políticas voltadas para Instituições Microfinanceiras que utilizem indicadores contábeis devem observar essas características.

In this study, the changed context for higher education institutions is analysed through the lens of various approaches to collaboration between higher education institutions and society. Three different approaches are discussed: the ivory tower, the factory, and the network. Although these approaches differ, higher education institutions are complex organisations and can embrace a mix of approaches. Nevertheless, depending on the approach applied, this impacts how collaboration between higher education institutions and organisations in society plays out. The study contextualised these approaches in a joint higher education-industry project focusing on developing work-integrated learning (WIL) in a Business Administration program. WIL should embrace practice-based pedagogical methods and strategies by integrating theoretical knowledge in the workplace. To achieve WIL, a network of stakeholders needs to be engaged actively in practice-based activities. The study aimed to report preliminary results from a higher education work-integrated learning project. The following research question was posed: How can higher education institutions, together with organisations in society, apply a networked approach to work-integrated learning? Thus, this paper contributes to knowledge regarding the networked aspects of the design and development of a preliminary framework, including the following themes: Exchanges of experiences and knowledge, Guest lecturers and Bring-Your-Own-Data (BYOD) assignments. These themes manifest a networked WIL framework as a hybrid between higher education and society. First, the networks of experiences and knowledge within academia merge with those of experiences and knowledge in society. Between these two, a hybrid networked work-integrated framework links higher education and society. Second, the same can be said to be true for guest lecturers. Here, guest lecturers became a link between higher education and society and therefore merge the two networks of learning through information and knowledge exchange. Third, BYOD assignments provided further manifestations of a networked WIL framework. Authentic data from the workplace meet the theories of higher education and a hybrid is created. When practice meets theory, they, too, become a link between higher education and society.

We are our own subjects. How our subjectivity becomes entangled in the lives of others is and has always been our topic. (Denzin 27)This article reflects on the process of disclosing the ethnographic self, particularly in relation to the use of e-mails and social networking sites, such as Facebook. Previous work has examined virtual ethnography as the main research method or its place within a mixed method approach (Orgad; Hine, Virtual Ethnography; Fay; Greschke). My focus lies on the voluntary and involuntary intertwining of physical ethnographic work (i.e. going to a specific location to immerse oneself in a culture) and the virtual relations formed with informants in the course of such fieldwork. Connecting with informants on Facebook has brought a new dimension to the active approach of impression management that is encouraged in traditional texts on ethnography and participant observation (Hammersley and Atkinson; Taylor and Bogdan; Ellen). Examples are drawn from my experience of three phases of geographically located fieldwork for my thesis on Spanish- and English-language media and the Cuban-American community in Miami, Florida, and from online “repercussions” of my physical presence in the field.In an ideal (research) world, the process of immersing oneself in a culture, studying and understanding its values, dynamics and symbolism is paired with professional and personal distance and reflexivity. Most of the time, the reality of fieldwork does not adhere to this ideal (Kleinman and Copp). Data collection does not take place in a void. On the contrary, it is a personal, emotional, embodied and challenging experience in which the researcher’s persona is highly involved: “If informants are people and have rights that affect ethical practice, ethnographers are also human and have identities that affect research practice” (Brewer 99).The researcher’s identity has a strong influence on the research process, but the same holds true the other way around. Ethnographic encounters have an effect on the ethnographer’s sense of identity or sense of self. The researcher’s identity, just like the informant’s, is ever-changing and in a constant process of negotiation that continues throughout the ethnographic experience. As Sarah Pink (47) points out, individuals not only position themselves and their identity in relation to others, but also in relation to objects and discourses (see also: Miller).Therefore the process of relating to the field does not end with physically removing oneself from it (Coffey). Dealing, relating and “coming to terms” with the field and those we encounter is much more complex. The assumption made that the researcher would not be influenced by this, meaning that the field has no impact whatsoever on the one collecting data, has been challenged severely, often by feminist scholars among others, over the past decades (Hey; Roberts; Berger).Establishing and positioning oneself and one’s role in the field can be a daunting process (Lindner). It can be informed by fears of acceptance, uncertainties about conventions not (fully) understood yet and the underlying dynamics one still hopes to uncover. The process of role(s) and identity negotiation of the researcher in the field goes on when writing the field, going through field notes and making sense of what we have experienced (Okely). So even though strict temporal and spatial boundaries might never have existed to the extent ethnography textbooks would have us believe, the use of e-mails and social networking sites have brought the field even closer to home. I have structured the following reflections on disclosing the ethnographic self in face-to-face conversations, that is, exposures made while being physically present in the field, and those taking place online. However, it is worth remembering that this is an artificial distinction as they are clearly interlinked and can overlap in time. Disclosure in Face-to-Face ConversationsWith establishing and negotiating one’s identity in the field and fieldwork relations comes the question of how much to disclose of oneself. How much should informants know about me? There are obvious ethical requirements: Every researcher should be clear about scope and aim of the research project, institutional affiliations, the way data will be stored and used (Mauthner et al.). But beyond that, how much of myself do I have to expose? What stands in the way of a straight-forward answer is the undefined nature of relationships of those we meet in the field: “Fieldwork relationships are at once professional and personal, yet not necessarily readily characterized as either”(Coffey 39).Arguably, there is not one right way to proceed, as it depends on the kind of field the researcher is finding herself in, her personality, role, identity and the type of relationship she wishes to establish with informants. The process of relationship-building to the field as a whole as constructed in the ethnographer’s mind and to individuals in the field is of course ongoing and very likely to evolve and change over time. This applies not only to the relationships built but also to the researcher’s sense of self and how he or she relates to those encountered in the field. It is partly in and through these encounters that the researcher’s understanding of self is influenced, shaped and negotiated on a continual basis. During three phases of fieldwork in 2006, 2007 and 2008 I interviewed over 40 Hispanic journalists, media executives and active members of the Cuban-American community in Miami, Florida. How much was I willing to disclose of myself during these encounters and subsequent e-mail exchanges? Should I correct informants when they wrongly assumed I was British because I was based at a British institution? Do they need to know why I have chosen to research this particular topic and them as a group, why I was based at a Scottish university and what brought me to the U.K. in the first place? The answers were no secrets, but neither was I comfortable to share them with all informants I met in the field. Gender and age-related dynamics came into play here with the majority of interviewees being male and significantly older than me (Easterday). At times, I was uneasy when it came to talking about myself. While I defined the majority of my initial relations as mostly, though not entirely, professional, some interviewees did have a different take on this. In particular, I felt that one interviewee who after the interview started asking me personal questions about my move to Scotland, clearly overstepped an invisible line, although it would have been perfectly alright from my perspective to ask him questions similar, though different in tone, within the context of an interview. A further aspect of disclosure within the context of ethnographic work is the open discussion of the research process with informants. Although this can be very fruitful, it can also be source of scorn and end in closed doors, especially in the highly polarised field I was researching: Once interviews were finished, some interviewees would ask whom I had interviewed previously—maybe just out of interest, maybe to go on and suggest future interviewees. I had never considered in detail what kind of reactions interviewees might have by my naming of previous contacts because for one, reactions had so far been positive and secondly, all interviewees had some understanding of what research entails and that I would naturally want to speak to as many people and as many “sides” as possible. In one particular case, though, the interviewee showed clear disapproval of my talking to a journalist at a well-known Miami-based newspaper. At the time, I did not take this minor condemnation very seriously, but in retrospect it turned out that this interviewee could have been a valuable source for further information and contacts. It taught me that it is wise to hold my cards closer to my chest in such a sensitive environment. This does not mean, however, that secrecy and constant striving towards a neutral position is always the best way to proceed, nor a believable position to hold as Kloos (511) found out: “One of the clergymen in Eastern Flevoland asked me once: ‘Do you have any opinions of your own?’”Virtual Exposure and DisclosurePrevious studies underlined that relationships forged and maintained online mirror offline everyday-life contacts, interests, concerns and vice versa. (Castells; Miller and Slater) For ethnographers whose informants have ready Internet access, this can bring significant advantages as well as challenges. Contacting informants whom I had heard about but not yet met in person by e-mail proved an extremely useful approach. An e-mail allowed me to say a few words about myself and introduce my research project. If there was no response to the e-mail, I was much more comfortable to call the person at this stage—rather than before an e-mail had been sent. E-mails proved a very successful way in contacting informants, thanking people after the interview and exchanging further information that had been touched upon in conversation. What surprised me, however, was that e-mails were also used by interviewees to contact me months after I had been in touch with them and had physically left the field. On a couple of occasions, interviewees sent me information that they thought was essential for my research or, in fact, asked me to fill out a questionnaire and comment on matters relating to my research topic. My role in the field and my relation to informants had turned from researcher to research participant, or interviewee in this case.While e-mails offer a rather controlled environment when approaching informants, other information about the researcher might be more unpredictable and harder to control or manage. I sometimes found myself wondering what information about me informants would find when they Googled my name. How would they combine and make sense of their offline construction of me as a researcher with my virtual persona? And to which extent is impression management in the context of social networking sites feasible and perhaps to be recommended? Of course these questions do not solely apply in a research context. However, it is worth considering them in an effort of understanding the dynamics which underlie the research process. Even though my research methodology included an online component, such as the monitoring of selected blogs and discussion forums, the majority of the data was gathered in clearly defined periods of physical ethnographic work. The relationship that evolved via e-mails and on Facebook outside of fieldwork phases were initiated by informants. I could obviously have ignored these contacts, however, as someone involved in media research I thought it strange and discourteous not to respond or accept informants as “Friends,” while seeking them out offline.Disclosing (personal) information on Facebook can become a risky business due to the diverse relationship of the people merged through Facebook’s list of “Friends.” Facebook does not force users to define or distinguish between different types of relationships. In my role as a researcher, I have always been highly uneasy to put on detailed information about “What’s on my Mind,” the facility Facebook offers for bringing others up to date on what is happening in one’s life. Reporting to my “Friends,” including informants, that most of my time was spent struggling with the data I had gathered in the field, could undermine their view of me as a researcher and a person worth talking to. Apart from that, there were obvious faux-pas that I needed to avoid online. Joining a Ernesto “Che” Guevara Fan group—like wearing a ‘Che’ T-shirt or pin – is not a smart move when trying to build a relationship with Cuban exiles. But even expressing fairly main-stream political opinion did not seem a good idea. Without being aware of it at the time, I was trying to perform a “stable research self,” as opposed to a fragmented, continuously changing and relationally constructed one. Following Geertz’s line of thought, I furthermore hoped that “the natives” had a similar perspective to mine and would perceive me as the balanced, neutral researcher that I was trying to be (Geertz).Arguably, Facebook allows for personal information and entries to be hidden from some contacts. It gives users the option to group contacts, thereby specifying who gets to see what kind of information. However, all contacts can see all contacts, to allow for networking to take place. Given the politically-charged and polarised nature of the community I was researching—and keeping in mind the incident recounted above, with one informant disapproving of me talking to a certain journalist and subsequently breaking up all communication—being connected with some people can have unwelcome side-effects for the research process.Personal and intercultural variations when reading and making sense of social networking sites are a further aspect worth noting in this context. Dalsgaard (10-12) underlines the hierarchical nature which characterises the practical use of the Internet and often mirrors offline power constellations. Unlike earlier celebration of the horizontal communication devoid of power structures, Internet interaction reproduces and adds further stratifications and “forms of ranking—some hierarchical, some not”. This also holds true for the number of contacts on a social networking site:Networks consist of nodes, and in the ‘Facebook society’, every person is a node. But there are differences between nodes. Some are more central than others and function as the hub for many more transactions. Some may only have ten ‘connections’ or ‘friends’, while others may have several hundreds – notwithstanding that there is qualitative difference between relationships, that not all relationships are personal, that many ‘friends’ are perhaps what we would normally call acquaintances and so on. (Dalsgaard 10)Drawing on Goffman, Dalsgaard (12) argues that popularity on social networking sites, has a symbolic or performance-orientated character, as it can be safely assumed that not every contact is “an important relationship built on long-term mutual exchange of greetings, gifts, favours, opinions and so on.”Even the number of friends and contacts can be understood as disclosing something about ourselves. How many people from the field and from outside the field are on my list of contacts? Who is there and who is not? Which relations are not included, pursued online, kept secret or ignored? Concerns of how individual informants would read my Facebook profile have left me feeling uneasy while keeping my activities to a minimum. However, secrecy, inactivity—which is in a way an attempt of the impossible act of non-performance or disappearance, can be just as harmful as disclosure. During the time of research I kept wondering whether someone working towards a doctorate in communication studies should know how to “work” Facebook. My wariness of disclosing too much of myself, aspects of my identity that would threaten my performance as a “stable researcher self,” held other parts of my fragmented identity captive and disclosed. In a way, I was happy with the relational construction of myself as the doctoral researcher in face-to-face encounters, but online encounters, not initiated by myself, had a different quality to them. They led me to struggle with the authentic, stable and singular self that Facebook encourages people to present to the outside world.Concluding RemarksManaging and handling acts of disclosure in geographically located fieldwork has been explored in great depth in recent scholarship. Voluntary and involuntary disclosure of the researcher’s fragmented identity in the context of social networking sites is a new phenomenon, and an unexpected challenge for those who did not see virtual ethnography as part of their main methodology. Similar to the fading dichotomy of public/private, e-mails and social networking sites have torn down the temporal and spatial boundaries fieldwork and the performance of the ethnographic self has been associated with. For the researcher who is connected with informants on Facebook, or other social networking sites, this can mean an ongoing performance of the researcher’s role; a continuous relating and positioning to those encountered in the field. This process might fade out with the end of a project, turning the informant into an acquaintance, friend or someone who happens to be our “Friend” on Facebook but has little further impact on our life and sense of self. When researching a group of people with ready access to digital media, virtual ethnography should possibly be part of the mix from the start. Hine (Virtual Methods 8) has pointed out that defining what exactly ethnography entails is problematic in itself. Immersing oneself in the field can take many different forms. Ethnography as a method is flexible enough to encompass encountering informants on social networking sites. In itself, it is worth noting who is online, who is not and what kind of interaction the informant is looking for. However, gathering this type of information raises ethical questions about the research process. In my case, geographically located field work was considered and approved by the university’s ethics committee, but online encounters—outside the chosen methodology—were not covered. Dealings with research participants were therefore institutionally endorsed within temporal and spatial limits and this indisputably contributed to my sense of a professional research self. Being contacted by informants on a social networking site, significantly challenges this framework and clouds the terms of reference. Whose rules apply? Or are there no rules? Observing participants’ profiles as an add-on to previously collected data, though tempting it may be, seems not a good option. But then informants might monitor the researcher’s profile for their own purposes, be it general curiosity, entertainment, or simply an enjoyable free-time activity. Once again, traditional roles of researcher and researched are easily reversed in the online encounter. For the time being, ethical guidelines generally assume a situation in which the researcher in some form is seeking out the researched, not the other way around. With the proliferation of social networking sites and online encounters, standard institutional ethical protocols fall short here.Nonetheless, online encounters between researcher and researched also bear potential. Asymmetric power structures can shift with the informant being able to contact, construct the researcher and disclose aspects of the researcher’s identity, or rather online persona, on their own terms and in a less controlled environment. As the incidence recounted above shows, this can entail a role reversal which blurs the lines between researcher and researched and underlines the performative and relational aspect of self. Furthermore, this indicates a much more flexible approach to roles of the researcher and informant which allow for mutual disclosing and exchanging—if both parties are willing to let this happen. On the other hand, this potential shift in power does not absolve the researcher from the responsibility inherent in the research process. As with other aspects of ethnographic work, “there can be no set formulae, only broad guidelines, sensitive to specific cases” (Okely 32). The unexplored terrain and ongoing experimentation of integrating social networking sites into everyday life call for a heightened sense of reflexivity and ethical awareness in the research process.ReferencesBerger, Peter L. Invitation to Sociology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.Brewer, John. Ethnography. Buckingham: Open UP, 2000.Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Coffey, Amanda. 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London: Tavistock, 1983.Hey, Valerie. “‘Not as nice as she was supposed to be’: Schoolgirls’ Friendship." Ethnographic Research: A Reader. Ed. Stephanie Taylor. London: Sage, 2002. 67–90.Hine, Christine. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage, 2000.–––, ed. Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg, 2005.Kleinman, Sherryl, and Martha Copp. Emotions and Fieldwork. London: Sage, 1993.Kloos, Peter. “Role Conflicts in Social Fieldwork.” Current Anthropology, 10.5 (1969): 509–512.Lindner, Rolf. “Die Angst des Forschers vor dem Feld. Überlegungen zur teilnehmenden Beobachtung als Interaktionsprozess.” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 77 (1981): 51-66.Mauthner, Melanie, Maxine Birch, Julie Jessop and Tina Miller. Ethics in Qualitative Research. London: Sage, 2002.Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.Miller, Daniel and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000.Okely, Judith. “Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge.” Anthropology and Autobiography. Ed. Judith Okely and Helen Callaway. London: Routledge, 1992. 1-28.Orgad, Shani. “How Can Researchers Make Sense of the Issues Involved in Collecting and Interpreting Online and Offline Data?” Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method. Ed. Annette N. Markham and Nancy K. Baym. London: Sage. 33–53.Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage, 2007.Roberts, Brian. Getting the Most out of the Research Experience: What Every Researcher Needs to Know. London: Sage, 2007.Taylor, Steven and Robert Bogdan, Introduction to Qualitative Methods: A Phenomenological Approach to the Social Sciences. New York: Wiley, 1975.AcknowledgementsI would like to thank my supervisors Prof. Philip Schlesinger, Prof. Raymond Boyle and Dr. Myra Macdonald for their advice throughout this project. My gratitude also to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for funding fieldwork in 2007 and 2008. Finally, a big thank you to the editors and reviewers of M/C Journal for their insightful comments.

Many years ago, while studying in Paris as a novice postgraduate, I was invited to accompany a friend to a seminar with Jacques Derrida. I leapt at the chance even though I was only just learning French. Although I tried hard to follow the discussion, the extent of my participation was probably signing the attendance sheet. Afterwards, caught up on the edges of a small crowd of acolytes in the foyer as we waited out a sudden rainstorm, Derrida turned to me and charmingly complimented me on my forethought in predicting rain, pointing to my umbrella. Flustered, I garbled something in broken French about how I never forgot my umbrella, how desolated I was that he had mislaid his, and would he perhaps desire mine? After a small silence, where he and the other students side-eyed me warily, he declined. For years I dined on this story of meeting a celebrity academic, cheerfully re-enacting my linguistic ineptitude. Nearly a decade later I was taken aback when I overheard a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney re-telling my encounter as a witty anecdote, where an early career academic teased Derrida with a masterful quip, quoting back to him his own attention to someone else’s quote. It turned out that Spurs, one of Derrida’s more obscure early essays, employs an extended riff on an inexplicable citation found in inverted commas in the margins of Nietzsche’s papers: “J’ai oublié mon parapluie” (“I have forgotten my umbrella”). My clumsy response to a polite enquiry was recast in a process of Chinese whispers in my academic community as a snappy spur-of-the-moment witticism. This re-telling didn’t just selectively edit my encounter, but remixed it with a meta-narrative that I had myself referenced, albeit unknowingly. My ongoing interest in the more playful breaches of scholarly conventions of quotation and attribution can be traced back to this incident, where my own presentation of an academic self was appropriated and remixed from fumbler to quipster. I’ve also been struck throughout my teaching career by the seeming disconnect between the stringent academic rules for referencing and citation and the everyday strategies of appropriation that are inherent to popular remix culture. I’m taking the opportunity in this paper to reflect on the practice of scholarly quotation itself, before examining some recent creative provocations to the academic ‘author’ situated inventively at the crossroad between scholarly convention and remix culture. Early in his own teaching career at Oxford University Lewis Carroll, wrote to his younger siblings describing the importance of maintaining his dignity as a new tutor. He outlines the distance his college was at pains to maintain between teachers and their students: “otherwise, you know, they are not humble enough”. Carroll playfully describes the set-up of a tutor sitting at his desk, behind closed doors and without access to today’s communication technologies, relying on a series of college ‘scouts’ to convey information down corridors and staircases to the confused student waiting for instruction below. The lectures, according to Carroll, went something like this: Tutor: What is twice three?Scout: What’s a rice-tree?Sub-scout: When is ice free?Sub-sub-scout: What’s a nice fee??Student (timidly): Half a guinea.Sub-sub-scout: Can’t forge any!Sub-scout: Ho for jinny!Scout: Don’t be a ninny!Tutor (looking offended, tries another question): Divide a hundred by twelve.Scout: Provide wonderful bells!Sub-scout: Go ride under it yourself!Sub-sub-scout: Deride the dunderhead elf!Pupil (surprised): What do you mean?Sub-sub-scout: Doings between!Sub-scout: Blue is the screen!Scout: Soup tureen! And so the lecture proceeds… Carroll’s parody of academic miscommunication and misquoting was reproduced by Pierre Bourdieu at the opening of the book Academic Discourse to illustrate the failures of pedagogical practice in higher education in the mid 1960s, when he found scholarly language relied on codes that were “destined to dazzle rather than to enlighten” (3). Bourdieu et al found that students struggled to reproduce appropriately scholarly discourse and were constrained to write in a badly understood and poorly mastered language, finding reassurance in what he called a ‘rhetoric of despair’: “through a kind of incantatory or sacrificial rite, they try to call up and reinstate the tropes, schemas or words which to them distinguish professorial language” (4). The result was bad writing that karaoke-ed a pseudo academic discourse, accompanied by a habit of thoughtlessly patching together other peoples’ words and phrases. Such sloppy quoting activities of course invite the scholarly taboo of plagiarism or its extreme opposite, hypercitation. Elsewhere, Jacques Derrida developed an important theory of citationality and language, but it is intriguing to note his own considerable unease with conventional acknowledgement practices, of quoting and being quoted: I would like to spare you the tedium, the waste of time, and the subservience that always accompany the classic pedagogical procedures of forging links, referring back to past premises or arguments, justifying one’s own trajectory, method, system, and more or less skilful transitions, re-establishing continuity, and so on. These are but some of the imperatives of classical pedagogy with which, to be sure, one can never break once and for all. Yet, if you were to submit to them rigorously, they would very soon reduce you to silence, tautology and tiresome repetition. (The Ear of the Other, 3) This weariness with a procedural hyper-focus on referencing conventions underlines Derrida’s disquiet with the self-protecting, self-promoting and self-justifying practices that bolster pedagogical tradition and yet inhibit real scholarly work, and risk silencing the authorial voice. Today, remix offers new life to quoting. Media theorist Lev Manovich resisted the notion that the practice of ‘quotation’ was the historical precedent for remixing, aligning it instead to the authorship practice of music ‘sampling’ made possible by new electronic and digital technology. Eduardo Navas agrees that sampling is the key element that makes the act of remixing possible, but links its principles not just to music but to the preoccupation with reading and writing as an extended cultural practice beyond textual writing onto all forms of media (8). A crucial point for Navas is that while remix appropriates and reworks its source material, it relies on the practice of citation to work properly: too close to the original means the remix risks being dismissed as derivative, but at the same time the remixer can’t rely on a source always being known or recognised (7). In other words, the conceptual strategies of remix must rely on some form of referencing or citation of the ideas it sources. It is inarguable that advances in digital technologies have expanded the capacity of scholars to search, cut/copy &amp; paste, collate and link to their research sources. New theoretical and methodological frameworks are being developed to take account of these changing conditions of academic work. For instance, Annette Markham proposes a ‘remix methodology’ for qualitative enquiry, arguing that remix is a powerful tool for thinking about an interpretive and adaptive research practice that takes account of the complexity of contemporary cultural contexts. In a similar vein Cheré Harden Blair has used remix as a theoretical framework to grapple with the issue of plagiarism in the postmodern classroom. If, following Roland Barthes, all writing is “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (146), and if all writing is therefore rewriting, then punishing students for plagiarism becomes problematic. Blair argues that since scholarly writing has become a mosaic of digital and textual productions, then teaching must follow suit, especially since teaching, as a dynamic, shifting and intertextual enterprise, is more suited to the digital revolution than traditional, fixed writing (175). She proposes that teachers provide a space in which remixing, appropriation, patch-writing and even piracy could be allowable, even useful and productive: “a space in which the line is blurry not because students are ignorant of what is right or appropriate, or because digital text somehow contains inherent temptations to plagiarise, but because digital media has, in fact, blurred the line” (183). The clashes between remix and scholarly rules of attribution are directly addressed by the pedagogical provocations of conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who has developed a program of ‘uncreative writing’ at the University of Pennsylvania, where, among other plagiaristic tasks, he forces students to transcribe whole passages from books, or to download essays from online paper mills and defend them as their own, marking down students who show a ‘shred of originality’. In his own writing and performances, which depend almost exclusively on strategies of appropriation, plagiarism and recontextualisation of often banal sources like traffic reports, Goldsmith says that he is working to de-familiarise normative structures of language. For Goldsmith, reframing language into another context allows it to become new again, so that “we don’t need the new sentence, the old sentence re-framed is good enough”. Goldsmith argues for the role of the contemporary academic and creative writer as an intelligent agent in the management of masses of information. He describes his changing perception of his own work: “I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor” (Perloff 147). For him, what is of interest to the twenty-first century is not so much the quote that ‘rips’ or tears words out of their original context, but finding ways to make new ‘wholes’ out of the accumulations, filterings and remixing of existing words and sentences. Another extraordinary example of the blurring of lines between text, author and the discursive peculiarities of digital media can be found in Jonathan Lethem’s essay ‘An Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’, which first appeared in Harpers Magazine in 2007. While this essay is about the topic of plagiarism, it is itself plagiarized, composed of quotes that have been woven seamlessly together into a composite whole. Although Lethem provides a key at the end with a list of his sources, he has removed in-text citations and quotation marks, even while directly discussing the practices of mis-quotation and mis-attribution throughout the essay itself. Towards the end of the essay can be found the paragraph: Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. …By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste ourselves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? (68) Overall, Lethem’s self-reflexive pro-plagiarism essay reminds the reader not only of how ideas in literature have been continuously recycled, quoted, appropriated and remixed, but of how open-source cultures are vital for the creation of new works. Lethem (re)produces rather than authors a body of text that is haunted by ever present/absent quotation marks and references. Zara Dinnen suggests that Lethem’s essay, like almost all contemporary texts produced on a computer, is a provocation to once again re-theorise the notion of the author, as not a rigid point of origin but instead “a relay of alternative and composite modes of production” (212), extending Manovich’s notion of the role of author in the digital age of being perhaps closest to that of a DJ. But Lethem’s essay, however surprising and masterfully intertextual, was produced and disseminated as a linear ‘static’ text. On the other hand, Mark Amerika’s remixthebook project first started out as a series of theoretical performances on his Professor VJ blog and was then extended into a multitrack composition of “applied remixology” that features sampled phrases and ideas from a range of artistic, literary, musical, theoretical and philosophical sources. Wanting his project to be received not as a book but as a hybridised publication and performance art project that appears in both print and digital forms, remixthebook was simultaneously published in a prestigious university press and a website that works as an online hub and teaching tool to test out the theories. In this way, Amerika expands the concept of writing to include multimedia forms composed for both networked environments and also experiments with what he terms “creative risk management” where the artist, also a scholar and a teacher, is “willing to drop all intellectual pretence and turn his theoretical agenda into (a) speculative play” (xi). He explains his process halfway through the print book: Other times we who create innovative works of remix artare fully self-conscious of the rival lineagewe spring forth fromand knowingly take on other remixological styles just to seewhat happens when we move insideother writers’ bodies (of work)This is when remixologically inhabitingthe spirit of another writer’s stylistic tendenciesor at least the subconsciously imagined writerly gesturesthat illuminate his or her live spontaneous performancefeels more like an embodied praxis In some ways this all seems so obvious to me:I mean what is a writer anyway buta simultaneous and continuous fusion ofremixologically inhabited bodies of work? (109) Amerika mashes up the jargon of academic writing with avant-pop forms of digital rhetoric in order to “move inside other writers’ bodies (of work)” in order to test out his theoretical agenda in an “embodied praxis” at the same time that he shakes up the way that contemporary scholarship itself is performed. The remixthebook project inevitably recalls one of the great early-twentieth century plays with scholarly quotation, Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Instead of avoiding conventional quoting, footnoting and referencing, these are the very fabric of Benjamin’s sprawling project, composed entirely of quotes drawn from nineteenth century philosophy and literature. This early scholarly ‘remixing’ project has been described as bewildering and oppressive, but which others still find relevant and inspirational. Marjorie Perloff, for instance, finds the ‘passages’ in Benjamin’s arcades have “become the digital passages we take through websites and YouTube videos, navigating our way from one Google link to another and over the bridges provided by our favourite search engines and web pages" (49). For Benjamin, the process of collecting quotes was addictive. Hannah Arendt describes his habit of carrying little black notebooks in which "he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of 'pearls' and 'coral'. On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection" (45). A similar practice of everyday hypercitation can be found in the contemporary Australian performance artist Danielle Freakley’s project, The Quote Generator. For what was intended in 2006 to be a three year project, but which is still ongoing, Freakley takes the delirious pleasure of finding and fitting the perfect quote to fit an occasion to an extreme. Unlike Benjamin, Freakley didn’t collect and collate quotes, she then relied on them to navigate her way through her daily interactions. As The Quote Generator, Freakley spoke only in quotations drawn from film, literature and popular culture, immediately following each quote with its correct in-text reference, familiar to academic writers as the ‘author/date’ citation system. The awkwardness and seeming artificiality of even short exchanges with someone who responds only in quotes might be bewildering enough, but the inclusion of the citation after the quote maddeningly interrupts and, at the same time, adds another metalevel to a conversation where even the simple platitude ‘thank you’ might be followed by an attribution to ‘Deep Throat 1972’. Longer exchanges become increasingly overwhelming, as Freakley’s piling of quote on quote, and sometimes repeating quotes, demands an attentive listener, as is evident in a 2008 interview with Andrew Denton on the ABC’s Enough Rope: Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope (2008) Denton: So, you’ve been doing this for three years??Freakley: Yes, Optus 1991Denton: How do people respond to you speaking in such an unnatural way?Freakley: It changes, David Bowie 1991. On the streets AKA Breakdance 1984, most people that I know think that I am crazy, Billy Thorpe 1972, a nigger like me is going insane, Cyprus Hill 1979, making as much sense as a Japanese instruction manual, Red Dwarf 1993. Video documentation of Freakley’s encounters with unsuspecting members of the public reveal how frustrating the inclusion of ‘spoken’ references can be, let alone how taken aback people are on realising they never get Freakley’s own words, but are instead receiving layers of quotations. The frustration can quickly turn hostile (Denton at one point tells Freakley to “shut up”) or can prove contaminatory, as people attempt to match or one-up her quotes (see Cook's interview 8). Apparently, when Freakley continued her commitment to the performance at a Perth Centerlink, the staff sent her to a psychiatrist and she was diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, then prescribed medication (Schwartzkoff 4). While Benjamin's The Arcades Project invites the reader to scroll through its pages as a kind of textual flaneur, Freakley herself becomes a walking and talking word processor, extending the possibilities of Amerika’s “embodied praxis” in an inescapable remix of other people’s words and phrases. At the beginning of the project, Freakley organised a card collection of quotes categorised into possible conversation topics, and devised a ‘harness’ for easy access. Image: Danielle Freakley’s The Quote Generator harness Eventually, however, Freakley was able to rely on her own memory of an astounding number of quotations, becoming a “near mechanical vessel” (Gottlieb 2009), or, according to her own manifesto, a “regurgitation library to live by”: The Quote Generator reads, and researches as it speaks. The Quote Generator is both the reader and composer/editor. The Quote Generator is not an actor spouting lines on a stage. The Quote Generator assimilates others lines into everyday social life … The Quote Generator, tries to find its own voice, an understanding through throbbing collations of others, constantly gluttonously referencing. Much academic writing quotes/references ravenously. New things cannot be said without constant referral, acknowledgement to what has been already, the intricate detective work in the barking of the academic dog. By her unrelenting appropriation and regurgitating of quotations, Freakley uses sampling as a technique for an extended performance that draws attention to the remixology of everyday life. By replacing conversation with a hyper-insistence on quotes and their simultaneous citation, she draws attention to the artificiality and inescapability of the ‘codes’ that make up not just ordinary conversations, but also conventional academic discourse, what she calls the “barking of the academic dog”. Freakley’s performance has pushed the scholarly conventions of quoting and referencing to their furthest extreme, in what has been described by Daine Singer as a kind of “endurance art” that relies, in large part, on an antagonistic relationship to its audience. In his now legendary 1969 “Double Session” seminar, Derrida, too, experimented with the pedagogical performance of the (re)producing author, teasing his earnest academic audience. It is reported that the seminar began in a dimly lit room lined with blackboards covered with quotations that Derrida, for a while, simply “pointed to in silence” (177). In this seminar, Derrida put into play notions that can be understood to inform remix practices just as much as they do deconstruction: the author, originality, mimesis, imitation, representation and reference. Scholarly conventions, perhaps particularly the quotation practices that insist on the circulation of rigid codes of attribution, and are defended by increasingly out-of-date understandings of contemporary research, writing and teaching practices, are ripe to be played with. Remix offers an expanded discursive framework to do this in creative and entertaining ways. References Amerika, Mark. remixthebook. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 29 July 2013 http://www.remixthebook.com/. Arendt, Hannah. “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940.” In Illuminations. New York, NY: Shocken, 1969: 1-55. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image Music Text. Trans Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977: 142-148. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland &amp; Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Blaire, Cheré Harden. “Panic and Plagiarism: Authorship and Academic Dishonesty in a Remix Culture.” Media Tropes 2.1 (2009): 159-192. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Monique de Saint Martin. Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. Trans. Richard Teese. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965. Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson). “Letter to Henrietta and Edwin Dodgson 31 Jan 1855”. 15 July 2013 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Letters_of_Lewis_Carroll. Cook, Richard. “Don’t Quote Me on That.” Time Out Sydney (2008): 8. http://rgcooke.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/interview-danielle-freakley.Denton, Andrew. “Interview: The Quote Generator.” Enough Rope. 29 Feb. 2008. ABC TV. 15 July 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsrGvwXsenE. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs, Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. London: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Text, Transference. Trans Peggy Kampf. New York: Shocken Books, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. “The Double Session”. Dissemination. Trans Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981. Dinnen, Zara. "In the Mix: The Potential Convergence of Literature and New Media in Jonathan Letham's 'The Ecstasy of Influence'". Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2 (2012). Freakley, Danielle. The Quote Generator. 2006 to present. 10 July 2013 http://www.thequotegenerator.com/. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing. New York: University of Colombia Press 2011. Gottlieb, Benjamin. "You Shall Worship No Other Artist God." Art &amp; Culture (2009). 15 July 2013 http://www.artandculture.com/feature/999. Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 2007: 59-71. http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/. Manovich, Lev. "What Comes after Remix?" 2007. 15 July 2013 http://manovich.net/LNM/index.html. Markham, Annette. “Remix Methodology.” 2013. 9 July 2013 http://www.markham.internetinquiry.org/category/remix/.Morris, Simon (dir.). Sucking on Words: Kenneth Goldsmith. 2007. http://www.ubu.com/film/goldsmith_sucking.html.Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. New York: Springer Wein, 2012. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Schwartzkoff, Louise. “Art Forms Spring into Life at Prima Vera.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Sep. 2008: Entertainment, 4. http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/art-forms-spring-into-life-at-primavera/2008/09/18/1221331045404.html.Singer, Daine (cur.). “Pains in the Artists: Endurance and Suffering.” Blindside Exhibition. 2007. 2 June 2013 http://www.blindside.org.au/2007/pains-in-the-artists.shtml.

Introduction The research from which this piece derives explores political remix video (PRV), a genre in which remixers critique dominant discourses and power structures through guerrilla remixing of copyrighted footage (“What Is Political Remix Video?”). Specifically, I examined the works of political video remixer Elisa Kreisinger, whose queer remixes of shows such as Sex and the City and Mad Men received considerable attention between 2010 and the present. As a rhetoric scholar, I am attracted not only to the ways that remix functions discursively but also the ways in which remixers are constrained in their ability to argue, and what recourse they have in these situations of legal and technological constraint. Ultimately, many of these struggles play out on YouTube. This is unsurprising: many studies of YouTube and other user-generated content (UGC) platforms focus on the fact that commercial sites cannot constitute utopian, democratic, or free environments (Hilderbrand; Hess; Van Dijck). However, I find that, contrary to popular belief, YouTube’s commercial interests are not the primary factor limiting remixer agency. Rather, United States copyright law as enacted on YouTube has the most potential to inhibit remixers. This has led to many remixers becoming advocates for fair use, the provision in the Copyright Act of 1976 that allows for limited use of copyrighted content. With this in mind, I decided to delve more deeply into the framing of fair use by remixers and other advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Social Media. In studying discourses of fair use as they play out in the remix community, I find that the framing of fair use bears a striking similarity to what rhetoric scholars have termed vernacular discourse—a discourse emanating from a small segment of the larger civic community (Ono and Sloop 23). The vernacular is often framed as that which integrates the institutional or mainstream while simultaneously asserting its difference through appropriation and subversion. A video qualifies as fair use if it juxtaposes source material in a new way for the purposes of critique. In turn, a vernacular text asserts its “vernacularity” by taking up parts of pre-existing dominant institutional discourses in a way that resonates with a smaller community. My argument is that this tension between institutional and vernacular gives political remix video a multivalent argument—one that presents itself both in the text of the video itself as well as in the video’s status as a fair use of copyrighted material. Just as fair use represents the assertion of creator agency against unfair copyright law, vernacular discourse represents the assertion of a localised community within a world dominated by institutional discourses. In this way, remixers engage rights holders and other institutions in a pleasurable game of cat and mouse, a struggle to expose the boundaries of draconian copyright law. YouTube’s Commercial InterestsYouTube’s commercial interests operate at a level potentially invisible to the casual user. While users provide YouTube with content, they also provide the site with data—both metadata culled from their navigations of the site (page views, IP addresses) as well as member-provided data (such as real name and e-mail address). YouTube mines this data for a number of purposes—anything from interface optimisation to targeted advertising via Google’s AdSense. Users also perform a certain degree of labour to keep the site running smoothly, such as reporting videos that violate the Terms of Service, giving videos the thumbs up or thumbs down, and reporting spam comments. As such, users involved in YouTube’s participatory culture are also necessarily involved in the site’s commercial interests. While there are legitimate concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, especially after Google introduced policies in 2012 to facilitate a greater flow of information across all of their subsidiaries, it does not seem that this has diminished YouTube’s popularity (“Google: Privacy Policy”).Despite this, some make the argument that users provide the true benefit of UGC platforms like YouTube, yet reap few rewards, creating an exploitative dynamic (Van Dijck, 46). Two assumptions seem to underpin this argument: the first is that users do not desire to help these platforms prosper, the second is that users expect to profit from their efforts on the website. In response to these arguments, it’s worth calling attention to scholars who have used alternative economic models to account for user-platform coexistence. This is something that Henry Jenkins addresses in his recent book Spreadable Media, largely by focusing on assigning alternate sorts of value to user and fan labour—either the cultural worth of the gift, or the satisfaction of a job well done common to pre-industrial craftsmanship (61). However, there are still questions of how to account for participatory spaces in which labours of love coexist with massively profitable products. In service of this point, Jenkins calls up Lessig, who posits that many online networks operate as hybrid economies, which combine commercial and sharing economies. In a commercial economy, profit is the primary consideration, while a sharing economy is composed of participants who are there because they enjoy doing the work without any expectation of compensation (176). The strict separation between the two economies is, in Lessig’s estimation, essential to the hybrid economy’s success. While it would be difficult to incorporate these two economies together once each had been established, platforms like YouTube have always operated under the hybrid principle. YouTube’s users provide the site with its true value (through their uploading of content, provision of metadata, and use of the site), yet users do not come to YouTube with these tasks in mind—they come to YouTube because it provides an easy-to-use platform by which to share amateur creativity, and a community with whom to interact. Additionally, YouTube serves as the primary venue where remixers can achieve visibility and viral status—something Elisa Kreisinger acknowledged in our interviews (2012). However, users who are not concerned with broad visibility as much as with speaking to particular viewers may leave YouTube if they feel that the venue does not suit their content. Some feminist fan vidders, for instance, have withdrawn from YouTube due to what they perceived as a community who didn’t understand their work (Kreisinger, 2012). Additionally, Kreisinger ended up garnering many more views of her Queer Men remix on Vimeo due simply to the fact that the remix’s initial upload was blocked via YouTube’s Content ID feature. By the time Kreisinger had argued her case with YouTube, the Vimeo link had become the first stop for those viewing and sharing the remix, which received 72,000 views to date (“Queer Men”). Fair Use, Copyright, and Content IDThis instance points to the challenge that remixers face when dealing with copyright on YouTube, a site whose processes are not designed to accommodate fair use. Specifically, Title II, Section 512 of the DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998) states that certain websites may qualify as “safe harbours” for copyright infringement if users upload the majority of the content to the site, or if the site is an information location service. These sites are insulated from copyright liability as long as they cooperate to some extent with rights holders. A common objection to Section 512 is that it requires media rights holders to police safe harbours in search of infringing content, rather than placing the onus on the platform provider (Meyers 939). In order to cooperate with Section 512 and rights holders, YouTube initiated the Content ID system in 2007. This system offers rights holders the ability to find and manage their content on the site by creating archives of footage against which user uploads are checked, allowing rights holders to automatically block, track, or monetise uses of their content (it is also worth noting that rights holders can make these responses country-specific) (“How Content ID Works”). At the current time, YouTube has over 15 million reference files against which it checks uploads (“Statistics - YouTube”). Thus, it’s fairly common for uploaded work to get flagged as a violation, especially when that work is a remix of popular institutional footage. If an upload is flagged by the Content ID system, the user can dispute the match, at which point the rights holder has the opportunity to either allow the video through, or to issue a DMCA takedown notice. They can also sue at any point during this process (“A Guide to YouTube Removals”). Content ID matches are relatively easy to dispute and do not generally require legal intervention. However, disputing these automatic takedowns requires users to be aware of their rights to fair use, and requires rights holders to acknowledge a fair use (“YouTube Removals”). This is only compounded by the fact that fair use is not a clearly defined right, but rather a vague provision relying on a balance between four factors: the purpose of the use, character of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the market value of the original (“US Copyright Office–Fair Use”). As Aufderheide and Jaszi observed in 2008, the rejection of videos for Content ID matches combined with the vagaries of fair use has a chilling effect on user-generated content. Rights Holders versus RemixersRights holders’ objections to Section 512 illustrate the ruling power dynamic in current intellectual property disputes: power rests with institutional rights-holding bodies (the RIAA, the MPAA) who assert their dominance over DMCA safe harbours such as YouTube (who must cooperate to stay in business) who, in turn, exert power over remixers (the lowest on the food chain, so to speak). Beyond the observed chilling effect of Content ID, remix on YouTube is shot through with discursive struggle between these rights-holding bodies and remixers attempting to express themselves and reach new communities. However, this has led political video remixers to become especially vocal when arguing for their uses of content. For instance, in the spring of 2009, Elisa Kreisinger curated a show entitled “REMOVED: The Politics of Remix Culture” in which blocked remixes screened alongside the remixers’ correspondence with YouTube. Kreisinger writes that each of these exchanges illustrate the dynamic between rights holders and remixers: “Your video is no longer available because FOX [or another rights-holding body] has chosen to block it (“Remixed/Removed”). Additionally, as Jenkins notes, even Content ID on YouTube is only made available to the largest rights holders—smaller companies must still go through an official DMCA takedown process to report infringement (Spreadable 51). In sum, though recent technological developments may give the appearance of democratising access to content, when it comes to policing UGC, technology has made it easier for the largest rights holders to stifle the creation of content.Additionally, it has been established that rights holders do occasionally use takedowns abusively, and recent court cases—specifically Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.—have established the need for rights holders to assess fair use in order to make a “good faith” assertion that users intend to infringe copyright prior to issuing a takedown notice. However, as Joseph M. Miller notes, the ruling fails to rebalance the burdens and incentives between rights holders and users (1723). This means that while rights holders are supposed to take fair use into account prior to issuing takedowns, there is no process in place that either effectively punishes rights holders who abuse copyright, or allows users to defend themselves without the possibility of massive financial loss (1726). As such, the system currently in place does not disallow or discourage features like Content ID, though cases like Lenz v. Universal indicate a push towards rebalancing the burden of determining fair use. In an effort to turn the tables, many have begun arguing for users’ rights and attempting to parse fair use for the layperson. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for instance, has espoused an “environmental rhetoric” of fair use, casting intellectual property as a resource for users (Postigo 1020). Additionally, they have created practical guidelines for UGC creators dealing with DMCA takedowns and Content ID matches on YouTube. The Center for Social Media has also produced a number of fair use guides tailored to different use cases, one of which targeted online video producers. All of these efforts have a common goal: to educate content creators about the fair use of copyrighted content, and then to assert their use as fair in opposition to large rights-holding institutions (though they caution users against unfair uses of content or making risky legal moves that could lead to lawsuits). In relation to remix specifically, this means that remixers must differentiate themselves from institutional, commercial content producers, standing up both for the argument contained in their remix as well as their fair use of copyrighted content.In their “Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video,” the Center for Social Media note that an online video qualifies as a fair use if (among other things) it critiques copyrighted material and if it “recombines elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning on (often unlikely) relationships between the elements” (8). These two qualities are also two of the defining qualities of political remix video. For instance, they write that work meets the second criteria if it creates “new meaning by juxtaposition,” noting that in these cases “the recombinant new work has a cultural identity of its own and addresses an audience different from those for which its components were intended” (9). Remixes that use elements of familiar sources in unlikely combinations, such as those made by Elisa Kreisinger, generally seek to reach an audience who are familiar with the source content, but also object to it. Sex and the City, for instance, while it initially seemed willing to take on previously “taboo” topics in its exploration of dating in Manhattan, ended with each of the heterosexual characters paired with an opposite sex partner, and forays from this heteronormative narrative were contained either within in one-off episodes or tokenised gay characters. For this reason, Kreisinger noted that the intended audience for Queer Carrie were the queer and feminist viewers of Sex and the City who felt that the show was overly normative and exclusionary (Kreisinger, Art:21). As a result, the target audience of these remixes is different from the target audience of the source material—though the full nuance of the argument is best understood by those familiar with the source. Thus, the remix affirms the segment of the viewing community who saw only tokenised representations of their identity in the source text, and in so doing offers a critique of the original’s heteronormative focus.Fair Use and the VernacularVernacular discourse, as broadly defined by Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, refers to discourses that “emerge from discussions between members of self-identified smaller communities within the larger civic community.” It operates partially through appropriating dominant discourses in ways better suited to the vernacular community, through practices of pastiche and cultural syncretism (23). In an effort to better describe the intricacies of this type of discourse, Robert Glenn Howard theorised a hybrid “dialectical vernacular” that oscillates between institutional and vernacular discourse. This hybridity arises from the fact that the institutional and the vernacular are fundamentally inseparable, the vernacular establishing its meaning by asserting itself against the institutional (Howard, Toward 331). When put into use online, this notion of a “dialectical vernacular” is particularly interesting as it refers not only to the content of vernacular messages but also to their means of production. Howard notes that discourse embodying the dialectical vernacular is by nature secondary to institutional discourse, that the institutional must be clearly “structurally prior” (Howard, Vernacular 499). With this in mind it is unsurprising that political remix video—which asserts its secondary nature by calling upon pre-existing copyrighted content while simultaneously reaching out to smaller segments of the civic community—would qualify as a vernacular discourse.The notion of an institutional source’s structural prevalence also echoes throughout work on remix, both in practical guides such as the Center for Social Media’s “Best Practices” as well as in more theoretical takes on remix, like Eduardo Navas’ essay “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats,” in which he writes that:In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed for a second time must be recognized, otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism […] Without a history, the remix cannot be Remix. An elegant theoretical concept, this becomes muddier when considered in light of copyright law. If the history of remix is what gives it its meaning—the source text from which it is derived—then it is this same history that makes a fair use remix vulnerable to DMCA takedowns and other forms of discipline on YouTube. However, as per the criteria outlined by the Center for Social Media, it is also from this ironic juxtaposition of institutional sources that the remix object establishes its meaning, and thus its vernacularity. In this sense, the force of a political remix video’s argument is in many ways dependent on its status as an object in peril: vulnerable to the force of a law that has not yet swung in its favor, yet subversive nonetheless.With this in mind, YouTube and other UGC platforms represent a fraught layer of mediation between institutional and vernacular. As a site for the sharing of amateur video, YouTube has the potential to affirm small communities as users share similar videos, follow one particular channel together, or comment on videos posted by people in their networks. However, YouTube’s interface (rife with advertisements, constantly reminding users of its affiliation with Google) and cooperation with rights holders establish it as an institutional space. As such, remixes on the site are already imbued with the characteristic hybridity of the dialectical vernacular. This is especially true when the remixers (as in the case of PRV) have made the conscious choice to advocate for fair use at the same time that they distribute remixes dealing with other themes and resonating with other communities. ConclusionPolitical remix video sits at a fruitful juncture with regard to copyright as well as vernacularity. Like almost all remix, it makes its meaning through juxtaposing sources in a unique way, calling upon viewers to think about familiar texts in a new light. This creation invokes a new audience—a quality that makes it both vernacular and also a fair use of content. Given that PRV is defined by the “guerrilla” use of copyrighted footage, it has the potential to stand as a political statement outside of the thematic content of the remix simply due to the nature of its composition. This gives PRV tremendous potential for multivalent argument, as a video can simultaneously represent a marginalised community while advocating for copyright reform. This is only reinforced by the fact that many political video remixers have become vocal in advocating for fair use, asserting the strength of their community and their common goal.In addition to this argumentative richness, PRV’s relation to fair use and vernacularity exposes the complexity of the remix form: it continually oscillates between institutional affiliations and smaller vernacular communities. However, the hybridity of these remixes produces tension, much of which manifests on YouTube, where videos are easily responded to and challenged by both institutuional and vernacular authorities. In addition, a tension exists in the remix text itself between the source and the new, remixed message. Further research should attend to these areas of tension, while also exploring the tenacity of the remix community and their ability to advocate for themselves while circumventing copyright law.References“About Political Remix Video.” Political Remix Video. 15 Feb. 2012. ‹http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/what-is-political-remix/›.Aufderheide, Patricia, and Peter Jaszi. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Kindle.“Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video.” The Center For Social Media, 2008. Van Dijck, José. “Users like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content.” Media Culture Society 31 (2009): 41-58.“A Guide to YouTube Removals,” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, 15 June 2013 ‹https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-YouTube-removals›.Hilderbrand, Lucas. “YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge.” Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007): 48-57.Howard, Robert Glenn. “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25.5 (2008): 490-513.Howard, Robert Glenn. “Toward a Theory of the World Wide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet Cloning.” Journal of Folklore Research 42.3 (2005): 323-60.“How Content ID Works.” YouTube. 21 June 2013. ‹https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370?hl=en›.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York U P, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York U P, 2006. Kreisinger, Elisa. Interview with Nick Briz. Art:21. Art:21, 30 June 2011. 21 June 2013.Kreisinger, Elisa. “Queer Video Remix and LGBTQ Online Communities,” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012). 19 June 2013 ‹http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/395/264›.Kreisinger, Elisa. Pop Culture Pirate. &lt; http://www.popculturepirate.com/ &gt;.Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. PDF.Meyers, B.G. “Filtering Systems or Fair Use? A Comparative Analysis of Proposed Regulations for User-Generated Content.” Cardozo Arts &amp; Entertainment Law Journal 26.3: 935-56.Miller, Joseph M. “Fair Use through the Lenz of § 512(c) of the DMCA: A Preemptive Defense to a Premature Remedy?” Iowa Law Review 95 (2009-2010): 1697-1729.Navas, Eduardo. “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats.” New Media Fix 1 Feb. 2007. 10 June 2013 ‹http://newmediafix.net/Turbulence07/Navas_EN.html›.Ono, Kent A., and John M. Sloop. Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration and California’s Proposition 187. Philadelphia: Temple U P, 2002.“Privacy Policy – Policies &amp; Principles.” Google. 19 June 2013 ‹http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/›.Postigo, Hector. “Capturing Fair Use for The YouTube Generation: The Digital Rights Movement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the User-Centered Framing of Fair Use.” Information, Communication &amp; Society 11.7 (2008): 1008-27.“Statistics – YouTube.” YouTube. 21 June 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html›.“US Copyright Office: Fair Use,” U.S. Copyright Office. 19 June 2013 ‹http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html›.“YouTube Help.” YouTube FAQ. 19 June 2013 ‹http://support.google.com/youtube/?hl=en&amp;topic=2676339&amp;rd=2›.

This article is about refugees’ and migrants’ dreams of home and family and stems from an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, “A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency” (LP140100935), with Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc. (Vinnies). A Vinnies-supported refugee and migrant support centre was chosen as one of the hubs for interviewee recruitment, given that many refugee families experience persistent and chronic economic disadvantage. The de-identified name for the drop-in language-teaching and learning social facility is the Migrant and Refugee Homebase (MARH). At the time of the research, in 2018, refugee and forced migrant families from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan constituted MARH’s primary membership base. MARH provided English language classes alongside other educational and financial support. It could also organise provision of emergency food and was a conduit for furniture donated by Australian families. Crucially, MARH operated as a space in which members could come together to build shared community.As part of her role, the researcher was introduced to Sara (de-identified), a mother-tongue Arabic speaker and the centre’s coordinator. Sara had personal experience of being a refugee, as well as being MARH’s manager, and she became both a point of contact for the researcher team, an interpreter/translator, and an empathetic listener as refugees shared their stories. Dreams of home and family emerged throughout the interviews as a vital part of participants’ everyday lives. These dreams and hopes were developed in the face of what was, for some, a nightmare of adversity. Underpinning participants’ sense of agency, subjectivity and resilience, Badiou argues (93, as noted in Jackson, 241) that hope can appear as a basic form of patience or perseverance rather than a dream for justice. Instead of imagining an improvement in personal circumstances, the dream is one of simply moving forward rather than backward. While dreams of being reunited with family are rooted in the past and project a vision of a family which no longer exists, these dreams help fashion a future which once again contains a range of possibilities.Although Sara volunteered her time on the research project as part of her commitment to Vinnies, she was well-known to interviewees as a MARH staff member and, in many cases, a friend and confidante. While Sara’s manager role implies an imbalance of power, with Sara powerful and participants comparatively less so, the majority of the information explored in the interviews pertained to refugees’ experiences of life outside the sphere in which MARH is engaged, so there was limited risk of the data being sanitised to reflect positively upon MARH. The specialist information and understandings that the interviewees shared positions them as experts, and as co-creators of knowledge.Recruitment and Methodological ApproachThe project researcher (Jaunzems) met potential contributors at MARH when its members gathered for a coffee morning. With Sara’s assistance, the researcher invited MARH members to take part in the research project, giving those present the opportunity to ask and have answered any questions they deemed important. Coffee morning attendees were under no obligation to take part, and about half chose not to do so, while the remainder volunteered to participate. Sara scheduled the interviews at times to suit the families participating. A parent and child from each volunteer family was interviewed, separately. In all cases it was the mother who volunteered to take part, and all interviewees chose to be interviewed in their homes. Each set of interviews was digitally recorded and lasted no longer than 90 minutes. This article includes extracts from interviews with three mothers from refugee families who escaped war-torn homelands for a new life in Australia, sometimes via interim refugee camps.The project researcher conducted the in-depth interviews with Sara’s crucial interpreting/translating assistance. The interviews followed a traditional approach, except that the researcher deferred to Sara as being more important in the interview exchange than she was. This reflects the premise that meaning is socially constructed, and that what people do and say makes visible the meanings that underpin their actions and statements within a wider social context (Burr). Conceptualising knowledge as socially constructed privileges the role of the decoder in receiving, understanding and communicating such knowledge (Crotty). Respecting the role of the interpreter/translator signified to the participants that their views, opinions and their overall cultural context were valued.Once complete, the interviews were sent for translation and transcription by a trusted bi-lingual transcriber, where both the English and Arabic exchanges were transcribed. This was deemed essential by the researchers, to ensure both the authenticity of the data collected and to demonstrate “trust, understanding, respect, and a caring connection” (Valibhoy, Kaplan, and Szwarc, 23) with the participants. Upon completion of the interviews with volunteer members of the MARH community, and at the beginning of the analysis phase, researchers recognised the need for the adoption of an interpretive framework. The interpretive approach seeks to understand an individual’s view of the world through the contexts of time, place and culture. The knowledge produced is contextualised and differs from one person to another as a result of individual subjectivities such as age, race and ethnicity, even within a shared social context (Guba and Lincoln). Accordingly, a mother-tongue Arabic speaker, who identifies as a refugee (Al-Hameed), was added to the project. All authors were involved in writing up the article while authors two, three and four took responsibility for transcript coding and analysis. In the transcripts that follow, words originally spoken in Arabic are in intalics, with non-italcised words originally spoken in English.Discrimination and BelongingAya initially fled from her home in Syria into neighbouring Jordan. She didn’t feel welcomed or supported there.[00:55:06] Aya: …in Jordan, refugees didn’t have rights, and the Jordanian schools refused to teach them [the children…] We were put aside.[00:55:49] Interpreter, Sara (to Researcher): And then she said they push us aside like you’re a zero on the left, yeah this is unfortunately the reality of our countries, I want to cry now.[00:56:10] Aya: You’re not allowed to cry because we’ll all cry.Some refugees and migrant communities suffer discrimination based on their ethnicity and perceived legitimacy as members of the host society. Although Australian refugees may have had searing experiences prior to their acceptance by Australia, migrant community members in Australia can also feel themselves “constructed in the public and political spheres as less legitimately Australian than others” (Green and Aly). Jackson argues that both refugees and migrants experiencethe impossibility of ever bridging the gap between one’s natal ties to the place one left because life was insupportable there, and the demands of the nation to which one has travelled, legally or illegally, in search of a better life. And this tension between belonging and not belonging, between a place where one has rights and a place where one does not, implies an unresolved relationship between one’s natural identity as a human being and one’s social identity as ‘undocumented migrant,’ a ‘resident alien,’ an ‘ethnic minority,’ or ‘the wretched of the earth,’ whose plight remains a stigma of radical alterity even though it inspires our compassion and moves us to political action. (223)The tension Jackson refers to, where the migrant is haunted by belonging and not belonging, is an area of much research focus. Moreover, the label of “asylum seeker” can contribute to systemic “exclusion of a marginalised and abject group of people, precisely by employing a term that emphasises the suspended recognition of a community” (Nyers). Unsurprisingly, many refugees in Australia long for the connectedness of the lives they left behind relocated in the safe spaces where they live now.Eades focuses on an emic approach to understanding refugee/migrant distress, or trauma, which seeks to incorporate the worldview of the people in distress: essentially replicating the interpretive perspective taken in the research. This emic framing is adopted in place of the etic approach that seeks to understand the distress through a Western biomedical lens that is positioned outside the social/cultural system in which the distress is taking place. Eades argues: “developing an emic approach is to engage in intercultural dialogue, raise dilemmas, test assumptions, document hopes and beliefs and explore their implications”. Furthermore, Eades sees the challenge for service providers working with refugee/migrants in distress as being able to move beyond “harm minimisation” models of care “to recognition of a facilitative, productive community of people who are in a transitional phase between homelands”. This opens the door for studies concerning the notions of attachment to place and its links to resilience and a refugee’s ability to “settle in” (for example, Myers’s ground-breaking place-making work in Plymouth).Resilient PrecariousnessChaima: We feel […] good here, we’re safe, but when we sit together, we remember what we went through how my kids screamed when the bombs came, and we went out in the car. My son was 12 and I was pregnant, every time I remember it, I go back.Alongside the dreams that migrants have possible futures are the nightmares that threaten to destabilise their daily lives. As per the work of Xavier and Rosaldo, post-migration social life is recreated in two ways: the first through participation and presence in localised events; the second by developing relationships with absent others (family and friends) across the globe through media. These relationships, both distanced and at a distance, are dispersed through time and space. In light of this, Campays and Said suggest that places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad; similarly, other recollections and experience can trigger a sense of fragility when “we remember what we went through”. Gupta and Ferguson suggest that resilience is defined by the migrant/refugee capacity to “reimagine and re-materialise” their lost heritage in their new home. This involves a sense of connection to the good things in the past, while leaving the bad things behind.Resilience has also been linked to the migrant’s/refugee’s capacity “to manage their responses to adverse circumstances in an interpersonal community through the networks of relationships” (Eades). Resilience in this case is seen through an intersubjective lens. Joseph reminds us that there is danger in romanticising community. Local communities may not only be hostile toward different national and ethnic groups, they may actively display a level of hostility toward them (Boswell). However, Gill maintains that “the reciprocal relations found in communities are crucially important to their [migrant/refugee] well-being”. This is because inclusion in a given community allows migrants/refugees to shrug off the outsider label, and the feeling of being at risk, and provides the opportunity for them to become known as families and friends. One of MAHR’s central aims was to help bridge the cultural divide between MARH users and the broader Australian community.Hope[01:06: 10] Sara (to interviewee, Aya): What’s the key to your success here in Australia?[01:06:12] Aya: The people, and how they treat us.[01:06:15] Sara (to Researcher): People and how they deal with us.[01:06:21] Aya: It’s the best thing when you look around, and see people who don’t understand your language but they help you.[01:06:28] Sara (to Researcher): She said – this is nice. I want to cry also. She said the best thing when I see people, they don’t understand your language, and I don’t understand theirs but they still smile in your face.[01:06:43] Aya: It’s the best.[01:06:45] Sara (to Aya): yes, yes, people here are angels. This is the best thing about Australia.Here, Sara is possibly shown to be taking liberties with the translation offered to the researcher, talking about how Australians “smile in your face”, when (according to the translator) Aya talked about how Australians “help”. Even so, the capacity for social connection and other aspects of sociality have been linked to a person’s ability to turn a negative experience into a positive cultural resource (Wilson). Resilience is understood in these cases as a strength-based practice where families, communities and individuals are viewed in terms of their capabilities and possibilities, instead of their deficiencies or disorders (Graybeal and Saleeby in Eades). According to Fozdar and Torezani, there is an “apparent paradox between high-levels of discrimination experienced by humanitarian migrants to Australia in the labour market and everyday life” (30) on the one hand, and their reporting of positive well-being on the other. That disparity includes accounts such as the one offered by Aya.As Wilson and Arvanitakis suggest,the interaction between negative experiences of discrimination and reports of wellbeing suggested a counter-intuitive propensity among refugees to adapt to and make sense of their migration experiences in unique, resourceful and life-affirming ways. Such response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors indicate a similar resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from negative migration experiences and associated emotions. … However, resilience is not expressed or employed uniformly among individuals or communities. Some respond in a resilient manner, while others collapse. On this point, an argument could be made that collapse and breakdown is a built-in aspect of resilience, and necessary for renewal and ongoing growth.Using this approach, Wilson and Arvanitakis have linked resilience to hope, as a “present- and future-oriented mode of situated defence against adversity”. They argue that the term “hope” is often utilised in a tokenistic way “as a strategic instrument in increasingly empty domestic and international political vocabularies”. Nonetheless, Wilson and Arvanitakis believe hope to be of vital academic interest due to the prevalence of war and suffering throughout the world. In the research reported here, the authors found that participants’ hopes were interwoven with dreams of being reunited with their families in a place of safety. This is a common longing. As Jackson states,so it is that migrants travel abroad in pursuit of utopia, but having found that place, which is also no-place (ou-topos), they are haunted by the thought that utopia actually lies in the past. It is the family they left behind. That is where they properly belong. Though the family broke up long ago and is now scattered to the four winds, they imagine a reunion in which they are together again. (223)There is a sense here that with their hopes and dreams lying in the past, refugees/migrants are living forward while looking backwards (a Kierkegaardian concept). If hope is thought to be key to resilience (Wilson and Arvanitakis), and key to an individual’s ability to live with a sense of well-being, then perhaps a refugee’s past relations (familial) impact both their present relations (social/community), and their ability to transform negative experiences into positive experiences. And yet, there is no readily accessible way in which migrants and refugees can recreate the connections that sustained them in the past. As Jackson suggests,the irreversibility of time is intimately connected with the irreversibility of one’s place of origin, and this entwined movement through time and across space proves perplexing to many migrants, who, in imagining themselves one day returning to the place from where they started out, forget that there is no transport which will convey them back into the past. … Often it is only by going home that is becomes starkly and disconcertingly clear that one’s natal village is no longer the same and that one has also changed. (221)The dream of home and family, therefore and the hope that this might somehow be recreated in the safety of the here and now, becomes a paradoxical loss and longing even as it is a constant companion for many on their refugee journey.Esma’s DreamAccording to author three, personal dreams are not generally discussed in Arab culture, even though dreams themselves may form part of the rich tradition of Arabic folklore and storytelling. Alongside issues of mental wellbeing, dreams are constructed as something private, and it generally breaks social taboos to describe them publicly. However, in personal discussions with other refugee women and men, and echoing Jackson’s finding, a recurring dream is “to meet my family in a safe place and not be worried about my safety or theirs”. As a refugee, the third author shares this dream. This is also the perspective articulated by Esma, who had recently had a fifth child and was very much missing her extended family who had died, been scattered as refugees, or were still living in a conflict zone. The researcher asked Sara to ask Esma about the best aspect of her current life:[01:17:03] Esma: The thing that comforts me here is nature, it’s beautiful.[01:17:15] Sara (to the Researcher): The nature.[01:17:16] Esma: And feeling safe.[01:17:19] Sara (to the Researcher): The safety. ...[01:17:45] Esma: Life’s beautiful here.[01:17:47] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is beautiful here.[01:17:49] Esma: But I want to know people, speak the language, have friends, life is beautiful here even if I don’t have my family here.[01:17:56] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is so pretty you only need to improve the language and have friends, she said I love my life here even though I don’t have any family or community here. (To Esma:) I am your family.[01:18:12] Esma: Bring me my siblings here.[01:18:14] Sara (to Esma): I just want my brothers here and my sisters.[01:18:17] Esma: It’s a dream.[01:18:18] Sara (to Esma): it’s a dream, one day it will become true.Here Esma uses the term dream metaphorically, to describe an imagined utopia: a dream world. In supporting Esma, who is mourning the absence of her family, Sara finds herself reacting and emoting around their shared experience of leaving siblings behind. In doing so, she affirms the younger woman, but also offers a hope for the future. Esma had previously made a suggestion, absorbed into her larger dream, but more achievable in the short term, “to know people, speak the language, have friends”. The implication here is that Esma is keen to find a way to connect with Australians. She sees this as a means of compensating for the loss of family, a realistic hope rather than an impossible dream.ConclusionInterviews with refugee families in a Perth-based migrant support centre reveals both the nightmare pasts and the dreamed-of futures of people whose lives have experienced a radical disruption due to war, conflict and other life-threatening events. Jackson’s work with migrants provides a context for understanding the power of the dream in helping to resolve issues around the irreversibility of time and circumstance, while Wilson and Arvanitakis point to the importance of hope and resilience in supporting the building of a positive future. Within this mix of the longed for and the impossible, both the refugee informants and the academic literature suggest that participation in local events, and authentic engagement with the broader community, help make a difference in supporting a migrant’s transition from dreaming to reality.AcknowledgmentsThis article arises from an ARC Linkage Project, ‘A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency’ (LP140100935), supported by the Australian Research Council, Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc., and Edith Cowan University. The authors are grateful to the anonymous staff and member of Vinnies’ Migrant and Refugee Homebase for their trust in and support of this project, and for their contributions to it.ReferencesBadiou, Alan. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003.Boswell, Christina. “Burden-Sharing in the European Union: Lessons from the German and UK Experience.” Journal of Refugee Studies 16.3 (2003): 316–35.Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. Hove, UK &amp; New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.Campays, Philippe, and Vioula Said. “Re-Imagine.” M/C Journal 20.4 (2017). Aug. 2017 &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1250&gt;.Crotty, Michael. The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. St Leonards: Allen &amp; Unwin, 1998.Eades, David. “Resilience and Refugees: From Individualised Trauma to Post Traumatic Growth.” M/C Journal 16.5 (2013). Aug. 2013 &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/700&gt;.Fozdar, Farida, and Silvia Torezani. “Discrimination and Well-Being: Perceptions of Refugees in Western Australia.” The International Migration Review 42.1 (2008): 1–34.Gill, Nicholas. “Longing for Stillness: The Forced Movement of Asylum Seekers.” M/C Journal 12.1 (2009). Mar. 2009 &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/123&gt;.Graybeal, Clay. “Strengths-Based Social Work Assessment: Transforming the Dominant Paradigm.” Families in Society 82.3 (2001): 233–42.Green, Lelia, and Anne Aly. “Bastard Immigrants: Asylum Seekers Who Arrive by Boat and the Illegitimate Fear of the Other.” M/C Journal 17.5 (2014). Oct. 2014 &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/896&gt;.Guba, Egon G., and Yvonna S. Lincoln. "Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research." Handbook of Qualitative Research 2 (1994): 163-194.Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants. Ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2006. 72-79.Jackson, Michael. The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-Being. California: U of California P, 2013.Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.Myers, Misha. “Situations for Living: Performing Emplacement." Research in Drama Education 13.2 (2008): 171-180. DOI: 10.1080/13569780802054828.Nyers, Peter. “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement.” Third World Quarterly 24.6 (2003): 1069–93.Saleeby, Dennis. “The Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice: Extensions and Cautions.” Social Work 41.3 (1996): 296–305.Valibhoy, Madeleine C., Ida Kaplan, and Josef Szwarc. “‘It Comes Down to Just How Human Someone Can Be’: A Qualitative Study with Young People from Refugee Backgrounds about Their Experiences of Australian Mental Health Services.” Transcultural Psychiatry 54.1 (2017): 23-45.Wilson, Michael. Accumulating Resilience: An Investigation of the Migration and Resettlement Experiences of Young Sudanese People in the Western Sydney Area. Sydney: University of Western Sydney, 2012.Wilson, Michael John, and James Arvanitakis. “The Resilience Complex.” M/C Journal 16.5 (2013). &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/741&gt;.Xavier, Johnathon, and Renato Rosaldo. “Thinking the Global.” The Anthropology of Globalisation. Eds. Johnathon Xavier and Renato Rosaldo. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2002.

Introduction Since December 2010 the dramatic spectacle of the spread of mass uprisings, civil unrest, and protest across North Africa and the Middle East have been chronicled daily on mainstream media and new media. Broadly speaking, the Arab Spring—as it came to be known—is challenging repressive, corrupt governments and calling for democracy and human rights. The convulsive events linked with these debates have been striking not only because of the rapid spread of historically momentous mass protests but also because of the ways in which the media “have become inextricably infused inside them” enabling the global media ecology to perform “an integral part in building and mobilizing support, co-ordinating and defining the protests within different Arab societies as well as trans-nationalizing them” (Cottle 295). Images of mass protests have been juxtaposed against those of individuals prepared to self-destruct for political ends. Video clips and photographs of the individual suffering of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the Bahraini Abdulhad al-Khawaja’s emaciated body foreground, in very graphic ways, political struggles that larger events would mask or render invisible. Highlighting broad commonalties does not assume uniformity in patterns of protest and media coverage across the region. There has been considerable variation in the global media coverage and nature of the protests in North Africa and the Middle East (Cottle). In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen uprisings overthrew regimes and leaders. In Syria it has led the country to the brink of civil war. In Bahrain, the regime and its militia violently suppressed peaceful protests. As a wave of protests spread across the Middle East and one government after another toppled in front of 24/7 global media coverage, Bahrain became the “Arab revolution that was abandoned by the Arabs, forsaken by the West … forgotten by the world,” and largely ignored by the global media (Al-Jazeera English). Per capita the protests have been among the largest of the Arab Spring (Human Rights First) and the crackdown as brutal as elsewhere. International organizations have condemned the use of military courts to trial protestors, the detaining of medical staff who had treated the injured, and the use of torture, including the torture of children (Fisher). Bahraini and international human rights organizations have been systematically chronicling these violations of human rights, and posting on Websites distressing images of tortured bodies often with warnings about the graphic depictions viewers are about to see. It was in this context of brutal suppression, global media silence, and the reluctance of the international community to intervene, that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad al-Khawaja launched his “death or freedom” hunger strike. Even this radical action initially failed to interest international editors who were more focused on Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but media attention rose in response to the Bahrain Formula 1 race in April 2012. Pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” to coincide with the race in order to highlight continuing human rights abuses in the kingdom (Turner). As Al Khawaja’s health deteriorated the Bahraini government resisted calls for his release (Article 19) from the Danish government who requested that Al Khawaja be extradited there on “humanitarian grounds” for hospital treatment (Fisk). This article does not explore the geo-politics of the Bahraini struggle or the possible reasons why the international community—in contrast to Syria and Egypt—has been largely silent and reluctant to debate the issues. Important as they are, those remain questions for Middle Eastern specialists to address. In this article I am concerned with the overlapping and interpenetration of two ecologies. The first ecology is the ethical framing of a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction intended to achieve political ends. The second ecology is the operation of global media where international inaction inadvertently foregrounds the political struggles that larger events and discourses surrounding Egypt, Libya, and Syria overshadow. What connects these two ecologies is the body of the hunger striker, turned into a spectacle and mediated via a politics of affect that invites a global public to empathise and so enter into his suffering. The connection between the two lies in the emaciated body of the hunger striker. An Ecological Humanities Approach This exploration of two ecologies draws on the ecological humanities and its central premise of connectivity. The ecological humanities critique the traditional binaries in Western thinking between nature and culture; the political and social; them and us; the collective and the individual; mind, body and emotion (Rose &amp; Robin, Rieber). Such binaries create artificial hierarchies, divisions, and conflicts that ultimately impede the ability to respond to crises. Crises are major changes that are “out of control” driven—primarily but not exclusively—by social, political, and cultural forces that unleash “runaway systems with their own dynamics” (Rose &amp; Robin 1). The ecological humanities response to crises is premised on the recognition of the all-inclusive connectivity of organisms, systems, and environments and an ethical commitment to action from within this entanglement. A founding premise of connectivity, first articulated by anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson, is that the “unit of survival is not the individual or the species, but the organism-and-its-environment” (Rose &amp; Robin 2). This highlights a dialectic in which an organism is shaped by and shapes the context in which it finds itself. Or, as Harries-Jones puts it, relations are recursive as “events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe” (3). This ensures constantly evolving ecosystems but it also means any organism that “deteriorates its environment commits suicide” (Rose &amp; Robin 2) with implications for the others in the eco-system. Bateson’s central premise is that organisms are simultaneously independent, as separate beings, but also interdependent. Interactions are not seen purely as exchanges but as dynamic, dialectical, dialogical, and mutually constitutive. Thus, it is presumed that the destruction or protection of others has consequences for oneself. Another dimension of interactions is multi-modality, which implies that human communication cannot be reduced to a single mode such as words, actions, or images but needs to be understood in the complexity of inter-relations between these (see Rieber 16). Nor can dissemination be reduced to a single technological platform whether this is print, television, Internet, or other media (see Cottle). The final point is that interactions are “biologically grounded but not determined” in that the “cognitive, emotional and volitional processes” underpinning face-to-face or mediated communication are “essentially indivisible” and any attempt to separate them by privileging emotion at the expense of thought, or vice versa, is likely to be unhealthy (Rieber 17). This is most graphically demonstrated in a politically-motivated hunger strike where emotion and volition over-rides the survivalist instinct. The Ecology of a Prison Hunger Strike The radical nature of a hunger strike inevitably gives rise to medico-ethical debates. Hunger strikes entail the voluntary refusal of sustenance by an individual and, when prolonged, such deprivation sets off a chain reaction as the less important components in the internal body systems shut down to protect the brain until even that can no longer be protected (see Basoglu et al). This extreme form of protest—essentially an act of self-destruction—raises ethical issues over whether or not doctors or the state should intervene to save a life for humanitarian or political reasons. In 1975 and 1991, the World Medical Association (WMA) sought to negotiate this by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the mentally/psychological impaired individual who chooses a “voluntary fast” and, on the other hand, the hunger striker who chooses a form of protest action to secure an explicit political goal fully aware of fatal consequences of prolonged action (see Annas, Reyes). This binary enables the WMA to label the action of the mentally impaired suicide while claiming that to do so for political protesters would be a “misconception” because the “striker … does not want to die” but to “live better” by obtaining certain political goals for himself, his group or his country. “If necessary he is willing to sacrifice his life for his case, but the aim is certainly not suicide” (Reyes 11). In practice, the boundaries between suicide and political protest are likely to be much more blurred than this but the medico-ethical binary is important because it informs discourses about what form of intervention is ethically appropriate. In the case of the “suicidal” the WMA legitimises force-feeding by a doctor as a life-saving act. In the case of the political protestor, it is de-legitimised in discourses of an infringement of freedom of expression and an act of torture because of the pain involved (see Annas, Reyes). Philosopher Michel Foucault argued that prison is a key site where the embodied subject is explicitly governed and where the exercising of state power in the act of incarceration means the body of the imprisoned no longer solely belongs to the individual. It is also where the “body’s range of significations” is curtailed, “shaped and invested by the very forces that detain and imprison it” (Pugliese 2). Thus, prison creates the circumstances in which the incarcerated is denied the “usual forms of protest and judicial safeguards” available outside its confines. The consequence is that when presented with conditions that violate core beliefs he/she may view acts of self-destruction—such as hunger strikes or lip sewing—as one of the few “means of protesting against, or demanding attention” or achieving political ends still available to them (Reyes 11; Pugliese). The hunger strike implicates the state, which, in the act of imprisoning, has assumed a measure of power and responsibility for the body of the individual. If a protest action is labelled suicidal by medical professionals—for instance at Guantanamo—then the force-feeding of prisoners can be legitimised within the WMA guidelines (Annas). There is considerable political temptation to do so particularly when the hunger striker has become an icon of resistance to the state, the knowledge of his/her action has transcended prison confines, and the alienating conditions that prompted the action are being widely debated in the media. This poses a two-fold danger for the state. On the one hand, there is the possibility that the slow emaciation and death while imprisoned, if covered by the media, may become a spectacle able to mobilise further resistance that can destabilise the polity. On the other hand, there is the fear that in the act of dying, and the spectacle surrounding death, the hunger striker would have secured the public attention to the very cause they are championing. Central to this is whether or not the act of self-destruction is mediated. It is far from inevitable that the media will cover a hunger strike or do so in ways that enable the hunger striker’s appeal to the emotions of others. However, when it does, the international scrutiny and condemnation that follows may undermine the credibility of the state—as happened with the death of the IRA member Bobby Sands in Northern Ireland (Russell). The Media Ecology and the Bahrain Arab Spring The IRA’s use of an “ancient tactic ... to make a blunt appeal to sympathy and emotion” in the form of the Sands hunger strike was seen as “spectacularly successful in gaining worldwide publicity” (Willis 1). Media ecology has evolved dramatically since then. Over the past 20 years communication flows between the local and the global, traditional media formations (broadcast and print), and new communication media (Internet and mobile phones) have escalated. The interactions of the traditional media have historically shaped and been shaped by more “top-down” “politics of representation” in which the primary relationship is between journalists and competing public relations professionals servicing rival politicians, business or NGOs desire for media attention and framing issues in a way that is favourable or sympathetic to their cause. However, rapidly evolving new media platforms offer bottom up, user-generated content, a politics of connectivity, and mobilization of ordinary people (Cottle 31). However, this distinction has increasingly been seen as offering too rigid a binary to capture the complexity of the interactions between traditional and new media as well as the events they capture. The evolution of both meant their content increasingly overlaps and interpenetrates (see Bennett). New media technologies “add new communicative ingredients into the media ecology mix” (Cottle 31) as well as new forms of political protests and new ways of mobilizing dispersed networks of activists (Juris). Despite their pervasiveness, new media technologies are “unlikely to displace the necessity for coverage in mainstream media”; a feature noted by activist groups who have evolved their own “carnivalesque” tactics (Cottle 32) capable of creating the spectacle that meets television demands for action-driven visuals (Juris). New media provide these groups with the tools to publicise their actions pre- and post-event thereby increasing the possibility that mainstream media might cover their protests. However there is no guarantee that traditional and new media content will overlap and interpenetrate as initial coverage of the Bahrain Arab Spring highlights. Peaceful protests began in February 2011 but were violently quelled often by Saudi, Qatari and UAE militia on behalf of the Bahraini government. Mass arrests were made including that of children and medical personnel who had treated those wounded during the suppression of the protests. What followed were a long series of detentions without trial, military court rulings on civilians, and frequent use of torture in prisons (Human Rights Watch 2012). By the end of 2011, the country had the highest number of political prisoners per capita of any country in the world (Amiri) but received little coverage in the US. The Libyan uprising was afforded the most broadcast time (700 minutes) followed by Egypt (500 minutes), Syria (143), and Bahrain (34) (Lobe). Year-end round-ups of the Arab Spring on the American Broadcasting Corporation ignored Bahrain altogether or mentioned it once in a 21-page feature (Cavell). This was not due to a lack of information because a steady stream has flowed from mobile phones, Internet sites and Twitter as NGOs—Bahraini and international—chronicled in images and first-hand accounts the abuses. However, little of this coverage was picked up by the US-dominated global media. It was in this context that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad Al Khawaja launched his “freedom or death” hunger strike in protest against the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations, the treatment of prisoners, and the conduct of the trials. Even this radical action failed to persuade international editors to cover the Bahrain Arab Spring or Al Khawaja’s deteriorating health despite being “one of the most important stories to emerge over the Arab Spring” (Nallu). This began to change in April 2012 as a number of things converged. Formula 1 pressed ahead with the Bahrain Grand Prix, and pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” over human rights abuses. As these were violently suppressed, editors on global news desks increasingly questioned the government and Formula 1 “spin” that all was well in the kingdom (see BBC; Turner). Claims by the drivers—many of who were sponsored by the Bahraini government—that this was a sports event, not a political one, were met with derision and journalists more familiar with interviewing superstars were diverted into covering protests because their political counterparts had been denied entry to the country (Fisk). This combination of media events and responses created the attention, interest, and space in which Al Khawaja’s deteriorating condition could become a media spectacle. The Mediated Spectacle of Al Khawaja’s Hunger Strike Journalists who had previously struggled to interest editors in Bahrain and Al Khawaja’s plight found that in the weeks leading up to the Grand Prix and since “his condition rapidly deteriorated”’ and there were “daily updates with stories from CNN to the Hindustan Times” (Nulla). Much of this mainstream news was derived from interviews and tweets from Al Khawaja’s family after each visit or phone call. What emerged was an unprecedented composite—a diary of witnesses to a hunger strike interspersed with the family’s struggles with the authorities to get access to him and their almost tangible fear that the Bahraini government would not relent and he would die. As these fears intensified 48 human rights NGOs called for his release from prison (Article 19) and the Danish government formally requested his extradition for hospital treatment on “humanitarian grounds”. Both were rejected. As if to provide evidence of Al Khawaja’s tenuous hold on life, his family released an image of his emaciated body onto Twitter. This graphic depiction of the corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction was re-tweeted and posted on countless NGO and news Websites (see Al-Jazeera). It was also juxtaposed against images of multi-million dollar cars circling a race-track, funded by similarly large advertising deals and watched by millions of people around the world on satellite channels. Spectator sport had become a grotesque parody of one man’s struggle to speak of what was going on in Bahrain. In an attempt to silence the criticism the Bahraini government imposed a de facto news blackout denying all access to Al Khawaja in hospital where he had been sent after collapsing. The family’s tweets while he was held incommunicado speak of their raw pain, their desperation to find out if he was still alive, and their grief. They also provided a new source of information, and the refrain “where is alkhawaja,” reverberated on Twitter and in global news outlets (see for instance Der Spiegel, Al-Jazeera). In the days immediately after the race the Danish prime minister called for the release of Al Khawaja, saying he is in a “very critical condition” (Guardian), as did the UN’s Ban-Ki Moon (UN News and Media). The silencing of Al Khawaja had become a discourse of callousness and as global media pressure built Bahraini ministers felt compelled to challenge this on non-Arabic media, claiming Al Khawaja was “eating” and “well”. The Bahraini Prime Minister gave one of his first interviews to the Western media in years in which he denied “AlKhawaja’s health is ‘as bad’ as you say. According to the doctors attending to him on a daily basis, he takes liquids” (Der Spiegel Online). Then, after six days of silence, the family was allowed to visit. They tweeted that while incommunicado he had been restrained and force-fed against his will (Almousawi), a statement almost immediately denied by the military hospital (Lebanon Now). The discourses of silence and callousness were replaced with discourses of “torture” through force-feeding. A month later Al Khawaja’s wife announced he was ending his hunger strike because he was being force-fed by two doctors at the prison, family and friends had urged him to eat again, and he felt the strike had achieved its goal of drawing the world’s attention to Bahrain government’s response to pro-democracy protests (Ahlul Bayt News Agency). Conclusion This article has sought to explore two ecologies. The first is of medico-ethical discourses which construct a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction to achieve particular political ends. 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