Journal articles on the topic 'Model of how foreign languages work in the human mind'

A review article devoted to the book of Andrzej Blikle – Doktryna jakości. Rzecz o skutecznym zarządzaniu. As pointed out by the Author, the book is a case of a work rare on the Polish publishing market, written by an outstanding scientist, who successfully runs a business activity. The combination of practical experience with theoretical knowledge gave a result that may be satisfying both for practitioners as well as theorists, and also those who want to get to know the ins and outs of an effective and efficient business management. The Author of the review believes that it is an important voice for shaping an inclusive socio-economic system, which constitutes a value in itself. Although the book is mainly concerned with business management, its message has a much wider dimension and is concerned with real measures of wealth, money and people’s lives. The book was awarded The SGH Collegium of Business Administration Award “For the best scientific work in the field of business administration in the years 2014-2015”. Andrzej Jacek Blikle Doktryna jakości. Rzecz o skutecznym zarządzaniu (The Doctrine of Quality. On Effective Management) Gliwice, Helion Publishing Company, 2014, p. 546 Introduction One of the distinctive features of the contemporary economy and contemporary world is a kind of obsession of quantity which is related to thoughtless consumerism, unfavourable to the care for the quality of the work and the quality of the produced and consumed goods and services. It is accompanied by culture (or rather non-culture) of singleness. Therefore, the book The Doctrine of Quality by Andrzej Blikle is like a breath of fresh air. It is a different perspective on the economy and the model of operation of enterprises, on the model of work and life of people. A. Blikle proves that it can be done otherwise. He proves it on the basis of careful studies of the source literature – as expected from a professor of mathematics and an economist, but also on the basis of his own experience gained during the scientific and educational work, and most of all through the economic practice. In the world governed by the obsession of quantity, characterised by fragility, shortness of human relationships, including the relationship of the entrepreneur – employee, A. Blikle chooses durability of these relations, creativity, responsibility, quality of work and production, and ethics. The Doctrine of Quality is a rare example of the work on the Polish publishing market, whose author is a prominent scientist, successfully conducting a business activity for more than two decades, which has contributed to the development of the family company – a known confectionery brand “A. Blikle”. The combination of practical experience with theoretical knowledge gave a result that may be satisfying both for practitioners as well as theorists, and also those who want to get to know the ins and outs of an effective and efficient business management, or develop the knowledge on this topic. In an attractive, clear narrative form, the author comprehensively presents the complexities of business management, indicating the sources of success, but also the reasons and the foundations of failures. At the same time, he presents these issues with an interdisciplinary approach, which contributes to thoroughness of the arguments and deeper reflections. Holism, typical to this book, is also expressed in the focus of A. Blikle not only on the economic, but also on social and ecological issues. Here, the author points to the possibility and need of reconciliation of the economic interests with social interests, and the care for the public good. Analyses of this subject are presented using the achievements of many areas of studies, in addition to economic sciences, including mathematics, sociology, psychology, medicine, and others. This gives a comprehensive picture of the complexity of business management – taking into account its close and distant environment. There are no longueurs in the book, although extensive (over 500 pages), or lengthy, or even unnecessary reasoning overwhelming the reader, as the text is illustrated with a number of examples from practice, and coloured with anecdotes. At the same time, the author does not avoid using expressions popular in the world of (not only) business. He proves that a motivational system which is not based on the approach of “carrot and stick” and without a devastating competition of a “rat race” is possible. The author supports his arguments with references not only to the interdisciplinary scientific achievements, but also to the economic historical experiences and to a variety of older and newer business models. There is a clear fascination with the reserves of creativity and productivity in the humanization of work. In fact, the author strongly exposes the potential of productivity and creativity in creating the conditions and atmosphere of work fostering elimination of fear of the future. He shows that such fear destroys creativity. It is not a coincidence that A. Blikle refers to the Fordist principles, including the warning that manufacturing and business do not consist of cheap buying and expensive selling. He reminds that Henry Ford, a legendary creator of the development of the automotive industry in the United States, put serving the public before the profit. The Doctrine of Quality is at the same time a book – proof that one of the most dangerous misconceptions or errors in the contemporary understanding of economics is finding that it is a science of making money, chremastics. Edmund Phelps and others warned against this in the year of the outbreak of the financial crisis in the USA in 2008, reminding that economics is not a science of making money but a science of relations between the economy and social life [Phelps, 2008]. Economics is a science of people in the process of management. Therefore, by definition, it applies to social values and ethos. Ethos is a general set of values, standards and models of proceedings adopted by a particular group of people. In this sense, ethos and economics as a science of people in the process of management are inseparable. Detaching economics from morality is in contradiction to the classical Smithian concept of economics, as Adam Smith combined the idea of the free market with morality. He treated his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as an inseparable basis for deliberations on the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, which was the subject of the subsequent work of this thinker [Smith, 1989; Smith, 2012]. Identifying economics with chremastics would then mean that all actions are acceptable and desired, if their outcome is earnings, profit, money. The book of A. Blikle denies it. It contains a number of case studies, which also stimulate broader reflections. Therefore, and also due to the features indicated above, it can be a very useful teaching aid in teaching entrepreneurship and management. The appearance of a book promoting the doctrine of quality and exposing the meaning of ethos of work is especially important because today the phenomenon of product adulteration becomes increasingly widespread, which is ironically referred to in literature as the “gold-plating” of products [Sennett, 2010, pp. 115-118], and the trend as “antifeatures”, that is intentionally limiting the efficiency and durability of products of daily use to create demand for new products. A model example of antifeature is a sim-lock installed in some telephones which makes it impossible to use SIM cards of foreign operators [Rohwetter, 2011, p. 48; Miszewski, 2013]. These types of negative phenomena are also promoted by the development of systemic solutions aiming at the diffusion of responsibility [Sennett, 2010]. This issue is presented among others by Nassim N.N. Taleb, in the book with a meaningful title Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand? The author proves that the economy and society lose their natural durability as a result of the introduction of numerous tools and methods of insurance against risks, but mostly by shifting the burden of risks on other entities [Taleb, 2012]. N.N. Taleb illustrates his arguments with numerous convincing examples and references to history, recalling, inter alia, that in ancient times there was no building control, but the constructors, e.g. of bridges had to sleep under them for some time after their construction, and the ancient aqueducts are still working well until today. So, he shows that a contemporary world, focused on quantitative effects, does not create a sound base for ethical behaviours and the care for the quality of work and manufacturing. Andrzej Blikle points to the need and possibility of opposing this, and opposing to what the Noble Price Winner for Economics, Joseph Stiglitz described as avarice triumphs over prudence [Stiglitz, 2015, p. 277]. The phrase emphasised in the book “Live and work with a purpose” is the opposition to the dangerous phenomena listed above, such as for example antifeatures. convincing that although the business activity is essentially focused on profits, making money, limited to this, it would be led to the syndrome of King Midas, who wanted to turn everything he touched into gold, but he soon realised that he was at risk of dying of starvation, as even the food turned into gold. What distinguishes this book is that almost every part of it forces in-depth reflections on the social and economic relations and brings to mind the works of other authors, but at the same time, creates a new context for them. So, A. Blikle clearly proves that both the economy and businesses need social rooting. This corresponds to the theses of the Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, who in his renowned work The Great Transformation, already in 1944 argued that the economy is not rooted in the social relations [Polanyi, 2010, p. 70]. He pointed to the risk resulting from commodification of everything, and warned that allowing the market mechanism and competition to control the human life and environment would result in disintegration of society. Although K. Polanyi’s warnings were concerned with the industrial civilization, they are still valid, even now – when the digital revolution brings fundamental changes, among others, on the labour market – they strengthen it. The dynamics of these changes is so high that it seems that the thesis of Jeremy Rifkin on the end of work [Rifkin, 2003] becomes more plausible. It is also confirmed by recent analyses included in the book of this author, concerning the society of zero marginal cost and sharing economy [Rifkin, 2016], and the analyses concerning uberisation [Uberworld, 2016]. The book of Andrzej Blikle also evokes one of the basic asymmetries of the contemporary world, which is the inadequacy of the dynamics and sizes of the supply of products and services to the dynamics and sizes of the demand for them. Insufficient demand collides with the rapidly increasing, as a result of technological changes, possibilities of growth of production and services. This leads to overproduction and related therewith large negative implications, with features of wasteful economy of excess [Kornai, 2014]. It is accompanied by phenomena with features of some kind of market bulimia, sick consumerism, detrimental both to people and the environment [Rist, 2015]. One of the more compromising signs of the economy of excess and wasting of resources is wasting of food by rich countries, when simultaneously, there are areas of hunger in some parts of the world [Stuart, 2009]. At the same time, the economy of excess does not translate to the comfort of the buyers of goods – as in theory attributed to the consumer market. It is indicated in the publication of Janos Kornai concerning a comparative analysis of the features of socio-economic systems. While exposing his deep critical evaluation of socialist non-market systems, as economies of constant deficiency, he does not spare critical opinions on the capitalist economy of excess, with its quest for the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP) and profits. As an example of the economy of excess, he indicates the pharmaceutical industry, with strong monopolistic competition, dynamic innovativeness, wide selection for the buyers, flood of advertisements, manipulation of customers, and often bribing the doctors prescribing products [Kornai 2014, p. 202]. This type of abnormalities is not alien to other industries. Although J. Konrai appreciates that in the economy of excess, including the excess of production capacities, the excess is “grease” calming down and soothing clashes that occur in the mechanisms of adaptation, he also sees that those who claim that in the economy of excess (or more generally in the market economy), sovereignty of consumers dominates, exaggerate [Kornai, 2014, pp. 171-172], as the manufacturers, creating the supply, manipulate the consumers. Thus, there is an excess of supply – both of values as well as junk [Kornai, 2014, p. 176]. Analysing the economy of excess, J. Kornai brings this issue to the question of domination and subordination. It corresponds with the opinion of Jerzy Wilkin, according to whom, the free market can also enslave, so take away individual freedom; on the other hand, the lack of the free market can lead to enslavement as well. Economists willingly talk about the free market, and less about the free man [Wilkin, 2014, p. 4]. The economy of excess is one of the consequences of making a fetish of the economic growth and its measure, which is the gross domestic product (GDP) and treating it as the basis of social and economic activity. In such a system, the pressure of growth is created, so you must grow to avoid death! The system is thus comparable to a cyclist, who has to move forwards to keep his balance [Rist, 2015, p. 181]. It corresponds with the known, unflattering to economists, saying of Kenneth E. Boulding [1956], criticising the focus of economics on the economic growth, while ignoring social implications and consequences to the environment: Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist. [from: Rist, 2015, p. 268]. GDP is a very much needed or even indispensable measure for evaluation of the material level of the economies of individual countries and for comparing their economic health. However, it is insufficient for evaluation of the real level of welfare and quality of life. It requires supplementation with other measures, as it takes into account only the values created by the market purchase and sale transactions. It reflects only the market results of the activity of enterprises and households. Additionally, the GDP account threats the socially desirable and not desirable activities equally. Thus, the market activity related to social pathologies (e.g. functioning of prisons, prostitution, and drug dealing) also increase the GDP. It was accurately expressed already in 1968 by Robert Kennedy, who concluded the discussion on this issue saying that: the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile [The Guardian, 2012]. While Grzegorz W. Kołodko even states that it should be surprising how it is possible that despite a number of alternative measures of social and economic progress, we are still in the corset of narrow measure of the gross product, which completely omits many significant aspects of the social process of reproduction [Kołodko, 2013, p. 44]. In this context he points to the necessity of triple sustainable growth – economic, social, and ecological [Kołodko, 2013, p. 377]. Transition from the industrial civilisation model to the new model of economy, to the age of information, causes a kind of cultural regression, a phenomenon of cultural anchoring in the old system. This type of lock-in effect - described in the source literature, that is the effect of locking in the existing frames and systemic solutions, is a barrier to development. The practice more and more often and clearer demonstrates that in the conditions of the new economy, the tools and traditional solutions turn out to be not only ineffective, but they even increase the risk of wrong social and economic decisions, made at different institutional levels. All this proves that new development models must be searched for and implemented, to allow counteraction to dysfunctions of the contemporary economy and wasting the development potential, resulting from a variety of maladjustments generated by the crisis of civilisation. Polish authors who devote much of their work to these issues include G.W. Kołodko, Jerzy Kleer, or Maciej Bałtowski. Studies confirm that there is a need for a new pragmatism, new, proinclusive model of shaping the social and economic reality, a model which is more socially rooted, aiming at reconciling social, economic and ecological objectives, with simultaneous optimisation of the use of the social and economic potential [Kołodko, 2013; Bałtowski, 2016; Kleer, 2015]. There is more and more evidence that the barriers to economic development growing in the global economy are closely related with the rooting of the economy in social relations. The book of A. Blikle becomes a part of this trend in a new and original manner. Although the author concentrates on the analyses of social relations mainly at the level of an enterprise, at the same time, he comments them at a macroeconomic, sociological and ethical level, and interdisciplinary contexts constitute an original value of the book. Conclusion I treat the book of Andrzej Blike as an important voice in favour of shaping an inclusive social and economic system, in favour of shaping inclusive enterprises, that is oriented on an optimal absorption of knowledge, innovation and effective reconciliation of the interests of entrepreneurs with the interests of employees and the interests of society. Inclusiveness is indeed a value in itself. It is understood as a mechanism/system limiting wasting of material resources and human capital, and counteracting environmental degradation. An inclusive social and economic system is a system oriented on optimisation of the production resources and reducing the span between the actual and potential level of economic growth and social development [Reforma, 2015]. And this is the system addressed by Andrzej Blikle in his book. At least this is how I see it. Although the book is mainly concerned with business management, its message has a much wider dimension and is concerned with real measures of wealth, money and people’s lives. null

International Journal of Innovation - IJI completes 7 yearsInternational Journal of Innovation - IJI has now 7 years old! In this editorial comment, we not only want to talk about our evolution but get even closer to the IJI community. It is our first editorial comment, a new IJI's communication channel. Some of the changes are already described on our website.IJI is an innovation-focused journal that was created to support scientific research and thereby contribute to practice. Also, IJI was born internationally, receiving and supporting research from around the world. We welcome articles in Portuguese, English, and Spanish.We have published eight volumes in IJI since 2013, totaling 131 articles. Our journal is indexed in: Dialnet and Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico; Ebsco Host; Erih Plus; Gale - Cengage Learning; Latindex; Proquest; Redalyc; Web of Science Core Collection (Emerging Sources Citation Index), among others. We provide free access “open access” to all its content. Articles can be read, downloaded, copied, distributed, printed and / or searched.We want to emphasize that none of this would be possible without the authors that recognized in IJI a relevant journal to publicize their work. Nor can we fail to mention the tireless and voluntary action of the reviewers, always contributing to the articles' improvement and skilling up our journal, more and more.All editors who passed through IJI have a fundamental role in this trajectory. And, none of this would be possible without the editorial team of Uninove. Everyone who passed and the current team. We want to express that our work as current editors of IJI would not be possible without you. Changes in the Intenational Journal of Innovation – IJIAs we mentioned earlier, IJI was born in 2013. And, over time, we are improving its structure always to improve it. In this section, we want to show some changes we made. We intend that editorial comments become a communication channel and that they can help our readers, authors, and reviewers to keep up with these changes.Although IJI is a comprehensive Innovation journal, one of the changes we want to inform you is that now, at the time of submission, the author will choose one of the available topics that best suit your article. The themes are: Innovative Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Learning; Innovation and Sustainability; Internationalization of Innovation; Innovation Systems; Emerging Innovation Themes and; Digital Transformation. Below, we present each theme so that everyone can get to know them:Innovative Entrepreneurship: emerging markets provided dynamic advantages for small businesses and their entrepreneurs to exploit the supply flows of resources, capacities, and knowledge-based on strategies oriented to the management of innovation. Topics covered in this theme include, for example: resources and capabilities that support innovative entrepreneurship; innovation habitats (Universities, Science and Technology Parks, Incubators and Accelerators) and their influences on the development of knowledge-intensive spin-offs and start-ups; open innovation, triple/quadruple helix, knowledge transfer, effectuation, bricolage and co-creation of value in knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship ecosystems; and adequate public policies to support innovative entrepreneurship.Innovation and Learning: discussions on this topic focus on the relationship between learning and innovation as topics with the potential to improve teaching and learning. They also focus on ways in which we acquire knowledge through innovation and how knowledge encourages new forms of innovation. Topics covered in this theme include, for example: innovative projects for learning; innovation-oriented learning; absorptive capacity; innovation in organizational learning and knowledge creation; unlearning and learning for technological innovation; new learning models; dynamics of innovation and learning; skills and innovation.Innovation and Sustainability: discussions on this topic seek to promote the development of innovation with a focus on sustainability, encouraging new ways of thinking about sustainable development issues. Topics covered in this theme include, for example: development of new sustainable products; circular economy; reverse logistic; smart cities; technological changes for sustainable development; innovation and health in the scope of sustainability; sustainable innovation and policies; innovation and education in sustainability and social innovation.Internationalization of Innovation: the rise of developing countries as an innovation center and their new nomenclature for emerging markets have occupied an important place in the international research agenda on global innovation and Research and Development (RD) strategies. Topics covered in this theme include, for example: resources and capabilities that support the internationalization of innovation and RD; global and local innovation and RD strategies; reverse innovation; internationalization of start-ups and digital companies; development of low-cost products, processes and services with a high-value offer internationalized to foreign markets; innovations at the base of the pyramid, disruptive and/or frugal developed and adopted in emerging markets and replicated in international markets; institutional factors that affect firms' innovation efforts in emerging markets.Innovation Systems: regulation and public policies define the institutional environment to drive innovation. Topics include industrial policy, technological trends and macroeconomic performance; investment ecosystem for the development and commercialization of new products, based on government and private investments; investment strategies related to new companies based on science or technology; Technology transfer to, from and between developing countries; technological innovation in all forms of business, political and economic systems. Topics such as triple helix, incubators, and other structures for cooperation, fostering and mobilizing innovation are expected in this section.Emerging Themes: from the applied themes, many emerging problems have a significant impact on management, such as industry 4.0, the internet of things, artificial intelligence or social innovations, or non-economic benefits. Intellectual property is treated as a cognitive database and can be understood as a technological library with the registration of the product of human creativity and invention. Social network analysis reveals the relationships between transforming agents and other elements; therefore, encouraged to be used in research and submitted in this section. The theoretical field not fully developed is not a barrier to explore any theme or question in this section.Digital Transformation: this interdisciplinary theme covers all the antecedents, intervening, and consequent effects of digital transformation in the field of technology-based companies and technology-based business ventures. The technological innovator (human side of innovation) as an entrepreneur, team member, manager, or employee is considered an object of study either as an agent of innovation or an element of the innovation process. Digital change or transformation is considered as a process that moves from the initial status to the new digital status, anchored in the theories of innovation, such as adoption, diffusion, push / pull of technology, innovation management, service innovation, disruptive innovation, innovation frugal innovation economy, organizational behavior, context of innovation, capabilities and transaction costs. Authors who submit to IJI will realize that they now need to make a structured summary at the time of submission. The summary must include the following information:(maximum of 250 words + title + keywords = Portuguese, English and Spanish).Title.Objective of the study (mandatory): Indicate the objective of the work, that is, what you want to demonstrate or describe.Methodology / approach (mandatory): Indicate the scientific method used in carrying out the study. In the case of theoretical essays, it is recommended that the authors indicate the theoretical approach adopted.Originality / Relevance (mandatory): Indicate the theoretical gap in which the study is inserted, also presenting the academic relevance of the discipline.Main results (mandatory): briefly indicate the main results achieved.Theoretical-methodological contributions (mandatory): Indicate the main theoretical and / or methodological implications that have been achieved with the results of the study.Social / managerial contributions (mandatory): Indicate the main managerial and / or social implications obtained through the results of the study.Keywords: between three and five keywords that characterize the work. Another change regarding the organization of the IJI concerns the types of work. In addition to the Editorial Comment and Articles, the journal will include Technological Articles, Perspectives, and Reviews. Thus, when submitting a study, authors will be able to choose from the available options for types of work. Throughout the next issues of the IJI, in the editorial comments, we will pass on pertinent information about every kind of work, to assist the authors in their submissions.Currently, the IJI is available to readers with new works three times a year (January-April; May-August; September-December) with publications in English, Portuguese and Spanish. From what comes next, we will have some changes in the periodicity. Next stepsAs editors, we want the IJI to continue with a national and international impact and increase its relevance in the indexing bases. For this, we will work together with the entire editorial team, reviewers, and authors to improve the work. We will do our best to give full support to the evaluators who are so dedicated to making constructive evaluations to the authors. We will also support authors with all the necessary information.With editorial comments, we intend to pass on knowledge to readers, authors, and reviewers to improve the articles gradually. We also aim to support classroom activities and content.Even with the changes reported here, we continue to accept all types of work, as long as they have an appropriate methodology. We also maintain our scope and continue to publish all topics involving innovation. We want to support academic events on fast tracks increasingly. About the articles in this edition of IJIThis issue is the first we consider the new organization of the International Journal of Innovation - IJI. We started with this editorial comment talking about the changes and improvements that we are making at IJI—as an example, showing the reader, reviewer, and author that the scope remains the same. However, at the time of submission, the author has to choose one of the proposed themes and have a mandatory abstract structured in three languages (English, Portuguese, and Spanish).In this issue, we have a section of perspectives that addresses the “Fake Agile” phenomenon. This phenomenon is related to the difficulties that companies face throughout the agile transformation, causing companies not to reach full agility and not return to their previous management model.Next, we publish the traditional section with scientific articles. The article “Critical success factors of the incubation network of enterprises of the IFES” brings critical success factors as the determining variables to keep business incubators competitive, improving their organizational processes, and ensuring their survival. Another published article, “The sharing economy dilemma: the response of incumbent firms to the rise of the sharing economy”, addresses the sharing economy in terms of innovation. The results of the study suggest that the current response to the sharing economy so far is moderate and limited. The article “Analysis of the provision for implementation of reverse logistics in the supermarket retail” made it possible to observe that through the variables that define retail characteristics, it is not possible to say whether a supermarket will implement the reverse logistics process. And the article “Capability building in fuzzy front end management in a high technology services company”, whose main objective was to assess the adherence among Fuzzy Front End (FFE) facilitators, was reported in the literature its application in the innovation process of a company, an innovative multinational high-tech services company.We also published the article “The evolution of triple helix movement: an analysis of scientific communications through bibliometric technique”. The study is a bibliometric review that brings essential contributions to the area. This issue also includes a literature review entitled “Service innovation tools: a literature review” that aimed to systematically review the frameworks proposed and applied by the literature on service innovation.The technological article “A model to adopt Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence (BI) among Saudi SMEs”, in a new IJI publication section, addresses the main issues related to the intention to use ERPBI in the Saudi private sector.As we mentioned earlier in this editorial, IJI has a slightly different organization. With the new format, we intend to contribute to the promotion of knowledge in innovation. Also, we aim to increasingly present researchers and students with possibilities of themes and gaps for their research and bring insights to professionals in the field.Again, we thank the reviewers who dedicate their time and knowledge in the evaluations, always helping the authors. We wish you, readers, to enjoy the articles in this issue and feel encouraged to send your studies in innovation to the International Journal of Innovation - IJI.

Abstract This study aims to explore and investigate translation procedures and how linguistic and cultural adaptation affects communication and marketing outcomes on consumer attitudes and behaviors in Zimbabwe. To answer pertinent questions, the study adopted a mixed-method research design, combining qualitative corpus analysis and quantitative data from questionnaires. Two different questionnaires were administered to different groups, and English-to-Shona translated adverts were collected. The study made use of participant observation and responses from both company representatives and consumers were analyzed. The study is grounded in the Skopos, communicative, and appropriateness theories to understand the interplay between translation strategies and marketing goals. Results of the study revealed that Shona translations frequently employ techniques such as cultural adaptation, modulation, and reformulation to achieve linguistic and cultural equivalence. However, the impact on consumer engagement varies, with 80% of surveyed consumers occasionally influenced by Shona advertisements. <strong><em>Keywords:</em></strong> advertising, consumers, English, marketing, Shona, translation.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <em><strong>How to cite</strong></em><strong>: </strong>Phiri, R., Nge, D., &amp; Ayonghe, L. (2024). The impact of English-Shona translation of adverts on consumer attitudes in Zimbabwe. <em>GPH-International Journal of Educational Research</em>, 7(12), 15-31. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14566512 <strong>1. Introduction</strong> According to Munday (2002), translating advertisements are ways through which companies gain insight into other countries or cultures. The clamor for the presence of local languages in Africa has led to the vulgarization of adverts in various domains such as social media, audio-visual media and many more, hence the rise of translation of adverts from English to Shona languages in Zimbabwe considering culture and context to effectively communicate. Cook (2001), considers advertising to be simply, everywhere;&nbsp; we cannot walk down the street, shop, watch television, go through the mail, log on to the Internet, read a newspaper or board a train without encountering advertising. Zimbabwe&rsquo;s constitution recognizes 16 official languages, with English as the official medium, alongside Shona and Ndebele which are the predominant indigenous languages in their respective geographic spheres, namely Mashonaland in the east and Matebeleland in the west of Zimbabwe. Advertising is omnipresent, and its effectiveness depends heavily on cultural resonance and contextual appropriateness. Translating advertisements involves more than linguistic transfer, it requires transcreation and cultural adaptation to maintain the original message&rsquo;s impact. Industry theorists like Wu (2018) emphasize that advertising translation must evoke the same emotional responses as the source material. Advertising texts does not only include words, but also cultural concepts, ideas and visuals. De Mooij (2004:179) defines translating advertising copy as &lsquo;painting the tip of an iceberg and hoping the whole thing will turn red&rsquo;. To him advertising lies on the cultural notion, as advertising is not made of words only, but made of culture. Translating advertising goes beyond translating a regular written text as it includes cultural elements such as shared beliefs, attitudes, norms, roles, and values. Hence, Reboul (1978) suggests that to transfer an advertisement from one language and culture to another, it is worth considering translating, adapting, and creating. Advertising texts are rich in cultural and social elements, whether they are translatable or not is still being questioned hence attention has to be paid to cultural and textual nuances.Basem (2006) says when translating, two languages and two cultures are involved. Simply speaking translated advertisements have an attractive power to manipulate consumers as they advocate, encourage, ask questions, announcing about products or services invoking their cultures that are deeply embedded into their minds. A closer reading of these authors as well as others has led to the quest to study how advertisements are translated in Zimbabwe where there is multiculturalism thereby addressing the issue of techniques and strategies that are implied in the translation of adverts from English to Shona in Zimbabwe marketing terminology in terms of translation strategies. The purpose of this research is therefore to investigate the techniques, strategies, and impact of such translated advertisements. <strong>1.1 Problem statement</strong> It has been observed that translated advertisements from English to Shona fail to give the intended effect on the target consumers as those of the original advertisements. This study, therefore seeks to assess the translated advertisements on consumer attitudes and the procedures used in their translation. &nbsp; <strong>1.2 Research Questions</strong> 1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What is the impact of translating English language advertisements into Shona by companies on customers in Zimbabwe? 2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What are the various translation techniques used in these English adverts to Shona translated adverts? <strong>1.3 Objectives</strong> 1. Identify, analyze, describe and assess the effectiveness of the translation of advertisements in Zimbabwe on consumer attitudes and behaviors. 2. Identify, analyze and describe the techniques involved in the translation of&nbsp;&nbsp; advertisements from English to Shona. <strong>2. Review of related literature</strong> <strong>2.1 Conceptual Review</strong> In this part key concepts related to the study will be defined. <strong>2.1.1 Translation</strong> Bell (1991:20) highlights that the phenomenon of translation is, &lsquo;a replacement of a representation of a text in one language by a representation of an equivalent text in a second language&rsquo;. Bell (1991) refers to an important notion in translation theory, namely equivalence, whereby the translator renders the message to the targeted audience in the closest possible equivalence that will be well understood by the target audience. In line with this study, Bell&rsquo;s definition simply means giving an appropriate translation equivalence from source text to target text. <strong>2.1.2 Advertising</strong> Bovee and Arens (1986:5) views advertising as non-personal communication of information that is usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the diverse media. Bovee and Arens (1986) view advertising as persuasive in nature according to messages being conveyed on various media to catch the eye of anyone who could be a possible client; for example, on social media, television, billboards, and radios whereby marketers have to pay to convey a message about their goods or services, hence the words they use in this case should be catchy to quickly attract the target audience.&nbsp; <strong>2.1.3 Advertising translation</strong> According to Sharabi (2023), advertising translation covers the conversion of marketing content to effectively reach a full-target (full-fledged) market or audience through translation, transcreation, and localization. In this way advertisements will not only be linguistically accurate but also will resonate to the essence of culture. De Mooij (2004), considers translating adverts like painting the tip of an iceberg, what you see are the words, but there is a lot behind the words that must be understood to transfer advertising from one culture to another. <strong>2.1.4 Advertising slogans</strong> Brierley (2002) says advertising slogans are short, memorable phrases used in advertising campaigns. Their purpose is to emphasize a phrase that the company wishes to be remembered by, particularly for marketing a specific corporate image or connection to a product or consumer base. Slogans speak volumes about a product, service or even the company itself to the customer&rsquo;s attention. <strong>2.1.5 Consumer behaviour </strong> According to De Mooij, (2004: 181) the correlation between consumer behavior and cultural values show that a culturally appropriate advertising style is the key to successful advertising. Consumers are products of their own culture and language therefore one has to consider certain pre-established notions of each culture before advertising. <strong>2.1.6 Translation strategies </strong> Ngoran (2017:36) describes &lsquo;domestication and foreignization&rsquo; as the two main strategies in translation. He says &lsquo;foreignization&rsquo; is source-text oriented, word for word, structure for structure and literal while &lsquo;domestication&rsquo; is target text-oriented, free, natural,and transparent and message for message. <strong>2.1.7 Translation techniques </strong> Ngoran (2017:38), considers a translation technique as an operational mechanism put in place by the translator in the course of actual translation. Translation techniques are micro strategies which narrow down the strategies that the translator uses in their translation, while techniques usually concentrate on segments of the text. They fall under strategies and they are the decision made by the translator in translating segments. Examples of translation techniques include; borrowing, calque, literal translation, reformulation, explicitation, transposition, modulation, cultural, formal and dynamic equivalence, local and global adaptation. <strong>2.2 Theoretical review </strong> The Skopos, communicative and the theory of appropriateness were used. <strong>2.2.1 The Communicative theory</strong> According to, Ngoran (2017), the communication theory of translation is a theory that aims at communicative translation, which attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original language.Communication is the ultimate goal of language instruction to enable learners to communicate effectively with others in real-life situations.The communicative theory is applied to this study as translation of advertisements, requires not only the linguistic aspects but also the communicative aspect making sure that the meaning of the message has been transmitted and in its originality. <strong>2.2.2 The Skopos theory</strong> Skopos theory is a translation theory proposed in the 1970s by the German Hans J. Vermeer.Skopos as a technical term referring to the purpose of a translation and of the action of translation. Skopos is a Greek term which means &lsquo;aim&rsquo;, &lsquo;goal&rsquo; or &lsquo;purpose&rsquo;. Vermeer freed translation research from the constraints of the original text centered theory, believing that translation must follow the principles of purpose, coherence, and fidelity. Theprinciple of purpose is the primary principle as any translation behavior is determined by the purpose of translation, which determines the means of translation as stated by Munday,(2012). <strong>2.2.3 The appropriateness theory</strong> The appropriateness theory, proposed by Paul Grice in the 1970s, is a conversational implicature theory that focuses on the cooperative nature of human communication. According to this theory, speakers are expected to make their contributions appropriate to the context of the conversation. This includes observing maxims such as truthfulness, clarity, relevance, and manner (Grice, 1975), this is what is needed in the translation of adverts to make them comprehensible as the original text. <strong>2.3 Empirical review</strong> This section reviews other studies relevant to the present studies which were carried out by other scholars in different contexts To begin with, Sichkar et al (2023), on the investigation of the techniques used to translate advertising texts in English and Ukrainian languages, found that translated slogans are target-oriented and address groups of people with definite values and demands. The results of the study indicate that the translation of English advertising slogans is oriented towards preserving their pragmatic effect and function in the target culture. The results prove that lexico-semantic, grammatical, and stylistic transformations are used in rendering advertising slogans into Ukrainian. The present study relates with, Sichkar et al. (2023),however, the present study goes further to analyze the translation techniques used in the translation of advertisements and seeks to understand the impact of these translations on consumer behavior. Syahputra et al. (2022), aims to describe a unique phenomenon in a translated advertisement. The study analyses translated advertisements and their relation to translation techniques. The study focused on how the language that contains the culture of a country can be presented to other countries by one advertisement product. It is a challenge for producers to promote their products, and the translator takes over the role as a communication bridge between producers and target consumers. Results showed that translated advertisement tends to keep its original text to preserve its meaning, the sound and image of the video also influences the translated version. Kappe (2012)&rsquo; s study on the translation of advertisements seeks to assess the use of semiotics, symbolism, and techniques used by advertisers and translators in persuading customers and to know whether translators of advertisements use the same techniques in the target language as used in the original text. The study focuses on the comparative analysis of 30 English Coca-Cola advertisements and their French translations from 1905 to 2011. Analysis was done based on the relevance theory, equivalence theory, and Skopos theory within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) which examines and analyzes the way existing translations are carried out on advertisements. De Mooij, (2004:179), asserts that &lsquo;translating an advertising copy is like painting the tip of an iceberg&rsquo;. The study focuses on the complex interplay between language, culture, and marketing strategies. His work emphasizes that effective advertisement translation goes beyond mere linguistic conversion; it requires a deep understanding of cultural nuances and consumer behavior. De Moiji employs comparative analysis by analyzing pairs of source and target language advertisements, focusing on linguistic choices, cultural references, and marketing strategies, to identify successful translation practices and common pitfalls, offering insights into effective cross-cultural advertising.The work equally examines how language functions within specific advertising contexts considering factors such as tone, style, and persuasive techniques. These works highlight the importance of translation of advertisements in preserving culture which is the main aspect in a human what will lure the consumer to have the will power to purchase a good or a service, which is what the current study seeks to investigate in Zimbabwe and the procedures used in the translations. <strong>3. Methodology</strong> <strong>3.1 Sample population</strong> The target population for this study is divided into two categories, the first category are the companies (Bakers Inn Zimbabwe, Saraquel Ltd, Coverlink holdings, NetOne Zimbabwe, and Nash Paints Zimbabwe) and the second category is a randomly selected public, who are the possible clients and consumers of the goods and services provided by these companies. Both groups, companies and the public, responded to online questionnaires that were designed with different questions to meet the expectations from each group making this study a success. <strong>3.2 Sampling </strong> For this study, purposive sampling was used to select companies that provided data for the studyand random sampling was used for the selection of participants to answer the questionnaire for the potential clients. Purposive sampling is the intentional selection or identification of individuals or groups of individuals based on their characteristics, knowledgeof and experience with a phenomenon of interest, Cresswell and Clark (2011). Random sampling refers to a randomly selected subset of the population; every individual has an equal chance of being selected. It is the method of selecting a sample of n units out of N units by drawing units one by one with or without replacement whereby, every unit has an equal probability of selection. It is applied to allow every individual to have an opportunity to be selected. <strong>3.3 Data collection instruments</strong> To carry out this study, questionnaires, participant observation and corpus analysis were used. Questionnaires were administered online to the proposed customers (public) and the advertising companies respectively together with online observations. The study makes use of corpus analysis to investigate and analyze the techniques used to translate the advertisements. The extracts of adverts were collected from websites and from the companies&rsquo; data. Twenty (20) excerpts were collected and analysed using the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) model. <strong>3.4 Participant observation</strong> Participant observation was based on the advertisements on posters, flyers and social media posts, to examine carefully, check and see how the adverts are translated and the frequency of the translations. We immersed ourselves in the Zimbabwean society to observe and participate on social media sites and websites ensuring the translation of advertisements, identifying the procedures used in the translation of these advertisements, in order to fully convince customers. The goal was to gain a deep understanding of the culture, beliefs and practices from an insider&rsquo;s perspective. We even went on to consult company representatives through WhatsApp forum so that they verify if they translate their adverts from English to Shona. <strong>3.5 Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS)</strong> DTS model that involves comparative analysis of English and Shona texts, revealing cultural adaptations and shifts in meaning due to translation techniques used will be used as a guide in describing and analyzing the basic features of English and Shona corpus analysis. <strong>4. DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS</strong> Data collected through questionnaires and observations will be presented, analyzed and interpreted in this section. &nbsp; <strong>4.1 Respondent&rsquo; profile</strong> The measured demographic variables of sex, age, and level of education of the randomly chosen clients/public in Zimbabwe will be presented.&nbsp; <strong>a) Gender </strong> Results show that the majority of the respondents were female with 21 (52.5%), while the minority is male with a percentage of 19 (47.5%). <strong>b) </strong><strong>Age</strong> Twenty nine out of 40 respondents that is 72.5% of the population were 20-35 years old, then 6 (15%) were 36-55 years old, 4 (10%) were above 55 years old and 1 (2.5%) was below 20 years old.&nbsp; <strong>c) Level of English proficiency</strong> Concerning the level of English proficiency of the respondents, 32(80%) of the respondents have an advanced English proficiency, while 8 (20%) are on the immediate level in English language and no one is a beginner. The fact that most of respondents fluently speak and understand English contributed to the study as they comprehended the questions on the administered questionnaire. The level of literacy is also a contribution to the Zimbabwean marketing society as customers can understand English language. <strong>d) Languages spoken at home.</strong> Regarding the languages spoken at home 75% of the target audience speaks Shona in their homes, followed by 10% who speak English and Shona, 10% who speak Ndebele, and 5% who speak English. The majority of the respondents speak Shona, adding to the study on how Shona adverts can influence their purchasing decisions. This highlights the importance of the language in daily interactions. <strong>4.1.2 Attitude of respondents towards translation of adverts</strong> <strong>a) Purchase of product or service as a result of Shona advertisements.</strong> The study aimed to determine if Shona advertisements have influenced purchasing power. Results showed that 65% of respondents are sometimes convinced to buy goods, while 32.5% have never bought. The remaining 2.5% are neither convinced nor pushed to buy. The results suggest that Shona advertisements have not fully convinced customers to purchase or not. <strong>b) Preference of English words or translated Shona words on advertisement</strong> The majority of the population (72.5%) prefers English words over Shona translated words in advertisements, while 20% prefer their mother language for a sense of belonging and connection to their culture. The remaining 7.5% are indifferent, allowing the message to be passed regardless of the language used. This preference may be influenced by their English literacy, as the majority of the population speaks Shona at home. <strong>c) Conviction to buy goods or services as a result of either translated Shona words or English ones</strong> This question aimed to determine if consumers feel more convinced and connected with marketers when goods are advertised in their native language. Results showed that 65% of respondents found Shona advertisements more convincing than English ones, indicating patriotism or love for their language. However, 15% of respondents felt not compelled to buy goods or services by Shona advertisements. <strong>d) Motives behind the decision to purchase goods and services that are promoted in Shona: </strong> The decision to purchase goods and services advertised in Shona is influenced by the emotional and cultural resonance these advertisements evoke. Shona commercials, with their local rhythm and simple vocabulary, are rated higher by audiences compared to English ones, making them more relatable and engaging. These advertisements acknowledge the diverse consumer base, particularly by appealing to the Zimbabwean identity. When the message is relevant and the marketing strategy is tailored to the target demographic, Shona adverts inspire interest and enhance the likelihood of purchase. Skilled organizations often craft these advertisements with expertise and cultural insight. However, there are criticisms. Some respondents find Shona adverts unconvincing due to their lack of creativity, substance, and clarity, resulting in ambiguous or unrealistic messages. To enhance appeal, advertising in Shona should emphasize product attributes while avoiding jargon or overly technical language, ensuring clarity and relatability for potential customers. <strong>e) Improvements to be made to Shona adverts.</strong> Enhancing Shona advertisements requires a focus on clarity, engagement, and cultural authenticity. Advertisers should use simple, precise language and concise messaging to maintain viewer interest. Incorporating regional proverbs, idioms, and slang makes the content relatable and genuine. Adverts should consider Shona&rsquo;s diverse dialects and regional variations, using vibrant visuals such as traditional attire, local landscapes, and culturally significant symbols to resonate with audiences. Additionally, clear translation into Shona can extend the reach of the advertisements. Marketers should avoid complex sentences, excessive jargon, and overly scripted performances, instead fostering natural communication styles. Handouts with clear explanations and visual aids can cater to audiences with varying literacy levels. Regular production of high-quality advertisements, focused on authenticity and professionalism, is also essential. <strong>f) Opinions on the purpose of Shona adverts.</strong> The primary purpose of Shona advertisements is to promote product awareness, educate consumers, and encourage purchase while fostering a cultural connection. These adverts effectively communicate brand messages to diverse age groups, ensuring inclusivity across the Zimbabwean population. By leveraging the native language, advertisers create an accessible medium that helps bridge cultural gaps and expands product reach. Moreover, Shona advertisements celebrate and preserve African cultural diversity and heritage. They respect local languages while promoting open communication, ensuring that people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds understand the brand&rsquo;s message. This approach strengthens cultural identity while achieving marketing goals. &nbsp; <strong>4.2 Companies</strong> The companies that participated to this study were NashPaints, Coverlink Holdings, Dairibord Zimbabwe, Saraquel ltd, Netone Zimbabwe and Baker's inn Zimbabwe. The professional positions of the people in the companies are as follows; marketing manager, customer service representative, human resource worker, marketer, marketing assistant and professional marketer, these helped ensure that the results are more accurate and aligned to the companies. &nbsp; <strong>a)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </strong><strong>Gender</strong> Six company representatives responded to the questionnaire, 4 are female, representing 66.67% of the total sample. On the other hand, 2(33.33%), are male. <strong>b)&nbsp; Goods and services offered</strong> The products and services provided by the different companies, are paint; insurance on cash plans, medical health, funeral insurance, legal insurance, special savings, home and auto insurance; dairy products; borehole drilling and installation; network service provider; and bread and confectionery items. The aim was to gather their opinions on translated advertisements, as these products cater to a larger market. <strong>d) Target audience</strong> The target audience for NetOne Zimbabwe and Coverlink Holdings includes all age groups, including infants, teens, adults, and professionals. Nash Paints targets adults investing in building, Saraquel Ltd targets adults, workers, and professionals for borehole drilling and installation, and Bakers&rsquo; Inn targets teens, adults, workers, and professionals for their bread and confectionery products. <strong>e) Market range</strong> This study reveals that 3 out of 6 companies target large scale markets, while others target small, medium, and all ranges.&nbsp; <strong>f) Person or department responsible for the Translations</strong> The results reveal that Zimbabwe&rsquo;s translation departments are predominantly bilinguals and agencies, with three companies relying on bilinguals and three relying on agencies. However, no professional translators are employed, highlighting the underrepresentation of qualified translators and the low status of translation as a profession in Zimbabwe, necessitating action from translator associations in the country. &nbsp; <strong>4.2.1 Opinions and attitudes towards the translation of advertisements by companies</strong> This portion of the questionnaire seeks to discuss the attitudes and opinions of respondents towards the translation of adverts. <strong>a) Advertising languages</strong> According to the results English and Shona are the primary languages used for advertising goods and services, with Ndebele being a secondary option. English is used by 100% of respondents, while Shona is also used all the companies. Ndebele is used by approximately 50% of companies. The frequency analysis shows that English and Shona are universally used, with Ndebele having a significant presence but not dominating the overall language use. <strong>b) Does translating advertisements increase sales and profits in the company?</strong> <strong>R1.</strong> It has not been measured yet but the assumption is that the message was related to more people than an English advert locally. <strong>R2</strong>.The Company hasn&rsquo;t had a direct record on profits and sales, but assumes that some of the customers who consult it would have understood the posts in the local language. So overall sales are increasing due to translating advertisements <strong>R3</strong>. Translation of promotional materials enhances communication with potential clients by bridging language barriers. Languages like Shona or Ndebele help understand product advantages and fulfill demands, increasing market reach, cultural relevance, trust, conversion rates, client loyalty, and sales. <strong>R4</strong>. In 2022, sales increased by 12%. This was the result of the introduction of Shona posts in a specific rural area of Zimbabwe, where people could read the flyers and understand without needing an explanation. Since the message containing the services was clearly stated, a lot of customers were invited. <strong>R5</strong>. There is no actual report or proof of it improving sales. Translations are valued for their potential to improve sales by reaching a broader audience, both English-speaking and non-English-speaking, thus increasing customer engagement. <strong>R6</strong>. Yes. Because the market range is wide, we understand that there is a type of consumers who prefer to engage in their native languages.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s why we use Shona and Ndebele also.&nbsp; We consider the translation of advertising materials to be a strategic move and it contributes to increased sales and expands reach.&nbsp; <strong>c) Why did you decide to translate advertising materials?</strong> <strong>R1</strong>. To make customers the center of attention. It&rsquo;s tempting to use your original tongue because you can even use popular lingo like &lsquo;Ma1, Chiremerera, ndayura, tinoramba, tichipisa, etc&rsquo;. <strong>R2</strong>. Translating promotional materials helps overcome language barriers and strengthens client connections. By speaking in Shona, we gain trust and credibility with Zimbabweans, making us their first choice for insurance services, despite not being fluent in English. <strong>R3</strong>. Translations of advertising materials are done to reach a wider audience, including those who would like information to be expressed in their language or who may not speak English well. Adverts are also translated for competitive edge because people are more likely to purchase a product when they comprehend the message than when they do not. <strong>R4</strong>. The translation of materials acknowledges, empowers, and promotes our mother tongue while reaching out to nearly all possible customers without leaving out any group. Companies translate promotional content to establish credibility and persuade customers that they are dependable and trustworthy. <strong>R5</strong>. It boosts the possibility of expanding clientele. Resonating with the cultural and language inclinations of the target customers. It shows a dedication to diversity and improves brand image. <strong>R6</strong>. Translating advertisements enhances local search engine optimization, increases visibility and traffic for Shona-based users, and makes content more accessible. Localizing content boosts sales, customer engagement, brand awareness, and helps businesses introduce new products to clients who may not speak English well. &nbsp; <strong>d) How important do you think translation of adverts is, in the promotion of African languages and preserving culture and meeting the company&rsquo;s objectives? </strong> <strong>R1</strong>. It is crucial because the message is more relatable. It also aligns with our goals, since we want the brand to represent the middle class, upper class, and the ghetto. Since our brand is universal, our advertising makes it more relatable. <strong>R2</strong>. Translating adverts enables us to become more relevant in the market by helping us localize and blend in with our business. It enables us to adapt to the specific preferences and market dynamics of the area. Additionally, it helps customers to perceive and believe that we recognize and value their particular requirements on a regional market. <strong>R3</strong>. Translations of advertisements enhance customer and company communication, conserving culture through content adaptation to cultural context and audience preferences. This ensures content is appropriate for the target audience, relevant to their culture, and has its own colloquial expressions. Translating advertising materials reduces misunderstandings and misinterpretations due to linguistic barriers, ensuring accurate communication and desired impact. <strong>R4.</strong>Translating advertising materials helps ensure accurate communication and impact, reducing misunderstandings and misinterpretations. This is crucial for entering new markets or increasing market share. Locally relevant adverts establish brand relevance and accessibility, increasing the likelihood of expanding into the target market, attracting new clients, and earning market share. <strong>R5.</strong>The company aims to be a network provider, increasing commercial activity, and supporting the Shona language. Some translations preserve indigenous Shona culture to make consumers feel valued. <strong>R6</strong>. Translating commercials into Shona and Ndebele ensures cultural alignment with target market conventions, values, and preferences. This ensures better understanding and comprehension for clients, maintains original tone and style, and evokes desired emotions and responses from the target market, thereby preserving the intended meaning. <strong>4.3 Discussions</strong> The study reveals that translating advertisements from English to Shona is crucial for upholding African culture, reducing language barriers, and promoting marketing strategies. The majority of respondents support this translation, as it gives them a sense of belonging and importance. However, they prefer English-language advertisements, despite speaking Shona in their homes. This may be due to diglossia where English is considered high and Shona is considered low. Shona advertisements provide cultural relevance and help preserve culture.The study also highlights the need for professional translators in Zimbabwe to ensure good translations.Using professional translators could help avoid errors of inappropriate jargon. The translation of advertisements from English to Shona has a positive impact on companies, as it increases client loyalty, engagement, brand awareness, sales, and profitability. This broadens the market range and allows companies to effectively communicate with people from diverse backgrounds and demographic age groups, earning brand recognition in a competitive world. &nbsp; <strong>4.4. Analytical analysis of the corpus</strong> Excerpts extracted from adverts of different companies that were collected from websites and from the companies are analyzed in this section of analysis. <strong>ST: Special savings plan</strong> <strong>TT: </strong><em>Plan yekuchengetedza mari yakanaka</em> The excerpt from an insurance companyuses borrowing technique and domestication strategy to translate the word <strong><em>plan</em></strong> as the translator did not find a word that is equivalent in the target text. The word <strong><em>special</em></strong> was also not rendered with the emphasis that it should have given in the original text, the weight of the meaning was rather reduced. The word that was rather better to use for special was <strong><em>yakakosha</em></strong>, the translation would have been, <strong><em>hurongwa hwekuchengetedza mari hwakakosha. </em></strong>The skopos theory applied, the purpose and aim of the message was conveyed to the target audience that they can trust the insurance company, one would also justify the use of the word <strong><em>plan</em></strong> as it is a word that is widely used in the society. <strong>ST: Crystal Clear Water from the original source</strong> <strong>TT: </strong><em>Mvura yakachena inoyevedza, Yabva pasi pemvura</em> This is an advert from a borehole drilling company on the cleanliness of the water that the boreholes provide, the translator used the domestication strategy and the explicitation technique as they had to explain what the original text ought to say. There is also a mistranslation on the words <strong><em>yabva pasi pemvura</em></strong> which are the elements of interestas the words <strong><em>original source</em></strong> refers to where the water is coming from that is the <strong><em>bedrock</em></strong> and in most times these could be springs and in Shona the original source that brings clean and healthy water that does not need further purification is called <strong><em>chitubu</em></strong> therefore there was a repetition of water coming from under water rather than saying the water is coming from the original source in Shona. The suggested translation is, <strong><em>Mvura yakachena inoyevedza, inobva muchitubu</em></strong>. The first part of the advert is well translated but the second rather has errors, the possible constraints here could have been finding the equivalent words for the target language. The skopos theory applies as the purpose of the source text was rather achieved. <strong>ST: Get spotted with the Baker&rsquo;s Inn loaf and win USD10</strong> <strong>TT:</strong><em> Batika paMap nechingwa che Baker&rsquo;s Inn upihwe USD10</em> The excerpt is from a bread company advertisement featuring a man holding money, offering promotions for buying bread. The advertisement aims to lure customers to buy more bread to receive vouchers and increase their chances of winning. The translation strategy is foreignization, with borrowing techniques such as map, Baker's Inn, and USD10 from English to maintain the original writer&rsquo;s spirit and relevance. Words such as <strong><em>map, Baker&rsquo;s Inn</em></strong> and <strong><em>USD10</em></strong> are borrowed from English to keep the readers in the spirit of the original writer and to maintain the sense. The word <strong><em>map</em></strong> came in to stand in for spotted so the translator just used common slang used in the country referring to being available, they say <strong><em>batika paMap</em></strong> therefore this was relatable to the reader. The word win was translated to <strong><em>upihwe</em></strong> which does not really bring the sense yet the word <strong><em>win</em></strong> in Shona is <strong><em>kubudirira/ hwinha/ kukunda</em></strong> which was rather going to emphasis on the competitive part of the promotion. The theory of appropriateness applies as the translator used the appropriate words to give the message relevance and communicate the sense and meaning. <strong>ST: Welcome home</strong> <strong>TT:</strong><em> Dzoka uyamwe</em> This is an advert from a telecommunication company, the slogan <strong><em>Welcome home</em></strong> was translated to <strong><em>dzoka uyamwe</em></strong>. The direct translation will be <strong><em>tinokutambirai kumba </em></strong>which in the case of a telecommunication company wouldn&rsquo;t render the expected impact that the source text is giving. The translation <strong><em>dzoka uyamwe</em></strong> which basically means something else different that is come back and drink was found to be more appropriate in the sense that the company is a network company that helps people connect on the internet so it is encouraging the clients to come back and take from them to get connectivity from them as it is homely. The strategy that was used is domestication and the strategy is modulation. The theory of appropriateness is applicable as the translator used words that would be appropriate to the context of the target culture. <strong>4.4.1 Discussions</strong> This study analyzed 20 excerpts of advertisements translated from English into Shona, focusing on marketing terms to persuade clients to trust the services and goods offered by companies. Translation techniques like literal translation, calque, transposition, modulation, adaptation, transposition, and explicitation were used. The study identified theories like skopos, appropriateness, and communicative, but possible constraints include translators&rsquo; influence by the source text and inaccurate renderings. The results suggest the need for more professional translators to ensure translations are conveyed in their natural state in the target culture. <strong>5. CONCLUSION</strong> The study analyzed 20 advertisements and their Shona translations using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It used Newmark&rsquo;s communicative theory, Vermeer&rsquo;s Skopos theory, and Grice&rsquo;s appropriateness theory to understand the impact of translation procedures on consumer behavior and attitudes towards companies. Data was collected through questionnaires, corpus analysis, and participant observations. Results showed that translation techniques like explicitation, transposition, borrowing, direct translation, and cultural adaptation are often used to align advertisements with Shona-speaking audiences. Public responses indicated mixed outcomes, with some consumers finding Shona translations relatable but others feeling they lacked the persuasive impact of original English adverts. The study suggests improvements in translation in Zimbabwe to meet cultural norms and values.The study indicates a need for improvement in Zimbabwe&rsquo;s advertisement translation to align with the language&rsquo;s cultural norms and values. The process requires linguistic precision, cultural sensitivity, and marketing acumen. Despite challenges, these efforts promote linguistic diversity and inclusivity in Zimbabwe&rsquo;s advertising landscape. Further studies on other indigenous languages would be necessary to assess their role in shaping consumer perceptions and equally consulting the translators in the marketing field. <strong>REFERENCES</strong> Basem, A (2006).The translation of fast-food advertising texts from English to Arabic.University of South Africa Bell, A. (1991). Translation and the translatability of advertising. In L. Venuti (Ed.), <em>the translation studies reader</em> (pp. 77-92). Routledge. Bovee, C. L., &amp; Arens, W. F. (1986). <em>Contemporary Advertising</em> (p. 5). Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin. Brierley, S. (2002). The importance of cultural context in advertising translation. <em>Journal of Advertising Research</em>, <em>42</em>(2), 31-40. https://doi.org/10.2501/JAR-42-2-31-40 Cook, G. 2001. The discourse of advertising, 2nd Edition, London: Routledge. Creswell, J. W., &amp; Clark, V. L. P. (2011). <em>Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research</em> (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. De Mooij, M. (2004). Translating advertising copy: Painting the tip of an iceberg and hoping the whole thing will turn red. In <em>The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication</em> (Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 179&ndash;198). St. Jerome Publishing. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole &amp; J. L. Morgan (Eds.), <em>Syntax and Semantics: Vol. 3. Speech Acts</em> (pp. 41&ndash;58). New York: Academic Press. Kappe.F.(2012).<em>The&nbsp;translation&nbsp;of&nbsp;advertisements:&nbsp;issues&nbsp;of&nbsp;semiotics,&nbsp;symbolism&nbsp; and&nbsp;persuasion</em>. University&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;Witwatersrand. Munday, J. (2002). <em>Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications</em>. London: Routledge. Ngoran, C.T. (2017). <em>Mastering translation in four stages.</em> ISBN: 978 9956-765-4-4 Reboul, O. (1978). <em>The Rhetoric of Advertising</em>. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Sharabi, C. (2023). <em>Marketing and Advertising Translation Techniques for International Companies.</em>Press.https://www.getblend.com/blog/marketing-and-advertising-translation-techniques-for-international-companies/ Sichkar, S., Kaminska, M., Bryk, M., Melko, K., Zhurkova, O., Kharkevych, H. (2023). Training of future translators through advertising slogans translation. Revista Rom&acirc;nească pentru Educaţie Multidimensională, 15(2), 418-439. https://doi.org/10.18662/rrem/15.2/742 Syahputra, , Suryadi, S., &amp; Azhar, R. (2022). <em>Cross-Cultural Translation in Advertising</em>. Jakarta: Universitas Indonesia Press. Syahputra F.P, Nasution E.H&amp;Widiantho. Y. (2022) <em>Translation Techniques in Translated Commercial Break Advertisement.</em>Proceedings of English Linguistics and Literature, Vol.3 (2022) Wu, J. (2018). Evoking Emotions in Advertising Translation: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. <em>Journal of Translation Studies</em>, <em>25</em>(3), 45&ndash;62. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. &nbsp; <strong>IMAGES</strong> &nbsp; Image 1: English advert with Shona translation from NetOne Image 2: English and Shona translated advert for Baker&rsquo;s Inn Image 3: English and Shona translated advert for Saraquel ltd

<strong>Abstract</strong> <strong>&nbsp;</strong> <strong><em>Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), which include philosophy, education, science, the arts, and governance, is a rich source of traditional knowledge that prioritizes self-reliance, ethical behavior, holistic living, and harmony with the natural world. Mahatma Gandhi, a modern-day visionary, offered a revolutionary framework for societal advancement by incorporating these timeless ideas into his beliefs in social justice, sustainability, and education. This essay explores the connections between Gandhian philosophy and IKS, emphasizing their continued applicability in addressing modern issues like environmental degradation, educational reform, and international injustices. Examining IKS from a Gandhian perspective highlights how traditional knowledge and contemporary innovations can be combined to produce long-lasting answers. Proposing an integrative paradigm, the paper imagines a future in which technological advancement and indigenous knowledge coexist, promoting ecological balance, equitable growth, and a peaceful international community.</em></strong> <strong>&nbsp;</strong> <strong>Introduction</strong> &nbsp; The huge body of knowledge found in Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) spans many different fields, such as philosophy, education, science, the arts, and governance. The holistic worldview of IKS, which has its roots in ancient traditions, emphasizes self-reliance, ethical living, harmony with environment, and interconnection. Deep insights into sustainable life and the search for knowledge that goes beyond materialistic objectives are provided by these systems. IKS has gained prominence as a framework for sustainable and equitable development in the modern day, when issues like social injustices, environmental disasters, and educational chaos are becoming more severe. A key player in India's independence movement and a visionary leader, Mahatma Gandhi struck a profound chord with Indian knowledge systems. His life and work demonstrated a blend of contemporary pragmatism and traditional Indian wisdom. Gandhi was greatly influenced by traditional Indian values, which included self-reliance (Swadeshi), truth-seeking (Satya), and nonviolence (Ahimsa). He thought that the social, economic, and environmental issues of his era might be resolved by reviving and utilizing IKS in conjunction with modern inventions. Gandhi's ideas are still very applicable in the twenty-first century since they provide a framework for rethinking education and development. IKS and Gandhian principles come together to form a strong foundation for sustainable development and holistic life. Both place a strong emphasis on integrating moral principles into all aspects of life and support an educational system that fosters moral ideals, character, and practical skills in addition to academic knowledge. By fusing work, education, and ethics, Gandhi's Nai Talim (Basic Education) demonstrated this unity and promoted the value of hard effort and lifelong learning. Regarding IKS, this is consistent with traditional Indian teaching approaches that prioritize hands-on learning and education that is focused on the community. Gandhian philosophy and the ideas of IKS offer useful answers to today's problems, which include ecological degradation, educational disparity, and the loss of cultural legacy. For instance, Gandhi's idea of ecological stewardship and modest life is reflected in IKS's emphasis on living in balance with nature. Likewise, IKS's community-based methods align with Gandhi's emphasis on decentralized development, encouraging inclusive and sustainable local solutions. Applying these ideas in contemporary settings has the ability to close the gap between conventional thought and contemporary developments. This essay aims to investigate the relationship between Gandhian principles and Indian knowledge systems, arguing for their applicability in tackling today's pressing international concerns. The conversation seeks to demonstrate the transformative potential of fusing old wisdom with contemporary activities by examining their shared values and distinctive contributions. The study imagines a time when these all-encompassing strategies promote ecological balance, educational reform, and sustainable development, creating a society based on moral principles and peaceful cohabitation. &nbsp; <strong>The Essence of Indian Knowledge Systems</strong> &nbsp; IKS provides a multifaceted viewpoint in which knowledge is transformational rather than just transactional. Important principles consist of: &nbsp; <strong>1. Holistic Learning: </strong> The emphasis of ancient Indian education, which was exemplified by institutions like Takshashila and Nalanda, was on holistic learning that combined spiritual and material knowledge. This method aimed to raise people who developed their intelligence, morals, and character in a balanced way. A variety of subjects, including as philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and the arts, were taught to the students in addition to moral and spiritual lessons. Producing well-rounded people who could pursue enlightenment and personal development while also addressing society concerns was the goal. By encouraging pupils to think critically, be disciplined, and pursue lifelong learning, teachers (gurus) developed an educational system that integrated spiritual insight with practical skills, promoting cultural growth and societal well-being. &nbsp; <strong>2. Sustainability and Ecology: </strong> The harmonious coexistence of humans and nature is emphasized in ancient Indian literature such as the Atharva Veda, which promote ecological balance and sustainable living. They emphasize how crucial it is to protect biodiversity, maintain natural resources, and practice environmental stewardship. Ancient Indian agriculture relied heavily on techniques like crop rotation, organic farming, and water conservation to maintain soil fertility and long-term harvests. A profound awareness of ecological preservation is demonstrated by practices like rainwater gathering and sacred grove maintenance. Because they provide tried-and-true answers to contemporary environmental problems and foster ecosystem resilience and sustainability, these old methods and ideologies are becoming more and more important today. <strong>&nbsp;</strong> <strong>3. Ethical Framework: </strong> The word Dharma or the principle of righteousness, is the ethical basis that guides the behavior of individuals and society in Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). Based on moral, spiritual, and ecological awareness, Dharma emphasizes the alignment of actions with universal harmony and justice, promoting responsibility towards self, society, and nature, and fostering sustainable coexistence. The Bhagavad Gita and Manusmriti are among the ancient texts that emphasize the importance of adhering to Dharma in both personal and professional spheres. This ethical framework ensures fairness, compassion, and balance, preventing the exploitation of individuals or resources. By incorporating Dharma, IKS offers timeless guidance for promoting environmental sustainability and societal well-being &nbsp; <strong>4. Community-Centric Approach: </strong> Indian customs place a strong emphasis on a community-centric attitude, giving the welfare of the group precedence over personal goals. These traditions, which have their roots in ideas like Sarvodaya (the benefit of all) and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world as one family), promote inclusivity, cooperation, and shared prosperity. This philosophy is reflected in customs including joint family arrangements, resource sharing, and community farming. Social cohesiveness and group decision-making are promoted via festivals, customs, and village councils (panchayats). This strategy assures that progress benefits everyone, especially excluded groups, and reduces socioeconomic inequities. These tried-and-true ideas provide important guidance for attaining just and sustainable societal development in a period of increasing individualism. <strong>&nbsp;</strong> <strong>Gandhian Ideals and Their Roots in IKS</strong> <strong>&nbsp;</strong> The ideas of IKS and Mahatma Gandhi's ideology are very similar. Indigenous knowledge is the foundation of his support for Swaraj (self-rule), Sarvodaya (welfare for all), and Swadeshi (self-reliance). Important elements consist of : &nbsp; <strong>1. Education and Nai Talim: </strong> Gandhi's Nai Talim (Basic Education) approach reinterpreted education by fusing intellectual and moral growth with practical skills. Inspired by the ancient Gurukul system, it placed a strong emphasis on combining the hands, heart, and brain to promote holistic growth. Gandhi promoted craft-based education, which connected learning to real-world situations through activities like weaving, gardening, and spinning. This method sought to develop students' independence, social awareness, and ethical foundation. Nai Talim promoted worker dignity and social harmony by tying academic study to constructive employment. In contemporary settings, it continues to be a trailblazing paradigm for inclusive and socially conscious education. &nbsp; <strong>2. Sustainability and Non-Violence: </strong> Gandhi's fight against industrial exploitation and his idea of a simple life are in line with the sustainable customs that are ingrained in Indian culture. His support of ecological harmony, simplicity, and non-consumerism is consistent with traditional customs that placed a high value on harmony with the natural world. The teachings of Buddhism and Jainism, two essential elements of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), are the foundation of the Gandhian principle of ahimsa, or non-violence. Ahimsa encourages empathy and reverence for all living things, including the environment. Gandhi's focus on non-violence highlights how all beings are interconnected and promotes a morally sound strategy for addressing social and environmental issues. &nbsp; <strong>3. Economic Self-Reliance: </strong> Gandhi exemplifies the Swadeshi ethic by supporting Khadi and village industries and promoting economic independence through community empowerment and local resources. Gandhi aimed to improve rural economies, encourage local craftsmanship, and lessen reliance on imported commodities by promoting the manufacture of hand-spun fabric and small-scale companies. The ideas of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), which prioritize decentralized and independent economies, are consistent with this vision. IKS supports community-driven, sustainable development models that use local resources to address community needs, developing resilience and economic independence while advancing social and environmental well-being. &nbsp; <strong>4. Spirituality in Action: </strong> Gandhi saw spirituality not as a set of rituals but as a living, practical experience. Texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, which highlights the significance of living in line with one's highest principles and selfless action (Karma Yoga), served as motivation for him. According to Gandhi, genuine spirituality shows up in day-to-day activities via dedication to the truth, non-violence, and service to others. Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), which emphasize the incorporation of spiritual ideas into everyday life, are characterized by this idea of spirituality as action. Gandhi's strategy emphasizes how spirituality ought to direct moral behaviour, social justice, and individual development in practical settings. <strong>Contemporary Relevance of Gandhian Ideals and IKS</strong> &nbsp; The fusion of IKS with Gandhian principles in the present day provides answers to urgent global issues. Important application areas consist of: &nbsp; <strong>1. Education Reform: </strong> Modern schooling frequently places a strong emphasis on rote memorization, which inhibits creativity and critical thinking. By combining the holistic approach of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) with Gandhian ideas of experiential learning, education can change to promote creativity, moral reasoning, and problem-solving abilities. As seen by his idea of Nai Talim, Gandhi's emphasis on experiential learning motivates pupils to actively interact with their surroundings, fostering the development of moral character and practical knowledge. This is supported by IKS, which emphasizes self-awareness, connection, and the growth of a well-rounded person. These methods can be combined to develop pupils who are not only knowledgeable but also able to think critically and act morally. &nbsp; <strong>2. Sustainable Development: </strong> The ecological issues of the world necessitate a change to environmentally conscious, sustainable behaviours. Gandhian ideals, which emphasize non-exploitation and simple life, are consistent with the philosophy of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), which promotes sustainable solutions. Gandhi's dedication to self-reliance and environmentally sustainable methods, such organic farming and handcrafting, goes hand in hand with IKS's ingrained reverence for the natural world. When combined, these frameworks support organic farming, renewable energy, and conservation-based urban design. We can build resilient communities that successfully address today's environmental issues by incorporating these ideas into contemporary development techniques. These communities will strike a balance between ecological well-being and social and economic advancement. <strong>3. Inclusive Economy: </strong> Because the international economy frequently sustains exploitative regimes, inequality has increased. By highlighting local economies, cooperative structures, and ethical trade, a Gandhian-IKS framework provides a transformative approach. Gandhi encouraged community-driven economic growth by emphasizing self-sufficiency through Khadi and village businesses, which lessens dependency on international exploitation. IKS backs these concepts by appreciating decentralized economies and just, sustainable methods. Through the promotion of cooperative ownership and ethical commerce, this framework aims to establish fair economic structures that give social welfare, environmental conservation, and local empowerment top priority. In contrast to the existing economic model, it promotes inclusive growth and lessens systemic inequalities. &nbsp; <strong>4. Mental and Physical Health: </strong> Ayurveda and yoga's comebacks demonstrate the Indian Knowledge Systems' (IKS) enduring value in fostering holistic health, which emphasizes the union of the mind, body, and spirit. Together with Ayurveda's natural healing methods, yoga's focus on physical postures, breathing exercises, and meditation provides a holistic approach to wellness. In addition to these activities, Gandhi's principles of self-discipline, balance, and simplicity promote a way of living that supports mental and physical health. Amidst contemporary lifestyle problems like stress and chronic illness, this Gandhian-IKS viewpoint offers a balanced and sustainable route to health, promoting resilience and general well-being. &nbsp; <strong>Challenges in Reviving IKS Through Gandhian Ideals</strong> &nbsp; Although IKS and Gandhian ideals have great promise, their incorporation into modern systems is hampered by a number of issues: &nbsp; <strong>1. Westernization of Knowledge: </strong> Traditional knowledge systems are frequently marginalized by the predominance of Western paradigms in administration and education, which results in a one-size-fits-all strategy that ignores different cultural viewpoints. While indigenous and local knowledge systems, including those in agriculture, medicine, and spirituality, are either ignored or underestimated, Western forms of science, technology, and governance have been given precedence in many countries. In addition to undermining cultural identities, this marginalization reduces the possibility of finding different, situation-specific answers to today's problems. Societies can develop more inclusive, sustainable, and culturally appropriate frameworks for governance and education by acknowledging and incorporating traditional knowledge systems. &nbsp; <strong>2. Documentation and Standardization: </strong> Formalizing and incorporating Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) into mainstream frameworks is extremely difficult because a large portion of IKS is still undocumented or fragmented. Traditional knowledge, which is transmitted orally, through regional customs, and through community-based education, frequently lacks systematic recording or written records. It is challenging to retain, research, and use IKS in modern situations due to the lack of standardized formats. Furthermore, attempts to incorporate IKS into contemporary frameworks for development, policymaking, and education are hampered by its lack of official acknowledgment. Efforts must be directed on recording, conserving, and standardizing IKS in order to overcome this and guarantee their inclusion in future social advancements while honouring their indigenous context. &nbsp; <strong>3. Cultural Disconnection: </strong> Cultural alienation has increased as a result of rapid urbanization and globalization, particularly among younger generations. Traditional values, customs, and languages are being progressively disregarded in favour of contemporary, Westernized lifestyles as cities grow and the impact of the world grows. Cultural identity may erode as a result of younger people's inability to relate to or value indigenous customs due to their frequent exposure to global media and technology. The preservation of traditional knowledge, arts, and customs is at risk due to this gap. In order to overcome this, initiatives must be made to protect and promote indigenous traditions, giving future generations a sense of pride and continuity in the face of global change. &nbsp; <strong>4. Policy and Implementation Gaps: </strong> Although the importance of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) is becoming more widely acknowledged, turning these insights into workable policies is still a difficult task. IKS integration into contemporary frameworks for development, education, and governance calls for a great deal of work, cross-sector coordination, and alignment. It can be challenging for policymakers to reconcile traditional knowledge with modern demands, especially when it comes to formalizing and standardizing indigenous traditions. In order to execute policies effectively, academic institutions, governmental organizations, and local communities must work together and establish mechanisms for documenting, preserving, and promoting IKS in a way that is both pertinent and flexible enough to be used in contemporary settings. &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong>Pathways for Revival and Integration</strong> &nbsp; To overcome these obstacles, a multifaceted strategy is necessary: &nbsp; <strong>1. Policy Interventions: </strong> For ancient wisdom to be preserved and applied in contemporary settings, governments must give Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) top priority when developing policies related to education, health, and the environment. Incorporating Indian customs and cultural knowledge into the curriculum is emphasized in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which provides a potential foundation. It supports a comprehensive educational strategy that incorporates IKS with contemporary scientific knowledge, encouraging sustainability, moral principles, and community-driven growth. Governments can promote a more inclusive, sustainable, and culturally sensitive approach to national progress and well-being by coordinating health, education, and environmental policies with IKS. &nbsp; <strong>2. Research and Documentation: </strong> Bridging the gap between ancient wisdom and contemporary science requires systematic attempts to record and validate traditional knowledge. We may conserve important insights that have been refined over generations by meticulously documenting indigenous practices, such as those in agriculture, medicine, and environmental management. This documentation can serve as a basis for scientific investigation, presenting fresh viewpoints on resource management, sustainability, and health. Traditional knowledge has legitimacy and significance in modern circumstances when it is validated using exacting scientific methodologies. By ensuring that traditional knowledge is combined with contemporary advancements, such initiatives promote a more comprehensive and long-term method of problem-solving. &nbsp; <strong>3. Public Awareness: </strong> A strong sense of pride and ownership among residents can be fostered by public awareness initiatives that emphasize the importance of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) in daily life. These campaigns can assist people in understanding the importance of IKS in tackling current issues by demonstrating how traditional methods in fields like sustainability, health, and agriculture contribute to contemporary solutions. Cultural identity can be strengthened and sustainable living encouraged by supporting regional crafts, indigenous eating customs, and environmental care. These kinds of programs can encourage people to incorporate IKS into their everyday lives, fostering a sense of shared obligation to protect and uphold these priceless customs for coming generations. <strong>4. Collaborative Platforms: </strong> The practical application of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), which are in line with Gandhian ideals of independence, sustainability, and social welfare, can be greatly aided by collaborative platforms including academia, business, and communities. These platforms can help close the gap between traditional knowledge and contemporary technological breakthroughs by establishing partnerships. While enterprises can assist in scaling up indigenous practices for real-world application, academic institutions can investigate and validate them. Communities can offer insightful information about the local applicability of IKS, guaranteeing that the solutions are advantageous and suitable for the local culture. These partnerships foster equitable, sustainable development based on the Gandhian values of harmony, simplicity, and service. &nbsp; <strong>Conclusion</strong> &nbsp; Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) provide a potent framework for addressing the urgent issues of the modern world when examined through the prism of Gandhian principles. The fundamental ideals of IKS, which place a strong emphasis on ethical behaviour, sustainable living, and harmony with nature, are strongly aligned with Gandhiji's ideas of non-violence, truth, simplicity, and self-reliance. These principles align with global hopes for a more fair, sustainable, and just future where advancement is determined by societal and human well-being rather than merely financial gain. When IKS is combined with contemporary innovations and guided by Gandhian principles, a comprehensive strategy that fosters individual and group development is produced. Gandhian principles advocate for innovations that serve the larger good rather than just financial gain, and they urge for the reconciliation of ethical considerations with technological advancement. We may address environmental issues, social injustices, and moral conundrums by combining traditional knowledge with modern understanding, paving the way for a solution that preserves natural balance and human dignity. Gandhian values and IKS work together to provide a sustainable framework for the future that offers answers that are both realistic and ethically sound. More than just an academic endeavor, the resuscitation of this relationship is a cultural and moral necessity that guarantees the survival of India's age-old knowledge. With its foundation in Gandhian philosophy, IKS's insights provide a beacon of hope for bringing about world peace in today's fast changing world, where the need for ethical behaviour and sustainable development is more important than ever. This blending of ageless customs and cutting-edge technology has the power to uplift and impact public opinion, reinforcing India's position as a leader and source of knowledge in building a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable world for coming generations.

<strong>Introduction:</strong> In the realm of language teaching and learning, the humanistic approach is one of the most remarkable movements. It is such an approach where the learner is seen as a whole person with physical, emotional and social features as well as cognitive characteristics. It is pertinent to educate the whole person i.e. the intellectual and the emotional dimensions&rdquo; (Moskowitz,1978). It emphasizes the importance of the inner 1970, the behaviouristic and the mentalistic approaches dominated the second and some fresh suggestions came forward towards the end of the 1970s. At this juncture, the traditional roles of teaches and learners were redefined. That is to say, learners centered classrooms replaced the previously authoritarian teaching practices. It was the work of Cal Rogers and Abraham Maslow that accelerated the development of humanistic psychology in the early seventies which was called counseling learning. According to Rogers, the learners are not to be considered as a class but as a group. Curran(1972) suggests that the learners ought to be considered as clients&nbsp; and the teachers as `counselors&rsquo; who address the needs of the learners. He also believed that by this method, the anxiety or the fear of making a `fool&rsquo; of oneself will be lowered. Another goal of this kind of approach is to state concisely, learning out of interest and not out of compulsion. In this approach, It is&nbsp; also believed that students are able to self-evaluate themselves and realize their self-worth and responsibilities in the learning process that help them learn out of interest and not out of compulsion. In this approach, to state concisely, learning process becomes interesting to the students, teaching becomes plausible to the administrators. &nbsp; <strong>Literature Review:</strong> Widely discussed in the 1970s, humanistic way of language teaching integrates chiefly four methods. They are humanistic in the sense that humanistic attitude, more or less, lies in them and they spring from almost the similar psychological and philosophical concern. Now, a critical look has been given at them one by one. The Total Physical Response (TRP) Suggestopedia The Natural Approach Communicative Language Teaching(CLT) <strong>The Total Physical Response:</strong> Development by James Asher in 1970, the total physical response is based on the premise that just as an infant who acquires the first language by physically responding to its parents speeches one&nbsp; can acquire a second or foreign language too following the same approach. The teacher takes the role of the parent and helps the learners to get motivated and their self-confidence is boosted. However, the inherent weakness of this method is that it heavily relies on imperatives and is effective with only basic level learners, not with the advanced ones. This method is humanistic in the sense that it chiefly focuses on the idea that learning should be as fun and stress free as possible. <strong>Suggestopedia: </strong> Often considered to be the strangest of the so-called humanistic approaches suggestopedia was originally developed in the 1970s by the Bulgarian educator anxiety, increasing motivation, fostering the development of positive attitude towards language learning, promoting self-esteem as well as different learning styles&rdquo; (Arnold,1999). So, it is clear that the humanistic approach takes into account affective as well as cognitive aspects of learning when as EFL/ESL teacher attempts to extend the learner&rsquo;s language competence. <strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Origin and Background of Humanistic Movement in Education: </strong>It was the work of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow that accelerated the development of humanistic psychology in the early seventies century. Which was called counseling learning? The learners are considered as a group not as a class. Curran (1972) suggests that fact, Humanistic Education evolved from and derived its basic principles from Humanistic psychology- which originated in the meddle Ages when the philosophy of humanism was born. He also believed that by this method the anxiety or the fear of making a fool of oneself will be lowered. Another goal of this kind of approach is to perceive a teacher as an empathetic helping agent in the learning process and not as a threat. In this approach humanistic approach will be described. Second, the impact of humanistic approach on language teaching will be presented Finally, Bangladeshi context will be discussed. &nbsp; Relation between Humanistic psychology and Education: Though Carl Rogers applied Humanistic psychology to education Humanistic education evolved from and derived its basic principles from Humanistic psychology which originated in the Middle Ages whole the philosophy of humanism was born. <strong>Humanistic Education and CLT:</strong> Now a days the influence of humanistic approach strongly evident in CLT method. Gap Our updated curriculum tries to enhance the social emotional development of students over emphasis on subject matter in the classroom makes learning mechanical and ultimately this harms the balanced growth of students personality. We really need to be turning our students into individuals who believe in, respect and understand themselves respect and others who are responsible citizens and who can cope with their lives But Innovative methods such as Inter active and communicative Language Teaching. That work miracles in the west really do not socially and culturally suit, agree or work with most Asian and south East Asian foreign Language Learners (Mahboob and Selim, 2000) because it emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Nunans (1991) five features of CLT include; 1. An emphases on learners to communicate through interaction in the target language. 2. The introduction of authentic texts into the learner situation. 3. The provision of opportunities learners to focus not only on language but also on the learning process itself. 4. An enhancement of the learners own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning. 5. An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activities outside the classroom. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; CLT basically focuses on improving learner&rsquo;s communicative competence Canale and Swain (1980, p.4) defined communicative competence in terms of four components: I. Grammatical competence words and rule. II. Socio. Appropriate III. Discourse competence: Cohesion and Cober IV. Strategic competence appropriate use of communicating strategic. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Any teaching practice that helps students develop their communicative competence in an authentic context is deemed an acceptable and beneficial from of instruction. In the classroom CLT often takes the form of learning and group work requiring negotiation and co-operation be taken into consideration. Fluency based an activity that encores learners to develop their confidence role plays in which students practice and develop language functions, as well as judicious use of grammar and pronounce tic on focused activities. <strong>Merits of CLT: </strong> CLT is a holistic approach: It does not focus only on the traditional structural Syllabus. It takes into consideration the communicative dimension of language. CLT provides vitality and motivation within the classroom CLT is a learner contested approach, It capilizes on the interests and needs of the learners. Students still perceive their teachers in the traditional superior role and hence they cannot take on the Joint responsibility in their own learning process. This is where the function of humanistic educationist important as it is perhaps one of the few means by which learners can be some what equipped male ready or prepared for such student method, According to Huitt&rsquo;s (1995) systems model of human behavior the primary emphasis of humanistic education is on the regulatory system and the effective emotional system. The development of these systems is often overlooked in our present education system. <strong>Basic principles of Humanistic Education:</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; According to gage and Berliner (1991), some key underlying principles of humanistic education are &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 1. Give freedom to choose: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Students will learn more easily and quickly if it is some thing they need and want to learn, so, they should be allowed to choose what they want to learn. 2. Importance of knowing how to learn: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Students should be inspired to be self motivated and take the responsibility to their own learning. 3. Self evaluation is the first priority: The emphasis here is on internal development and self persuasion. 4. Humanistic education focuses on the whole person: here feelings are as important as facts:&nbsp; 5. Students learn best in a non threatening environment. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The environment should be psychologically and emotionally as well as physically non-threatening. &nbsp; <strong>Language teaching and humanistic Approach:</strong> &nbsp; Gertrude Moskowitz (1978) gives specific strategies of foreign language teaching which can help a teacher in integrating humanistic concepts into the existing curriculum. Below and the Fundamental tenets of humanistic education: Personal growth, including realizing ones full potential one of the primary goals of education. The development of human values should be ensured. 3. The learners should be engaged emotionally as well as intellectually. 4. Behaviors that course anxiety and stress should be avoided 5. Learners should be actively involved in the learners&rsquo; process. 6. Learners can and should tales responsibilities for their own learning Learners can and should take responsibilities for their own learning Stevick,(1990) mentions five emphases of humanism which serve an a guideline to the humanist teachers . Feeling: Personal emotions and aesthetic appreciations should be encouraged. Learners feelings are respected in a humanistic class room. Social relation: This encourages friendship and co- operation. The learner develops interpersonal skills that accelerate language learning. Responsibility: This aspect accepts the need for public scrutiny, criticism, and correction and disapproves of whomever or what ever denies their importance. Intellect: It includes knowledge, reason and understanding. This fought against whichever interferes with the free exercise of the mind. Self actualization: It is concerned with the quest for full realization of one&rsquo;s own cheapest true qualities. This aspect believes that the pursuit of uniqueness brings about liberation since conformity leads to enslavement. <strong>Implications of Humanistic Approach on Education:</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Affective education recognizes that any one who is teaching is dealing students and their feelings. Humanistic education aims at self actualization and it considered the fact that learning is affected by what students feels about themselves, and when they feel about themselves they are to be high achievers. Arthur Combs (1959) commented that a persons self- concept what he believes about himself is crucial for his growth and development because he carries his self concept with him to his class,&nbsp; his home and very where The humanistic Approach has important implication for education as it shifts the focus from teaching to learning This change of focus is crucially important because students do not always learn what the teacher teaches. Teaching is vitally important for language learning. In the formed context but the ultimate consideration is learning that is how much students learn from classroom Instruction or teaching. The humanistic Approach to teaching Advocated by Moskowitz (1978) and the humanistic psychology of learning has had a significant impact on our present understanding of learning. Education arms to facilitate change and learning which is only possible if one facilitates learning by establishing an interpersonal relationship with the learners. Humanistic education has a lot of to do with foreign language learning, if the foreign language is taught with positive feelings about themselves and their class mates it will help increase their self esteem and understanding of themselves and others. Once this self actualization occurs students would see the subject matter as self enhancing and related to their lives and they will be motivated to learn to use the foreign language. <strong>Language Programmes based on this approach Motivates learners:</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; During class activities and exercise the teacher has to build a rapport with learners so that they feel accepted and confident about themselves and their abilities. The class environment should be friendly, supportive, non threatening so that students can overcome their shyness, doubts, tensions and worries and participate in class activities and contribute to the learning process. Teacher must be a facilitator first: The teacher&rsquo;s role is important because he/she must facilitate learning and create a learning friendly atmosphere in the class. The teacher must be genuine and true in her/his efforts. He must trust accept and prize students as a worthy individual, she must openly communicate with his/her students and vice-versa, Secondly, the teacher can add humanistic touch to language teaching in the classroom. Learn student&rsquo;s nerve: it will give them a sense of individually and responsibility. &nbsp;&nbsp;Maintain Eye contact: when interacting with students the teacher can try to appear open and accessible to them. &nbsp;Exchange a little chit chat with the students it makes them important and human. &nbsp;Move around the class: It makes the class seem smaller and increases student involvement and participation. &nbsp; Thirdly, for improving class participation a learner can take strategies: such as <strong>Divide the class:</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Divide the class into groups according to ability and aptitude. This creates a positive learning atmosphere and helps both weak and bright learners. Engage group work have students participate in group work especially co- operative learning in order to develop social and affective skills ensure. <strong>Plans ensure the participation: </strong> Give instructions objectives and time management guidelines at the onset this saves time and the work is done. <strong>Give reward: </strong> Give credit and encouragement for participation in class activities and show your appreciation every time. &nbsp; <strong>Exchange ideas: </strong> Ask students to contribute materials, topics and ideas for their class it boosts their confidence <strong>Permit to work individually: </strong> Accept the learners individual differences let the work their won place <strong>Give assist &amp; support: </strong> Assist while they work help students having problems. Provide general support and approval help the students learn to set realistic goals ensure best accuse of <strong>Forget Language: </strong> Try to keep them using as much of the target language as is possible for them. Research Questions This research attempts to answer the following unresolved questions: <strong><em>Firstly,</em></strong> what are the pivotal problems of Humanistic approach to ELT in Bangladesh? <strong><em>Secondly,</em></strong> how can we get rid of these menaces to make sure the solution in Language teaching in Bangladesh? Objective of the study The study will be done for satisfying the following objectives: <strong>Broad Objective: </strong>The study is to analyze the major barriers in Humanistic approach to ELT (English Language Teaching) system during class room teaching and higher education stages in Bangladesh. In doing so, priority will be given to trace out the crucial loopholes of existing system in comparison with a standard philosophy. <strong>Specific Objectives:</strong> The specific objectives of the study are as follows: To argue why the system of investigation of the effective aspects of language learning by the learner&rsquo;s may lose any chance of retrieving the system of ELT by Humanistic approach from the malaise it has been suffering from. To examine whether existing philosophy and trends at the policy level are worthy anymore and what would be the future trends in ELT in Bangladesh. Methodology <strong>Nature of Study:</strong> This is an applied research which aims at solving specific practical problems. It is concerned with generating new information to serve current needs, solve problems or develop alternatives. To attain the objectives of the study the following research methods will be applied- <strong>Survey method:</strong> This method is selected to get inputs from face-to-face interview through a semi-structured questionnaire survey with a large number of stakeholders of effective Language learning system in Bangladesh (i.e. teachers, students, researcher &amp; fellow, and some key persons whose role is very crucial during learning stages and to record their understanding on the realities of the problem. <em>The students, teachers </em>to the Universities of Language center, and experts on the subjects will also be interviewed. The entire experimental method to observe cases from beginning to end is not adopted in this research due to the uncertainty involved in the humanistic approach and time constraint of the research. Therefore, survey method is adopted as it will be the most suitable scientific method for collecting cross-section data for this research. <strong>Observation and consultation: </strong>Since many qualitative aspects of the problem many not be clearly addressed through semi-structured questionnaire survey mentioned earlier, few observation of CLT &amp; ELT cases will be made to get firsthand knowledge on how students, learners and service providers are struggling with this system. Further, consultations will be conducted at a later stage of the research to collect relevant details on different important issues surfaced through questionnaire survey and observations made earlier. &nbsp; <strong>Probable outcome of the Research: </strong> At present in a situation like ours, there is a real need for language teachers to subscribe to humanistic Approach with from faith its psychological foundation. Because humanistic education is concerned while educating and emotional dimension In the traditional education methods the subject contest was poured into the students who were taken to be empty vessels waiting to be filled up by the teachers on the On the other hand in humanistic method a classroom becomes lively and which is full of learning activities in which students actively and enthusiastically participate and they are respected as human beings by the teachers. A learner in an individual method who needs to understand himself and communicate himself to others. <strong>Implications of the Humanistic Approach in the Context of Bangladesh</strong> In an ideal language classroom where achieving communicative competence is the main objective of learning, the relation between the learner and the teacher is vitally important. As the learners are to respect and obey their teachers, the teachers, too, should value the feelings and emotions of the learners. But in our culture it is commonly seen that the learners respect their teachers whereas the teachers, taking this advantage, dominate the class almost as dictators. Obviously, in such a class the situation appears as a barrier to enhancing communicative competence. Here, the humanistic approach suggests that the teachers should have, as the learners have, respected for the emotions and feelings of the learners. No doubt, in the atmosphere where the teacher is a mediator. a facilitator, a motivator, a co-participant, but in n way a dictator, learners learn the language best. &nbsp;In a pleasant, non-threatening and congenial learning environment, the learner can perform and practice independently and gradually reach his optimum goal. But in our context we see a distorted, despicable and dismal picture of language classroom where the teacher controls everything and the learner is a passive recipient of what is given. In many cases the learners even cannot express their feelings, ask any question or talk at all in the classroom. In this situation we can have benefit from humanistic teaching since it affirms that a non-threatening classroom environment is a must for the language learner to develop the language skills. It would not be unwise to say that the more actively the learners are involved in the classroom activities, the more rapidly and successfully will they learn the target language. But, regrettably in the traditional classrooms f our country, learners are still treated as empty vessels or mere passive recipients. Though Bangladesh still sticks to the misconception of treating learners as empty vessels, huge researches show that learners should be the centre of the learning process including all classroom procedures and activities. To learn the language faster and more effectively, the learners must be involved in the classroom activities emotionally and intellectually. Supporting this view, Breen and Candlin remark that the learner &ldquo;should contribute as much as he gains, and thereby learn in an independent way&rdquo; ( cited in Richards and Rodgers, 1980). This is one of the striking implications of humanistic language teaching. Therefore, the language learners in Bangladesh can have maximum benefit if the principles of the humanistic approach are strictly implemented. &nbsp;In our country it is still seen that students memorize paragraphs, letters, applications, essays etc. That is the picture of cramming just before the examination and vomiting in the examination is very common. This is why, when the students o outside the classroom. They cannot effectively use the language in real life situations. Humanistic teaching advocates fostering creativity and confidence in language learners. It is believed that the learner,&nbsp; to learn a foreign language successfully, will emotionally engage himself in the learning process, creatively construct meaning by participating in authentic and genuine classroom activities in which making errors is thought to be an integral part of effective learning. Therefore, humanistic teaching can of course, be a constructive suggestion for the teachers in our context who are still on wrong track of leading the learners towards cramming instead of creativity. Humanistic language teaching encourages pair work as well as group work. It also focuses on the learner&rsquo;s ideas and realizations are marvelously diverse. As in Bangladesh in one language classroom the teacher has to deal with more than fifty students on average, he, following the humanistic model can design the classroom activities with pair work and group work. Again, when the students are of heterogeneous linguistic levels, the teacher can allow autonomy to every individual learner so that he can grow up in an independent way. &nbsp; <strong>Conclusion</strong> Humanistic approach to teaching seeks to emphasize that the effective aspects of language learning are as important as the cognitive aspects. That is both affective and effective aspects are equally important in language learning. There fore, teachers pay attention to the students emotional state which has a considerable impact on their language performance and practices? In a non-threatening and pleasurable environment that humanistic teaching offers, learners grow the ability of learning autonomy and feel motivated to learning new linguistic behaviors. So in language teaching, teachers should consider the affective factors to achieve in language teaching. Though humanistic language teaching has been supported by many scholars, there are some opponents who are dead against it . For example, Gadd( 1998) finds fault with English teachers for using techniques which involve the emotions or the inner self. He also speaks of liberation the teacher from the inappropriate and oppressive role of nature of the inner self. Actually, Gadd&rsquo;s arguments are either not well founded or misleading. No humanistic teachers or theorists ever talk substituting the cognitive for effective, but rather about adding the affective, both to facilitate the cognitive in language learning and to encourage the development of the whole person&rdquo;(Arnold, 1998). Besides, such problems are solved if it is kept in mind that humanistic teaching is not conceived of as something to be imposed from above upon an unwilling teacher or to be prescribed for all teacher. &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong>References: </strong> Arnold&rsquo;s. (1998): Towards more humanistic English teaching. ELT Journal, 52(3),235-242.(1999). Affect in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 227. Canale, M,, and M. Swain(1980): Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching.&nbsp; Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 1-47, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/1.1.1 Curran, C.A.(1972): Counseling- Learning: A Whole person model for education, New York:&nbsp; Grune and Stratton. Gadd, N.(1998): Towards less humanistic English Teaching.ELT Journal, 52(3), 223-233.&nbsp; doi:10.1093/elt/52.3.223. Ghaith, G. and H. Diab(2008): Determinants of EFL achievement among Arab college bound learners. Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, 1(4), 278-286. Lei,Q.(2007): EFL teachers factors and students affect, US- China Education Review, 4(3), 60-67.doi:10.2307/1170741. Maskowitz,G.(1978): caring and Sharing in the Foreign language class: A Sourcebook on Humanistic Techniques. Massachusetts: Newbury House. Mc.Kenna.G.(1995): Learning theories made easy: Humanism. Nursing Standard. 2(9),29-31. Numan,D.(1991): Communicative Tasks and the Language curriculum. TESOL Quarterly, 25(2), 279-295. Richards, J.C. and T.S. Rodgers (1986): Approaches and methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevick, E.W.(1990): Humanism in language teaching: A critical perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wang&rsquo;s.(2005): Humanistic approach and affective factors in foreign language teaching. Sino-US English Teaching.2 (5),1-5. Doi:10.1207/s15430421tip4102-2

<strong>Gyeongsang University Turnitin Trash Files</strong> <strong>HUMAN CAPITAL NEXUS AND GROWTH OF NIGERIA ECONOMY</strong> <strong>CHAPTER ONE</strong> <strong>INTRODUCTION</strong> <strong>Background to the Study </strong> Government expenditure equally known as public spending simply refers to yearly expenditure by the public sector (government) in order to achieve some macroeconomic aims notably high literacy rate, skilled manpower, high standard of living, poverty alleviation, national productivity growth, and macro-economic stability. It is also expenditure by public authorities at various tiers of government to collectively cater for the social needs of the people. Generally, it has been revealed that public expenditure plays a key role in realizing economic growth. This is because providing good education to individuals is one of the principal avenues of improving human resource quality in any economy. From this perspective, advancing school enrolment may subsequently lead to economic growth. Therefore, education remains the effective way to subdue poverty, illiteracy, underfeeding and accelerate economic growth in the long-term. Much attention has been channeled towards clarifying the relationship between education and economic growth, and so, has led to series of studies by economists over the past 30 years. There is substantial literature to back the fact that correlation exists between the two. (Sylvie, 2018). In line with the views of Hadir and Lahrech (2015), the fact that humans are the most worthy assets remains undisputable in both developed and developing countries. Therefore efficiency in human resource management is pertinent if development must be realized. In this sense, the major gateway to development is adequate investment in human capital which may be described as an individual&rsquo;s potential economic value in terms of skills, knowledge, and other intangible assets. In order to realize the well-known macroeconomic objective of economic growth, Nigeria being a developing country embarked on some programs in the educational sector with the aim of boosting human capital development. However, these programs have only served as conduits for enriching the corrupt political elite. Given the high prospects of achieving economic growth in Nigeria and the place of human capital development in its actualization, education, therefore, remains a top priority for the Nigeria government as well as concerned researchers. Thus, this study is one among other concerned studies that will attempt to examine economic growth and human capital nexus in Nigeria through education variables. In particular, using education as a measure of human capital, it will attempt to explore the impact of education variables on the growth of Nigeria&rsquo;s economy. According to Wamboye, (2015), education makes way for vital knowledge, skills, techniques and information for individuals to function in family and society. Education can groom a set of educated leaders to take on jobs in government services, public and private firms, and domestic and foreign firms. The growth of education can provide all kinds of grooming that would foster literacy and basic skills. Though alternative investments in the economy could generate more growth, it must not deviate from the necessary contributions; economic as well as non-economic, that education can make and has made to expediting macroeconomic growth (Clark, 2015). Todaro and Smith in Clark (2015), likewise called attention to the fact that, extension of education lead to an increasingly gainful labor force and provide it with expanded information and abilities, and boost employment and income-earning avenues for educators, schools, and employees. Economic growth, proxied by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), gives numerous advantages which include increasing the general living standard of the masses as estimated by per capita pay (income), making the distribution of income simpler to accomplish, thus, shortening the time span needed to achieve the fundamental needs of man to a considerable majority of the masses. The main source of per capita yield (output) in any nation, regardless of whether it is advanced or developing, is really increment in &#39;human productivity&#39;. Per capita yield (output) growth is notwithstanding a significant aspect of economic prosperity (Abramowitz, 1981). For the most part, it has been uncovered that individuals are the most important source of productivity growth and economic prosperity. Technology and technological hardware are the results of human inventions and innovativeness. The suggestion of UNESCO, that 26% of yearly planned expenditure (budget) in developing nations should be dedicated to education has become intangible, particularly in Nigeria. Planned expenditure on education in Nigeria ranges from only 5%-7% of total planned expenditure. The impact of the above situation on the economic prosperity of the nation as it concerns human capital development, capacity building, infrastructural advancement, etc, is troubling. On this note, the necessity of a well-thought out plan for rectifying this unwanted situation can&#39;t be over stressed. &nbsp; <strong>1.2 Statement of the Problem </strong> Sikiru (2011) as cited in Ajibola (2016) rightly pointed out that the role of education in any economy is no longer business as usual because of the knowledge based globalized economy where productivity greatly depends on the quantity and quality of human resource, which itself largely depends on investment in education. Governments continue to increase spending on education with a view toward enhancing the standard of education, build human capacity and attainment of economic growth. Ironically, this effort by government is still a far cry of UNESCO&rsquo;s recommendation of 26% total annual budget to education, and so, has not yielded the expected results. Thus, researchers sought to understand the relationship between government expenditure on education and economic growth and how they influence each other. These researches on the above subject matter, have given rise to divergent school of thoughts. Over time, Nigeria has indicated willingness to develop&nbsp; education in order to curtail illiteracy and quicken national development. Anyway regardless of the irreproachable evidence that education is key to the improvement of the economy; there exists a wide loop-hole in accessibility, quality and fairness (equity) in education (Ayo, 2014). Empirically verifiable facts in recent years have indicated that the Nigeria&nbsp;education system has continuously turned-out graduates who overtime have defaulted in adapting to evolving techniques and methods of production; due to inadequate infrastructure, underfunding, poor learning aids, outmoded curriculum, dearth of research and development. This has resulted to drastic reduction in employment and the advent of capacity underutilization. This paper assesses growth of Nigeria economy in relation to government expenditure on education and school enrollment from 1981 to 2018. Frequent adjustments and changes in education system in Nigeria, points to the fact that, all is not well with the countries education system. Government have experimented 6-3-3-4, 9-3-4 systems of education, among others. Enrollment in schools forms the main part of investment in human capital in most of the world&rsquo;s societies (Schultz, 2002). There are several explanations concerning why improvement in scholastic quality is not forthcoming in Nigeria as regards the above subject matter. Researchers disagree on whether changes in education attainment levels alters economic growth rate in the long-term. &nbsp;&ldquo;In Nigeria, average public education expenditure to total government expenditure between 1981 and 2018 is 5.68 per cent. It ranged between 0.51 and 10.8 per cent during the period under review&rdquo; (CBN Statistical Bulletin, 2019). However, the major problem therefore, is that despite an increase in the numeric value of budgetary allocation to education in Nigeria over the years, they still fall short of 26 % UNESCO,S recommendation. For instance, 2014, 10.6%; 2015, 9.5%; 2016, 6.1%, 2017, 5.41%, 2018, 7.0% and 2019, 7.2% percent respectively of total annual budget to education. The statistics presented above indicates that investment in education has not produced the desired level of human capital and economic growth in Nigeria. These uncertainties as it relates to government expenditure on education, school enrollment and growth of Nigeria economy gave birth to this research work. Furthermore, most studies relating to the subject matter, conducted analysis on times series data without subjecting these data sets to structural breaks, thereby giving rise to spurious results and therefore, unreliable recommendations. For instance, unit root test with structural breaks were not employed in majority of these studies. <strong>1.3 Research Questions </strong> The issues raised above have provoked series of questions which this study attempts to provide answers. These questions include; i. To what extent does government expenditure on education affect growth of Nigeria economy? ii. To what extent does primary school enrollment affect growth of Nigeria economy? iii. To what extent does secondary school enrollment affect growth of Nigeria economy? iv. To what extent does tertiary school enrollment affect growth of Nigeria economy? <strong>1.4 Objectives of the Study </strong> The main objective of the study is to access the effect of government expenditure on education and growth of Nigeria economy. Specific objectives of the study are to; i. Access the effect of government expenditure on growth of Nigeria economy. ii. Access the effect of primary school enrollment on growth of Nigeria economy. iii. Access the effect of secondary school enrollment on growth of Nigeria economy. iv. Access the effect of tertiary school enrollment on growth of Nigeria economy. <strong>1.5 Hypotheses of the Study </strong> The following hypotheses were tested in this study. i. Government expenditure on education has no significant effect on growth of Nigeria economy. ii. Primary school enrollment has no significant effect on growth of Nigeria economy. iii. Secondary school enrollment has no significant effect on growth of Nigeria economy. iv. Tertiary school enrollment has no significant effect on growth of Nigeria economy. <strong>1.6 Scope of the Study </strong> The study covers the time series analysis of government expenditure on education, school enrolment; primary, secondary and tertiary, and growth of Nigeria economy from 1981 to 2018. Based on available data. Justification for this study is on the premise that, time series data used for the study is a current data on government expenditure on education, education enrolment and economic growth in Nigeria. This study used annual data for the period 1981-2018, collected from the CBN Statistical Bulletin (2019) and World Bank databank. Variables employed for the study include; Real GDP Per Capita, government expenditure on education, primary, secondary and tertiary school enrolment. <strong>1.7 Significance of the Study </strong> Models of economic growth provide useful predictions that inform decisions made by policy makers. Agreeing with policy options based on inaccurate research studies could undermine government intervention particularly in the education sector. A good perception of the interaction among investment in education, its outcome, school enrolment and economic growth is appropriate policy measure, guarantees human capital development. Thus, a representative model that take cognisance of inter-play among public education expenditure, school enrolment and growth of the economy will lead to adequate disbursement and utilization of government funds. The outcome of this research will serve as a tool for policy makers in the Ministries of Finance, Education and the National Planning Commission including regulatory agencies not mentioned here. It will also serve as a reference material for subsequent research work in this field. <strong>1.8 Limitation of the Study </strong> This research x-rays Government Expenditure on Education, school (primary, secondary and tertiary) enrolment as they relate to Growth of Nigeria Economy. Time series data covering the period 1981 to 2018 is used for this study. A study undertaken in 2020, but can not access 2019 data on the variables used, stand as one of the limitations, since lag periods are essential in policy implementation. Data availability, genuineness and accuracy of same, time and financial constraints, constitute limitations to this research work. Effect of corruption on government expenditure and outbreak of Corona virus, resulting to closure of tertiary institutions in Nigeria, also constitute limitation to this study. <strong>1.9 Organization of the Study </strong> This research work comprises of five (5) chapters, these includes; Chapter one: this consists of background to the study, Problem Statement, research questions, research hypothesis and scope of the study. Chapter two: consisting of conceptual framework, theoretical review, review of related literatures and theoretical framework. Chapter three: explained the methodology this research adopted. Chapter four: presentation of results and discussion of findings. Chapter five: consists of summary of findings, conclusion, policy recommendation, contribution to knowledge and suggestion for further studies.&nbsp; <strong>CHAPTER TWO</strong> <strong>LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORITICAL FRAMEWORK</strong> <strong>2.1 Conceptual Review</strong> <strong>2.1.1 Government&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </strong> Government is the sector of the economy focusing on giving different public services. Its structure differs by nation, yet in many nations, government involves such services as infrastructure, military, police, public travel, government provided education, alongside medical services and those working for the public sector itself, like, elected authorities. The government may offer types of assistance that a non-taxpayer can&#39;t be barred from, (for example, street lighting), goods which aids all of society instead of benefiting only one person. Finances for government goods and services are generally obtained through various techniques, including taxes, charges, and through monetary transfers from different tiers of government (for example from federal to state government). Various governments from around the globe may utilize their own strategies for financing public goods and services. <strong>2.1.2 Government Expenditure</strong> Government Expenditure refers to government spending both capital and recurrent. For the purpose of this study we limited our scope to government educational expenditure in Nigeria. The theory of government expenditure is the theory of the costs of availing goods and services through planned spending (budget). There are two ways to deal with the subject of growth of government, precisely, the expansion in total size of government spending and the expansion of government in terms of economic magnitudes. Government expenditure is spending made by the public sector (government) of a nation on aggregate needs and wants, for example, pension and arrangement of infrastructure, among others. Until the nineteenth century, government speding was constrained, as free enterprise theorists believed that financial resources left in the private sector could lead to higher returns. In the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes advocated the job of government spending in influencing levels of wages and income distribution in the economy. From that point forward government spending has demonstrated an expanding pattern. The public expenditure trend of the government of a nation is essentially the manner in which assets (resources) are distributed to the various segments of the economy where spending is required. It is exemplified in the government&rsquo;s ways of spending money. In analyzing the trend of government spending hence, it is critical to realize that under a federal system of administration, government job in dealing with the economy is the joint duty of the different tiers of government (Eze and Ikenna 2014). <strong>2.1.3 Human Capital </strong> By and large, human capital is characterized as all skills that are indistinguishably helpful to numerous organizations, including the training organization. Industry-specific skills, conversely, foster efficiency (productivity) just in the industry in which the skills were obtained. In a serious market setting, laborers consistently get a pay that approaches their minor profitability and in this manner, on account of general human capital, laborers win a similar compensation any place they work. <strong>2.1.4 Economic Growth</strong> As per Haller (2012), economic growth or economic expansion means the way toward expanding the size of a country&rsquo;s economy, its macro-economic indicators, particularly the per capita GDP, in an incremental yet not mandatorily linear course, with beneficial outcomes on the socio-economic sector. IMF (2012) perceives economic expansion as the expansion in the market worth of commodities created in a country over a period of time after discounting for inflation. The rate of increment in real Gross Domestic Product is often used as an estimate of economic expansion. In the perspectives of Kimberly (2012), economic expansion is an expansion in the creation of commodities. Any expansion in the worth of a nation&rsquo;s created commodities is likewise characterized as economic expansion. Economic expansion means an expansion in real GNP per unit of labor input. This relates to labor efficiency variation with time. Economic expansion is routinely estimated with the pace of increment in GDP. It is often estimated in real terms (deducting the impact of inflation on the cost of all commodities created). Growth improves the living standard of the individuals in that specific nation. As per Jhingan (2004), one of the greatest aims of money policy approach as of late has been quick macroeconomic expansion. He thus, characterized economic prosperity (growth) as the event whereby the real per capita earnings (income) of a nation increments over a significant stretch of time. Economic expansion is estimated by the expansion in the quantity of commodities created in a nation. An expanding economy creates more commodities in each subsequent timespan. In this manner, growth happens when an economy&#39;s capacity to produce increases which in turn, is utilized to create a greater quantity of commodities. In a more extensive perspective, economic expansion means increasing the living standard of individuals, and reducing disparities in earnings. &nbsp; <strong>2.1.5 </strong><strong>Gross Domestic Product</strong> - GDP Investopedia designates Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the financial worth of marketable commodities created in a nation during any given duration of time. It is normally computed on a yearly or a quarterly premise. It comprises household and government consumption, government pay-outs, investments and net exports that exist in a sovereign territory. Set forth plainly, GDP is a broad estimation of a country&#39;s aggregate economic activity. &nbsp; <strong>2.1.6 Education</strong> There is no singular meaning of education and this is on the grounds that it indicates various things to various individuals, cultures and societies (Todaro and Stephen, 1982). Ukeje (2002), considers education to be a process, a product and a discipline. When viewed as a process, education is a group of activities which involves passing knowledge across age-groups (generations). When viewed as a product, education is estimated by the characteristics and attributes displayed by the educated individual. Here, the informed (educated) individual is customarily considered to be an informed and refined individual. While as a discipline, education is perceived in terms of the pros of well-structured knowledge which learners are acquainted with. Education is a discipline concerned with techniques of giving guidance and learning in institutions of learning in lieu of informal socialization avenues like rural development undertakings and education via parent-child interactions). It comprises both inherent (intrinsic) and instrumental worth. It is attractive for the person as well as for the general public. Education as private commodity directly aids the individuals who get it, which thusly influences the person&#39;s future pay (income) stream. At the macroeconomic level, a workforce that is superior in terms of education is thought to expand the supply of human capital in the economy and increment its efficiency (productivity). Considering the externalities pervasive in education, it is broadly acknowledged that the state has a key task to carry out in guaranteeing fair distribution of educational chances (opportunities) to the whole populace. This is especially critical in developing nations, for example, Nigeria that experiences the ill effects of elevated poverty levels, inequality and market imperfections. Enrolment might be viewed as the process of commencing participation in a school, which is the number of learners (students) adequately registered as well as participating in classes (Oxford dictionaries). 2.1.7 Primary Education Pupils usually commence learning at the elementary level when they are as old as 5 years or more. Pupils go through 18 terms equivalent to 6 years at the elementary level and may be awarded a first school leaving certification upon successful completion of learning. Subjects treated at the elementary stage comprise arithmetic, foreign and indigenous languages, culture, home economics, religious studies, and agric science. Privately owned institutions of learning may opt to treat computer science, and fine arts. It is mandatory to participate in a Common Entrance Examination in order to meet requirements for induction into secondary institutions of learning. <strong>2.1.8 Secondary Education In Nigeria</strong> Decades after the advancement of elementary education, government gave attention to secondary education, because of the requirement for pupils to advance their education in secondary schools. Secondary education is defined as the completion of fundamental education that started at the elementary level, and seeks to establish the frameworks for long-term learning and human development, by providing subject and skill-centred guidance. It is equally a link between elementary learning and tertiary learning. It is given in two phases, junior and senior levels of three years each and it is six-year duration. It was only in 1909 that the colonial administration began to supplement the endeavors of the Christian Missions in giving secondary education. This was when King&#39;s College was established in Lagos as the colonial government&#39;s secondary institution of learning. As per Adesina and Fafunwa , numerous laws were enacted to improve the condition of secondary education in Nigeria. For the duration of the time the nation was under Colonial Governments, there were scarcely any secondary schools to give secondary education to those that were then ready to gain it. 2.1.9 Tertiary Education Institutions of tertiary learning comprise universities, colleges of education, polytechnics and monotechnics. Government has dominant control of university education, and regulates them through National Universities Commission (NUC). At the university level, first year selection criteria include: At least 5 credits in not more than two sittings in WAEC/NECO; and a score above the 180 benchmark in the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board Entrance Examination (JAMB). Prospective entrants who hold satisfactory national certificates of education (NCE) or national diplomas (ND) having 5 or more ordinary level credits may gain direct entry into universities at the undergraduate level. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <strong>2.2 Theoretical Review</strong> <strong>2.2.1 Wagner&rsquo;s Law of Expending State Activity </strong> Public expenditure has one its oldest theories rooted in Adolph Wagner&rsquo;s (1883) work. A German economist that came up with a fascinating hypothesis of development in 1883 which held that as a country builds its public sector up, government spending will consequently become more significant. Wagner built up a &ldquo;law of increasing state activity&quot; after empirical investigation on Western Europe toward the conclusive part of the nineteenth century. Wagner&#39;s Law as treated to in Likita (1999) contended that government administration development is a product of advancement in industrialization and economic development. Wagner believed that during industrialization, the expansion of real earnings per capita will be accompanied by increments in the portion of government spending in total spending. He stated that the coming of industrial communities can bring about greater political impetus for social advancement and expanded earnings. Wagner (1893) stated three central reasons for the expansion in state spending. To start with, activities in the public sector will supplant non-private sector activities during industrialization. State duties like authoritative and defensive duties will increment. Furthermore, governments will be expected to give social services and government assistance like education, and public health for the elderly, subsidized food, natural hazards and disaster aids, protection programs for the environment and social services. Thirdly, industrial expansion will lead to novel&nbsp; technology and erode monopoly. Governments will need to balance these impacts by offering public goods through planned spending. Adolf Wagner in Finanzwissenschaft (1883) and Grundlegung der politischen Wissenschaft (1893) identified state spending as an &ldquo;internal&rdquo; factor, controlled by the development of aggregate earnings. Thus, aggregate earnings give rise to state spending. Wagner&#39;s may be viewed as a long-term phenomenon which is best observed with lengthy time-series for better economic interpretation and factual (statistical) derivations. This is because these patterns were expected to manifest after 5 or 10 decades of present day industrial community. The hypothesis of public spending is the hypothesis of the costs of availing commodities through planned government spending as well as the theory of policies and laws enacted to bring about private spending. Two ways to deal with the topic of the growth of the government sector are, namely, the expansion in volume of non-private spending and the expansion of non-private sector. Okafor and Eiya (2011) investigated the factors responsible for increment of government spending utilizing BLUE-OLS estimator. They discovered that population, government borrowing, government income, and inflation significantly affected government at the 5% level, while inflation most certainly did not. Further, Edame (2014) examined the predictive factors of state infrastructure spending in Nigeria, utilizing error correction modeling. In this study, it was found that growth-pace of urbanization, public income, density of population, system of government, and foreign reserves collectively or separately impact Nigeria&rsquo;s state infrastructure spending. &nbsp; <strong>2.2.3</strong><strong>The Classical Theory of Economic Growth</strong> This theory signifies the underlying structure of economic reasoning and Adam Smith&#39;s &quot;The Wealth of Nations&quot; (1776) typically paves the way for classical economics. Prominent and remarkable advocates of the classical school are: Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1823), Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), Karl Marx (1818-1883), John Stuart Mill (1808-1873), Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) and so on. Basically Smith&#39;s theory says that the endowment of countries was put together not with respect to gold, but with respect to commerce: As when two economic agents trade valuable commodities, in order to reap the benefits of trade, endowment grows. The classicalists see that markets are self-regulating, when liberated from compulsion. The classicalists termed this figuratively as the &quot;invisible hand&quot;, which establishes equilibrium, when consumers choose among various suppliers, and failure is allowed among firms that fail to compete successfully. The classicalists often warned against the risks of &ldquo;trust&rdquo;, and emphasized on free market economy (Smith, 1776). Adam Smith connected the expansion in endowment of individuals to the expansion of the yield of production factors, which manifests in the improvement of productivity of labor and an expansion in the quantity of working capital. Much scrutiny was given to population expansion, to the expansion in the portion of laborers in material production, to investment and geographical findings, which added to far-reaching prosperity. The perspectives of Thomas Malthus on economic expansion, portraying the expansion of populace and the expansion in production appeared pessimistic. As per Malthus, when the proportion between population expansion and subsistence methods&nbsp; remains, when the populace is expanding increasingly, and subsistence methods expand steadily, the aftermath will be inadequate earth resources (land), and consequently a severe battle for few resources, the prevalence of wars, plagues, hunger, mass illness, etc (Ojewumi and Oladimeji, 2016). As a solution to this issue, Malthus proposed to limit the growth of the populace by the &quot;call to prudence&quot;, particularly the impoverished, and the birth of children on the bases that they were to be provided with decent means of subsistence. One among the most compelling classicalists was David Ricardo (1772 &ndash; 1823). Apparently, the hypothesis of comparative advantage which recommends that a country should engage exclusively in internationally competitive businesses and trade with different nations to acquire commodities lacking domestically is his most notable contribution. He contended the possibility of the presence of a natural market wages and expected that new technologies will result to a fall in the demand for labor. John Stuart Mill (1808-1873) to a great extent summarized the past ideologies of the classicalists. Specifically, he finished the classicalists&rsquo; hypothesis of economic dynamics that considers long-term economic patterns. At the core of this idea is the unceasing amassing of capital. As indicated by the hypothesis, the expansion in capital prompts an increment in the need for labor, and zero population growth gives rise to increment in real earnings, and therefore gives rise to population expansion in the long-run. When the amassing of capital is quicker than the expansion in the workforce, both of these processes can, in principle, remain forever. Increment in the quantity of laborers means having more &quot;mouths&quot;, hence the expansion in the demand for consumption and particularly for food. Food created in agribusiness, which, as we know, characterized by diminishing returns to scale. Therefore, issues of diminishing marginal productivity of capital emerge and the fall of incentives to invest. <strong>2.2.4 The Keynesian Approach of Public Expenditure </strong> John M. Keynes (1936), a British Economist and the pioneer of macroeconomics contended that public spending is a crucial determinant of economic posperity. Keynes hypothesis clearly stated that fiscal policy instrument (for example government expenditure) is a significant apparatus for obtaining stability and better economic expansion rate in the long-term. To obtain stability in the economy, this hypothesis endorses government action in the economy through macroeconomic policy especially fiscal policy. From the Keynesian view, government spending will contribute incrementally to economic expansion. Keynes contended that it is necessary for government to mediate in the economy since government could change financial downturns by raising finances from private borrowing and afterward restoring the funds to the private sector through several spending programs. Likewise, government capital and recurrent spending in the structure provision of class rooms, research centers, acquisition of teaching and learning aids including PCs and payment of salary will have multiplier effects on the economy. Spending on education will boost productivity as well as advancement by improving the quality of labour. It will likewise help in developing a stream of educated administrators in both the private and public sectors of the economy. Keynes classified public spending as an exogenous variable that can create economic prosperity rather than an endogenous phenomenon. In summary, Keynes acknowledged the functioning of the government to be significant as it can prevent economic downturn by expanding aggregate demand and in this manner, switching on the economy again by the multiplier effect. It is an apparatus that proffers stability the short-term yet this should be done carefully as excessive government spending leads to inflation while lack of spending aggravates unemployment. &nbsp; <strong>2.2.5 </strong><strong>Human Capital Theory</strong> Human capital theory, at first developed by Becker (1962), contends that workers have a set of abilities which they can improve or acquire by learning and instruction (education). Be that as it may, human capital hypothesis often assume for the most part expect that experiences are converted into knowledge and skills. It helps us comprehend the training activities of organizations. It (re-)introduced the view that education and training add up to investment in future efficiency (productivity) and not only consumption of resources. From this viewpoint, both firms and labourers rely upon investment in human capital to foster competitiveness, profitability, and earnings. In spite of the fact that these advantages are self-evident, these investments are tied to some costs. From the firm&#39;s perspective, investment in human capital contrast from those in physical capital, because the firm doesn&#39;t gain a property right over its investment in skills, so it and its employees need to agree on the sharing of costs and benefits derived from these investments. While investment in physical capital are solely the organization&#39;s own choice, investment in the abilities (skills) of its workforce include interaction with the workers to be groomed. In the basic formulation, Becker, assuming that commodity and labour markets are perfectly competitive, introduced the distinction between firm-specific and general human capital to answer the question: who bears the expenses of training? &nbsp; <strong>2.2.6 Neoclassical Growth Theories </strong> The neoclassical development hypotheses arose in the 1950s and 1960s, when regard for the issues of dynamic equilibrium declined and the issue of actualizing growth potentials through the adoption of novel technology, boosting productivity and improving the organization of production gained popularity. The principle advocates of this school are Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), Leon Walras (1834-1910), William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), Irving Fisher (1867-1947) and others. The American economist Robert Solow (1924-present) along with other economists opposed the state&#39;s participation and rather supported the notion of permitting firms to competitively grow by utilizing the majority of the assets accessible to them. They hinged on the production theory and marginal productivity theory from the classical school, according to which, the earnings obtained production factors depend on their marginal products. Neoclassical scholars disagreed with neo-Keynesian views on growth on three grounds (UN, 2011): Firstly, in light of the fact that they are centered around capital accumulation, overlooking land, labour, technology and so on; On the second note, owing to the fact that they are rooted in the unchanging nature of capital share in earnings (income); On the third note, while the neoclassicists recognized the self-restoring equilibrium of the market mechanism, the former overlooked it. On this premise, they identified inflationary government spending as a source of instability in the economy. <strong>2.2.7 The Endogenous Growth Theory</strong> This was created as a response to exclusions and inadequacies in the Solow-Swan model. This theory throws light on long-term economic expansion pace based on the pace of population expansion and the pace of technical advancement which is autonomous with regards to savings rate. Since long-term economic expansion rate depended on exogenous factors, Romer (1994) saw that the neoclassical hypothesis had hardly limited implications. As per Romer, in models with exogenous technical change and exogenous population expansion, it never truly made a difference what the public administration did. The new growth theory doesn&#39;t rebuff the neoclassical growth theory. Perhaps it broadens the neoclassical growth hypothesis by incorporating endogenous technical advancement in growth models. The endogenous development models have been improved by Kenneth J. Arrow, Paul M. Romer, and Robert E. Lucas. The endogenous development model highlights technical advancement arising from pace investment, quantity of capital, and human capital supply. Romer saw natural assets as a lower priority than ideas. He refers to case of Japan which has limited natural assets but welcomed novel ideas and technology from the West. These included improved plans for production of producer durable goods for final production. Accordingly, ideas are key in economic prosperity. With respect to endogenous growth theory, Chude and Chude (2013) submitted that the major improvement in the endogenous growth hypothesis in relation to the past models lies in the fact that it treats the determinants of technology. That is, it openly attempts to model technology instead of expecting it to be exogenous. Momentously, it is a statistical clarification of technological improvement that introduced a novel idea of human capital, knowledge and abilities (skills) that empower employees to be increasingly productive. More often than not, economic expansion is a product of progress in technology, arising from effective utilization of productive resources through the process of learning. This is because human capital development has high rate or increasing rate of return. Therefore, the rate of growth depends heavily on what (the type of capital) a country invests in. Thus to achieve economic expansion, public expenditure in human capital development especially education spending must be increased. At the same time, the theory predicts unexpected additional benefits from advancement of a substantial valued-added knowledge economy, that can develop and preserve a competitive advantage in expanding industries. <strong>2.3 Empirical Review</strong> Bearing in mind the sensitive nature of the field being studied, many investigations had been conducted with the aim of clarifying the divergent ideological schools. For example, Amadi, and Alolote, (2020) explored government infrastructural spending and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic advancement nexus. The investigation uncovered that public spending on transport, communication, education and medical infrastructure significantly affect economic expansion, while spending on agric and natural resources infrastructure recorded a major adverse impact on economic expansion. Despite the fact that the investigation is recent, the time series variables were not exposed to unit root tests with breaks, and thus will yield misleading outcomes. Shafuda and Utpal (2020) explored government spending on human capital and Namibia&rsquo;s economic prosperity (growth) nexus from 1980 to 2015. The examination utilized human development indicators like healthcare outcomes, educational accomplishments and increment in national earnings in Namibia. The investigation uncovered huge effects of government spending on medical care and education on GDP expansion over the long-term. Study conducted in 2020 that utilized data from 1980-1915, comprises a setback to this work. Ihugba, Ukwunna, and Obiukwu (2019) explored government education spending and Nigeria&rsquo;s elementary school enrolment nexus by applying the bounds testing (ARDL) method of cointegration during the time of 1970 to 2017. The model utilized for the investigation attempted to recognize the interaction between two variables and their relationship with control variables; per capita earning (income), remittances, investment and population expansion. The bounds tests indicated that the variables that were studied are bound together over the long-term, when elementary school enrolment is the endogenous variable. The investigation saw that an inconsequential relationship exists between government education spending on elementary school enrolment while a positive relationship exists among remittances and primary school enrolment. Sylvie (2018) explored education and India&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus. The investigation inspected the connection among education and economic prosperity in India from 1975 to 2016 by concentrating on elementary, secondary and tertiary levels of education. It used econometric estimations with the Granger Causality Method and the Cointegration Method. The study indicated that there is convincing proof demonstrating a positive association between education levels and economic expansion in India which may impact government activities and shape the future of India. Ayeni, and Osagie (2018), explored education spending and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus from 1987 to 2016. The investigation uncovered that education spending was inconsistent with education sectoral yield (output), while recurrent education spending had meaningful relationship with real gross national output (or GNP), conversely, capital spending on education was weak. Ogunleye, Owolabi, Sanyaolu, and Lawal, (2017), utilized BLUE-OLS estimator to study the effect of advancement in human capital on Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion from 1981 to 2015. The empirical outcomes indicated that human capital development has strong effects on economic expansion (growth). Likewise, human capital development variables; secondary school enrolment, tertiary enrolment, aggregated government spending on health and aggregated government spending on education displayed positive and strong effect on economic expansion of Nigeria. Glylych, Modupe and Semiha (2016) explored education and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus utilizing BLUE-OLS estimator to unveil the interaction between education as human capital and real Gross Domestic Product. The investigation found a strong connection between GDP and different indicators (capital spending on education, recurrent spending on education, elementary school enrolment and secondary school enrolment) utilized in the investigation except for elementary school enrolment (PRYE). Lingaraj, Pradeep and Kalandi (2016) explored education expenditure and economic expansion nexus in 14 major Asian nations by utilizing balanced panel data from 1973 to 2012. The co-integration result indicated the presence of long-run relationships between education spending and economic expansion in all the nations. The findings additionally uncovered a positive and significant effect of education training on economic advancement of all the 14 Asian nations. Further, the panel vector error correction showed unidirectional Granger causality running from economic expansion to education spending both in the short and long-run, however, education spending only Granger causes long-run economic expansion in all the nations. The findings likewise demonstrated a positive effect of education spending on economic expansion. The study contended that education sector is one of the significant elements of economic expansion in each of the 14 Asian nations. A significant portion of government spending ought to be made on education by upgrading different essential, senior and technical educations in the respective countries to make available the skilled labour for long-term economic advancement. Ojewumi and Oladimeji (2016) explored government financing and Nigeria&rsquo;s education nexus. In the research work, public spending on education was arranged into two classes (recurrent and capital spending). The data covered the period 1981 to 2013 and were secondary in nature. The data were gotten for the most part from the publications of the World Bank, Central Bank of Nigeria and National Bureau of Statistics. BLUE-OLS estimator was utilized to study the data. The main results indicated that the effect of both capital and recurrent spending on education expansion were negative during the examination time frame. The study suggested that the elevated level of corruption common in the educational sector ought to be checked to guarantee that finances ear-marked for education particularly capital spending in the sector are prudently appropriated. Government at various levels ought to likewise increment both capital and recurrent spending to support the educational sector up to the United Nations standard. Obi, Ekesiobi, Dimnwobi, and Mgbemena, (2016) explored government education spending and Nigeria&rsquo;s education outcome nexus from 1970 &ndash; 2013. The investigation utilized BLUE-OLS estimator, and demonstrated that government spending on education has a cordial and notable impact on education. Public health spending and urban population expansion were likewise found to positively affect education outcome but are insignificant in influencing education outcome. Omodero, and Azubike, (2016), explored government spending on education and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic advancement nexus from 2000&ndash;2015. Multiple regression analysis and student t-test were applied for investigation. The outcome of the investigation showed that education spending is significant and affects the economy. Additionally, education enrolment demonstrated a significant relationship with GDP but minor effect on the economy. Muhammad and Benedict (2015) explored education spending and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus during the time covering 1981-2010. Co-joining and Granger causality tests were utilized so as to unveil the causal nexus between education spending and economic expansion. They found that there is co-integration between real growth rate of GDP, aggregated government spending on education, recurrent expenditure on education and elementary school enrolment. Adeyemi and Ogunsola (2016) explored advancement in human capital and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus from 1980-2013 on secondary school enrolment, life expectancy rate, government spending on education, gross capital formation and economic expansion rate. ARDL cointegration approach was utilized in the investigation and it uncovered a positive since a long-run nexus among secondary school enrolment, life expectancy rate, government spending on education, gross capital formation and economic expansion rate. Olalekan (2014) explored human capital and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus utilizing yearly data on education and health, from 1980 to 2011. The investigation made use of Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) techniques in the research and the estimated outcomes gave proof of positive connection between human capital and economic expansion. Oladeji (2015) explored human capital (through education and effective services in healthcare) and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus from 1980 to 2012. The investigation utilized BLUE-OLS estimator and uncovered that there is a significant functional and institutional connection between the investment in human capital and economic expansion. The work indicated that a long-term nexus existed between education and economic expansion rate. Hadir and Lahrech, (2015) explored human capital advancement and Morocco&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus utilizing yearly data from 1973 to 2011. The BLUE-OLS estimator was incorporated utilizing aggregated government spending on education and health, the enrolment data of tertiary, secondary and elementary educational institutions as a measure for human capital. The research uncovered a positive nexus between aggregated government spending on education, aggregated government spending on health, elementary education enrolment, secondary education enrolment and tertiary education enrolment. Obi and Obi (2014) explored education spending and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus as a method for accomplishing ideal socio-economic change required from 1981 to 2012. The Johansen co-integration method and BLUE-OLS estimator econometric methods were utilized to closely study the connection between GDP and recurrent education spending. The results showed that regardless of the fact that a positive relationship was obtainable between education spending and economic expansion, a long-term nexus was not obtainable over the period under examination. Jaiyeoba (2015) explored investment in education/health and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus from 1982 to 2011. He utilized trend analysis, the Johansen cointegration and BLUE-OLS estimator. The outcomes demonstrated that there was long-term connection between government spending on education, health and economic expansion. The factors: health and education spending, secondary and tertiary enrolment rate and gross fixed capital formation carried the speculated positive signs and were notable determinants (apart from government spending on education and elementary education enrolment rate). Sulaiman, Bala, Tijani, Waziri and Maji (2015) explored human capital /technology and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus. They utilized yearly time series covering 35 years (1975-2010) and applied autoregressive distributed lag method of cointegration to look at the connection between human capital, technology, and economic expansion. Two measures of human capital (secondary and university enrolment) were utilized in two different models. Their outcome uncovered that all the factors in the two separate models were cointegrated. Besides, the findings from the two assessed models indicated that human capital in measured by secondary and tertiary education enrolments have significant positive effect on economic expansion. Borojo and Jiang (2015) explored education/health (human capital) and Ethiopia&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus from 1980 to 2013. Human capital stock is measured by elementary, secondary and tertiary education enrolment. Human capital investment is proxied by spending on health and education. The Augmented Dickey Fuller test and Johansen&#39;s Co-integration method were utilized to test unit root and to ascertain co-integration among factors, respectively. Their investigation indicated that public spending on health as well as education and elementary as well as secondary education enrolments has positive and significant impacts on economic expansion both in the short-term and the long-term. Ekesiobi, Dimnwobi, Ifebi and Ibekilo (2016) explored public education investment and Nigeria&rsquo;s manufacturing yield nexus. The investigation utilized Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) unit root test and BLUE-OLS estimator to examine the connection between public educational spending, elementary school enrolment rate, per capita income, exchange rate, FDI and manufacturing yield (output) rate. The investigation discovered that public education spending has a positive but inconsequential impact on manufacturing yield (output) rate. Odo, Nwachukwu, and Agbi (2016) explored government spending and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus. Their finding demonstrated that social capital had inconsequential positive effect on economic expansion during the period under consideration. Jiangyi, (2016) explored government educational spending and China&rsquo;s economic expansion nexus bearing in mind the spatial third-party spill-over effects. The findings uncover that public educational spending in China has a significant positive effect on economic expansion, but spending in various educational level shows varying outcomes. Public educational spending beneath high-education is positively related with domestic economic expansion, while the impact of educational spending in high-education is inconsequential. Lawanson (2015) explored the importance of health and educational elements of human capital to economic expansion, utilizing panel data from sixteen West African nations over the period 1980 to 2013. He utilized Diff-GMM dynamic panel procedure. The empirical results show that coefficients of both health and education have positive and significant impacts on GDP per capita. The paper ascertains the importance of human capital to economic expansion in West Africa. He suggested that more assets and policies to persuade and improve access to both education and health by the populace ought to be sought after by policy makers. Ehimare, Ogaga-Oghene, Obarisiagbon and Okorie (2014), explored the connection between Nigerian government Expenditure and Human Capital Development. The level of human capital development, which is a measure of the degree of wellbeing (health) and educational achievement of a country influence the level of economic activities in that country. The unit root test was employed to ascertain if the stationary or non-stationary with the Phillip Peron test. So as to measure the efficiency of government spending on human capital development, the data analysis was performed with Data Envelopment Analysis including Input Oriented Variable Return to Scale. The discoveries of the study uncovered that there has been substantial decrease in the efficiency of government spending since 1990 up till 2011 which has been diminishing. Ajadi and Adebakin (2014), investigated the nature of association between human capital development and economic expansion. The descriptive survey method of research was incorporated and multi&ndash;stage sampling method was utilized to choose a size of 200 respondents utilized for the research. An adopted questionnaire with 0.86 reliability index was utilized for information gathering. Data gathered were examined utilizing the Pearson&#39;s Product Moment Correlation Coefficient. The results demonstrated that education has a predictive r-value of 0.76 on individual personal earnings and the type of occupation (job) is linked with individual personal earnings (r=0.64). It, subsequently, concluded that economic expansion rate is influenced by individual personal earnings and suggested that government ought to create adequate educational policy to avail the human capital need of the populace for economic prosperity. Harpaljit, Baharom and Muzafar (2014) examined the connection between education spending and economic expansion rate in China and India by utilizing yearly data from 1970 to 2005. This investigation used multi econometric methods including co-integration test, BLUE-OLS estimator, and VECM. The result uncovered that there is a long-term nexus between earnings (income) level, Gross Domestic Product per capital and education spending in both China and India. Also, a unidirectional causal relationship was obtained for the two nations, running from earnings (income) level to education spending for China, while for India, education spending Granger causes the level of earnings. Urhie (2014) analyzed the impacts of the components of public education spending on both educational achievement and Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion rate from 1970 to 2010. The investigation utilized Two Stage Least Squares estimation procedure to analyze the hypotheses. The result uncovered that both capital and recurrent spending on education affect education achievement and economic expansion rate differently. Recurrent spending negatively affected education while capital spending was found to have a positive effect. Conversely, recurrent education had a positive and notable effect on economic expansion while capital spending had a negative effect. Chude and Chude (2013) explored the impacts of public education spending on Nigeria&rsquo;s economic expansion over a time frame from 1977 to 2012, with particular focus on disaggregated and sectorial spending analysis. Error correction model (ECM) was utilized. The result uncovered that over the long-term, aggregated education spending is significant and has a positive relationship on economic expansion. Abdul (2013), analyzed Education and Economic expansion in Malaysia given the fact human capital or education has is now one of the focal issues in the research of economic advancement. The researcher contended that the current studies showed that human capital, particularly education, is a significant ingredient of economic expansion. Thus the researcher investigated the issue of Malaysia education data. Notwithstanding a few issues and data quality issues, Malaysian education datasets are heavily correlated for both secondary and tertiary education. The researcher further tests the impact of various datasets on education and economic expansion relationship. The results were fundamentally the same thereby indicating that Malaysian education datasets are not unreliable. The results were econometrically consistent irrespective of measure of education utilized. All datasets lead to the same conclusion; education is inversely associated with economic expansion. Alvina and Muhammad (2013), inspected the long-term connection between government education spending and economic expansion. The investigation utilized heterogeneous panel data analysis. Panel unit root test are applied for checking stationarity. The single equation approach of panel co-integration (Kao, 1999); Pedroni&#39;s Residual-Based Panel of co-integration Test (1997, 1999) was applied to ascertain the presence of long-term connection between public education spending and gross domestic production. Finally Panel fully modified OLS result uncovered that the effect of government public education on economic expansion is more prominent in developing nations as contrasted with the developed nations, which confirmed the &quot;catching-up effect&quot; in developing nations. Mehmet and Sevgi (2013), inspected the nexus between education spending and economic expansion in Turkey. The examination utilized econometric method as the principal investigation instrument. The result uncovered a positive connection between education spending and economic expansion in the Turkish economy for the period 1970-2012. Implying that, education spending in Turkey positively affected economic expansion. Edame (2014) researched the determinants of Nigeria&rsquo;s public infrastructure spending, utilizing ECM. He found that pace (rate) of urbanization, government income, population density, external reserves, and kind of government collectively or independently impact on public spending on infrastructure. Aregbeyen and Akpan (2013) examined the long-term determinants of Nigeria&rsquo;s government spending, utilizing a disaggregated approach. In their examination, they found that foreign aid is significantly and positively influencing recurrent spending to the detriment of capital spending; that income (revenue) is likewise positively influencing government spending; that trade transparency (openness) is adversely impacting government spending; that debt service obligation diminishes all parts of government spending over the long-term; that the higher the size of the urban population, the higher would be government recurrent spending on economic services; solid proof that Federal government spending is one-sided with regards to recurrent spending, which increments substantially during election times. In likewise manner, Adebayo et al. (2014) researched the effect of public spending on industrial expansion of Nigeria through co-integration and causality and discovered that public spending on administration, economic services, and transfers remained negatively related with industrial expansion while government spending on social services remained positively related in the long-term. They concluded in this manner that there is no crowding-out impact. From these studies reviewed, there is proof that all the investigations joined economic, social, and political determinants of government spending. Srinivasan (2013), analyzed the causal nexus between public spending and economic expansion in India utilizing co-integration approach and error correction model from 1973 to 2012. The co-integration test result uncovered the presence of a long-term equilibrium connection between public spending and economic expansion. The error correction model estimate indicated unilateral causality which runs from economic expansion to public spending in the short-term and long-term. Mohd and Fidlizan (2012), narrowed down on the long-term relationship and causality between government spending in education and economic expansion in Malaysian economy from 1970-2010. The investigation utilized Vector Auto Regression (VAR). The result indicated that economic expansion co-integrated with fixed capital formation (CAP), labour force participation (LAB) and government spending on education (EDU). The Granger cause for education variable and vice versa. In addition, the investigation demonstrated that human capital like education variable goes a long way in affecting economic expansion. Consensus from the above investigations demonstrates that government spending impacts positively on economic expansion. Notable theories that support this case include; Keynes, Wagner, Peacock and Wiseman. Keynes, in his hypothesis draws a connection between public spending and economic expansion and infers that causality runs from public spending to income, meaning that public sector spending is an exogenous factor and public instrument for expanding national income. Again, it holds that expansion in government spending prompts higher economic expansion. Wagner, Peacock and Wiseman and numerous economists have developed various theories on public spending and economic expansion. Wagner positioned public sector spending as a behavioral variable that positively indicates if an economy is prospering. Notwithstanding, the neo classical growth model created by Solow opined that the fiscal policy doesn&#39;t have any impact on the expansion of national income. These multifaceted results obtained from prior investigations show that in reality public spending and other inputs in the education system may have some innate heterogeneity, suggesting that what holds in a given area or country may not hold in another. In the light of the above, this investigation sees that it is necessary to revise the allotment of public spending on education, with regards to the type of impact this spending has on education outcomes. <strong>2.4 Theoretical Framework</strong> The endogenous growth theory has been adopted as the appropriate theoretical framework for this study. This owes much to the fact that, the theory emphasizes the critical role of human capital development, through public investments on education, as a major driver of aggregate productivity in the economy. This is also supported by the work of Ogunleye, Owolabi, Sanyaolu, and Lawal, (2017) who ascertained how economic expansion is influenced by advancement in human capital from 1981 to 2015. In this study it was discovered that economic expansion is greatly influenced by advancement in human capital. Also, economic expansion appeared to facilitated by secondary education enrolment, tertiary education enrolment, and aggregate spending on health and education by the government. <strong>2.5 Research Gap</strong> Though, so much research work has been carried out on the relationship between human capital development, Public Sector Expenditure on Education and Economic expansion in Nigeria, a lot still needed to be done to address some abnormities in these studies. Of note, is that methods adopted in most of these studies are faced with methodological limitations and policy carry-overs, not minding that no two economies are the same. This study therefore, seeks to fill these gaps created by previous researches. Importantly, time plays a vital role in research, making it imperative for continuous and up to date studies, so as to keep abreast with changes as quickly as possible. In the study carried out by Ojewumi and Oladimeji (2016), time series data covering from 1981-2013 was used, while Muhammad and Benedict (2015), used time series data from 1981-2010. These studies above used time series data of 1981 to 2013 and 1981 to 2010 respectively, while this study used updated data covering 1981-2018, thereby making the study current and up to date. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong>Chapter Three</strong> <strong>Research Methods</strong> <strong>3.1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Research Design</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Ex post facto research design and econometric procedures of analysis will be employed for empirical investigation. <strong>3.2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Model Specification</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Here, we specify a model which captures the relationship between real gross domestic product in per capita terms and the selected education enrolment variables. &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.1) In the above model, <em>Ln</em> denotes natural log, <em>PER_RGDP</em> denotes real gross domestic product in per capita terms,<em> PER_PEE</em> denotes public expenditure on education in per capita terms, <em>PENR</em> denotes percentage of primary education enrolment from population total, <em>SENR</em> denotes percentage of secondary education enrolment from population total, and <em>TENR</em> denotes percentage of tertiary education enrolment from population total. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For further empirical analysis we can explicitly express the above model in the form of an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.2) Here, based on economic theory and intuition all of the coefficients are expected to be positive. <strong>3.3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Estimation Procedure</strong> <strong>3.3.1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Unit Root Test with Breaks</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Unlike the popularly used unit root tests (e.g. ADF and PP) which test the null of non-stationarity without accounting for possible breaks-points in data, the break-point unit root test of Peron (1989) tests the null of non-stationarity against other alternatives while accounting for a single break-point in the given data. The alternative hypotheses for this test are succinctly described in the following equations: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.3) &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.4) &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.5) The first equation captures a break in the intercept of the data with the intercept-break dichotomous variable <em>I_t</em> which takes on values of 1 only when <em>t</em> surpasses the break-point <em>Br</em>; the second captures a break in the slope of the data with a regime-shift dichotomous variable <em>T_t*</em> which takes on values of 1 only when <em>t </em>surpasses the break-point <em>Br</em>; and the third equation captures both effects concurrently with the &ldquo;crash&rdquo; dichotomous variable <em>D</em> which takes on values of 1 only when <em>t</em> equals <em>Br</em>+1. <strong>3.3.2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ARDL Bounds Cointegration Approach</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The popularly-used residual-based cointegration methods may not be very useful when the time-series under consideration attain stationarity at different levels. On the other hand, in addition to being econometrically efficient for small sample cases (<em>n</em> &lt; 30), the bounds cointegration method developed by Pesaran and Shin (1999) is particularly useful for combining time-series that attain stationarity at levels and first-difference. The bounds cointegration method makes use of upper bounds and lower bounds derived from 4 pairs of critical values corresponding to 4 different levels of statistical significance: the 1% level, the 2.5% level, the 5% level, and the 10% level. The null of &ldquo;no cointegration&rdquo; is to be rejected only if the computed bounds f-statistic surpasses any of the upper bounds obtained from a chosen pair of critical values, while the alternative hypothesis of cointegration is to be rejected only if the bounds f-statistic falls below any of the lower bounds obtained from a chosen pair of critical values. Therefore, in contrast to other cointegration tests, the bounds test can be inconclusive if the bounds f-statistic neither surpasses the chosen upper bound nor falls below the chosen lower bound. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To obtain the bounds f-test statistic, an f-test is performed jointly on all of the un-differenced explanatory variables of the &ldquo;unrestricted&rdquo; error correction model (ECM) derived from any corresponding autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model such as the previously specified empirical ARDL model in (3.2). This takes the general form: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.6) where &Delta;<em>i_t</em> denotes the chosen endogenous variable in first difference; &Delta;<em>j_t</em> and &Delta;<em>k_t</em> denote the chosen exogenous variables in first differences;&nbsp; and <em>e_t</em> denotes the stochastic component. Choosing the best lag-length to be included is made possible by information criteria such as the Akaike and the Schwarz Information Criterion. In the case where the bounds cointegration test disapproves the null, a &ldquo;restricted&rdquo; version of the error correction model can be estimated along-side a long-run model to capture the relevant short-run and long-run dynamics as seen in the following expressions: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.7) &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.8) Here, the error correction term <em>_t</em>_-1 is non-positive and bounded between 0 and 1 (or 0 and 100) in order to capture the short-run rate of adjustment to long run equilibrium, while the coefficients <em>₁</em>,&hellip;,<em>_j</em>&nbsp; in (3.7) capture the state of long-run equilibrium and are obtained from <em>₁</em>=<em>b₂</em>/<em>b₁</em>,&hellip;, <em>_j</em>=<em>b_j</em>/<em>b₁</em> respectively. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong>3.4&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Model Evaluation Tests and Techniques</strong> <strong>3.4.1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; R² and Adjusted R²</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The R² and the adjusted R² both provide measures of goodness-of-fit. However, the adjusted R² is preferably used because it is robust against redundant regressors which inflate the conventional R². They involve the following statistics: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.9) &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.10) where <em>SS_r</em> denotes the sum of squares of the regression residuals, <em>SS_t</em> denotes the total sum of squares of the dependent variable, <em>n</em> denotes the number of observations, and <em>k</em> denotes the number of regressors (Verbeek, 2004). <strong>3.4.2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; T-Test and F-Test</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The t-test and the f-test can be utilized to evaluate hypotheses pertaining to statistical significance of the parameters in a regression. Particularly, the t-test may be applied to a single parameter while the f-test may be applied to multiple parameters. They involve the following statistics: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.11) &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.12) where <em>a_k</em> denotes a single parameter-estimate, <em>se </em>denotes its standard error, <em>R²</em> denotes the coefficient of determination of the regression, <em>N</em> denotes the number of observations, and <em>J</em> denotes the number of regressors. For the t-test, the statistical insignificance null hypothesis is to be rejected only if <em>t_i</em> exceeds its 5% critical-value, while for the f-test the joint statistical insignificance null hypothesis is to be rejected only if <em>f</em> exceeds its 5% critical-value at <em>N-J</em> and <em>J-1</em> degrees of freedom (Verbeek, 2004). <strong>3.4.3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Residual Normality Test</strong> The Jarque-Bera test statistic (Jarque and Bera, 1987) is useful in determining whether the residuals of a regression are normally distributed. The Jarque-Bera statistic is computed as: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.13) where <em>S</em> is the skewness, <em>K</em> is the kurtosis, and <em>N</em> is the number of observations. Under the null hypothesis of a normal distribution, the Jarque-Bera statistic is distributed as <em>X²</em> with 2 degrees of freedom. Therefore, the null hypothesis is to be accepted if the absolute value of the Jarque-Bera statistic exceeds the observed value under the null hypothesis. Contrarily, the null hypothesis is to be rejected if the absolute value does not exceed the observed value. <strong>Heteroskedasticity Test</strong> The Breusch-Pagan-Godfrey test (Breusch and Pagan, 1979; Godfrey, 1978) evaluates the null hypothesis of &ldquo;no heteroskedasticity&rdquo; against the alternative hypothesis of heteroskedasticity of the form , where is a vector of independent variables. The test is performed by completing an auxiliary regression of the squared residuals from the original equation on . The explained sum of squares from this auxiliary regression is then divided by to give an LM statistic, which follows a chi square <em>X² </em>distribution with degrees of freedom equal to the number of variables in <em>Z </em>under the null hypothesis of no heteroskedasticity. Therefore, the null hypothesis is to be accepted if the LM statistic exceeds the observed value under the null hypothesis. Contrarily, the null hypothesis is to be rejected if the LM statistic does not exceed the observed value. <strong>3.4.5&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Serial Correlation Test</strong> The Godfrey (1978) Lagrange multiplier (LM) test is useful when testing for serial correlation in the residuals of a regression. The LM test statistic is computed as follows: First, assuming there is a regression equation: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.14) where <em>&beta;</em> are the estimated coefficients and <em>&epsilon;</em> are the errors. The test statistic for the lag order <em>&rho;</em> is based on the regression for the residuals <em>&epsilon; = y - XḂ</em> which is given by: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.15) The coefficients <em>𝛾</em> and <em>𝛼</em><em>_&delta;</em>are expected to be statistically insignificant if the null hypothesis of &ldquo;no serial correlation&rdquo; is to be accepted. On the other hand, the null hypothesis cannot be accepted if the coefficients <em>𝛾</em> and <em>𝛼</em><em>_&delta;</em>are found to be statistically significant. <strong>3.4.6&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Model Specification Test</strong> The Ramsey (1969) Regression Error Specification Test (RESET) is a general test for the following types of functional specification errors: Omitted variables; some relevant explanatory variables are not included. Incorrect functional form; some of the dependent and independent variables should be transformed to logs, powers, etc. Correlation between the independent variables and the residuals. Ramsey (1969) showed that these specification errors produce a non-zero mean vector for the residuals. Therefore, the null and alternative hypotheses of the RESET test are: &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (3.16) The RESET test is based on an augmented regression which is given as: &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.17) The test of the null hypothesis of a well-specified model is tested against the alternative hypothesis of a poorly specified model by evaluating the restriction <em>𝛾</em><em> = 0</em>. The null hypothesis is to be accepted if <em>𝛾</em><em> = 0</em>, whereas the null hypothesis is to be rejected if <em>𝛾</em><em> &ne; 0</em>. The crucial factor to be considered in constructing the augmented regression model is determining which variable should constitute the <em>Z</em> variable. If <em>Z</em> is an omitted variable, then the test of <em>𝛾</em><em> = 0</em> is simply the omitted variables test. But if <em>y</em> is wrongly specified as an additive relation instead of a multiplicative relation such as <em>y =</em><em>𝛽</em><em>₀</em> X^𝛽¹X^𝛽² + 𝜖 then the test of <em>𝛾</em><em> = 0 </em>is a functional form specification test. In the latter case the restriction <em>𝛾</em><em> = 0 </em>is tested by including powers of the predicted values of the dependent variables in <em>Z</em> such that . <strong>3.4.7&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; CUSUMSQ Stability Test</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For the test of stability, cumulative sum of recursive residuals (CUSUM) and cumulative sum of recursive residuals squares (CUSUMSQ) tests as proposed by Brown, Durbin, and Evans (1975) was employed. The technique is appropriate for time series data and is recommended for use if one is uncertain about when a structural change might have taken place. The null hypothesis is that the coefficient vector &szlig; is the same every period. The CUSUM test is based on the cumulated sum of the residuals: &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.18) where &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.19) and &nbsp; &nbsp; (3.20) <strong>3.5&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Sources of Data</strong> The Central bank of Nigeria served as the main source of data collection. This implies also that the study adopted secondary data. <strong>Chapter Four</strong> <strong>Empirical Results</strong> <strong>4.1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Descriptive Statistics</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Before going into cointegration analysis, we will attempt to briefly examine the properties of the data with descriptive statistics. Table 4.1 and Figures 4.1 to 4.5 will be acknowledged for this purpose. Table 4.1: Descriptive Statistics &nbsp; PER_RGDP PER_PEE PENR SENR TENR Mean 264316.01 635.72 23096192.94 5796345.78 787115.08 Median 232704.55 361.03 19747039.31 4410684.33 755776.70 Maximum 385349.04 2340.12 46188979.59 11840028.21 1648670.36 Minimum 199039.15 7.38 9554076.94 1846106.82 49626.49 Std. Dev. 66113.04 681.06 9425336.46 3142601.76 592505.50 Skewness 0.65 0.77 0.59 0.79 0.17 Kurtosis 1.83 2.43 2.27 2.15 1.36 Jarque-Bera 4.88 4.24 3.01 5.14 4.47 Probability 0.09 0.12 0.22 0.08 0.11 Observations 38 38 38 38 38 &nbsp; Figure 4.1: Trend of Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP) Per Capita &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Figure 4.2: Trend of Public Expenditure on Education (PEE) Per Capita &nbsp; &nbsp; Figure 4.3: Trend of Primary School Enrolment (PENR) &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Figure 4.4: Trend of Secondary School Enrolment (SENR) &nbsp; &nbsp; Figure 4.5: Trend of Tertiary School Enrolment (TENR) &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the second column of Table 4.1, RGDP per capita mean is NGN 264, 316.01 ($734.21). This critically lags behind RGDP per capita mean in all developed (OECD) countries and underscores the need for human and non-human capital development. Further, RGDP per capita maximum is NGN 385, 349.04 while its minimum is NGN 199, 039.15. Given that the trend of RGDP per capita is positively sloped as seen in Figure 4.1, the disparity between RGDP per capita maximum and its minimum indicates growth in RGDP per capita during the period under investigation. Lastly, the Jarque-Bera statistic (4.88) and probability value (0.09) of RGDP per capita simply suggest that it follows a normal distribution, with NGN 66, 113.04 as its standard deviation. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the third column of Table 4.1, PEE per capita mean is NGN 635.72 ($1.77). Just like RGDP per capita, this critically lags behind PEE per capita mean in all developed (OECD) countries and underscores the need for more government intervention in the education sector. Further, PEE per capita maximum is NGN 2, 340.12 while its minimum is NGN 7.38. Given that the trend of PEE per capita is positively sloped exponentially as seen in Figure 4.2, the disparity between PEE per capita maximum and its minimum indicates rapid growth in PEE per capita during the period under investigation. Lastly, the Jarque-Bera statistic (4.24) and probability value (0.12) of PEE per capita simply suggest that it follows a normal distribution, with NGN 681.06 as its standard deviation. From the fourth column of Table 4.1, PENR mean is 23096192.94. This represents about 18.33% of total population mean (126036036.63) and indicates high primary school enrolment during the period under investigation. Further, PENR maximum is 46188979.59 while its minimum is 9554076.94. Given that the trend of PENR is positively sloped linearly as seen in Figure 4.3, the disparity between PENR maximum and its minimum indicates consistent growth in PENR during the period under investigation. Lastly, the Jarque-Bera statistic (3.01) and probability value (0.22) of PENR simply suggest that it follows a normal distribution, with 9425336.46 as its standard deviation. From the fifth column of Table 4.1, SENR mean is 5796345.78. This represents about 4.60% of total population mean (126036036.63) and indicates relatively low secondary school enrolment during the period under investigation. Further, SENR maximum is 11840028.21 while its minimum is 1846106.82. Given that the trend of SENR is positively sloped exponentially as seen in Figure 4.4, the disparity between SENR maximum and its minimum indicates rapid growth in SENR during the period under investigation. Lastly, the Jarque-Bera statistic (5.14) and probability value (0.08) of SENR simply suggest that it follows a normal distribution, with 3142601.76 as its standard deviation. From the sixth column of Table 4.1, TENR mean is 787115.08. This represents about 0.63% of total population mean (126036036.63) and indicates very low tertiary school enrolment during the period under investigation. Further, TENR maximum is 1648670.36 while its minimum is 49626.49. Given that the trend of TENR is positively sloped concavely as seen in Figure 4.5, the disparity between TENR maximum and its minimum indicates slow growth in TENR during the period under investigation. Lastly, the Jarque-Bera statistic (4.47) and probability value (0.11) of TENR simply suggest that it follows a normal distribution, with 592505.50 as its standard deviation. From the descriptive statistics above, it is obvious that substantial disparities exist between the maximum and minimum values of the variables, especially for PEE per capita and TENR. This may distort the regression results of the cointegration analysis and may also lead to unnecessarily large regression coefficients. In order to avoid these problems, we have transformed the variables in two major ways. Firstly, we have reduced disparity among the variables by expressing PENR, SENR, and TENR as percentages of population total. Secondly, we have downsized all the variables to a smaller scale by expressing them in natural log form. Therefore instead of RGDP, PEE per capita, PENR, SENR, and TENR, we now have Ln_PER_RGDP, Ln_PER_PEE, Ln_PENR, Ln_SENR, and Ln_TENR respectively as our investigative variables. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong>4.2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Break-Point Unit Root Test Results</strong> Table 4.2: Break-Point Unit Root Test Result Summary Variables Lags Included Specification Break Date ADF Test Statistic 5% Critical Value Summary <em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em><em>_t</em> 0 Intercept &amp; Trend 2001 -3.3506 -5.1757 Non-Stationary <em>∆Ln_PER_RGDP</em><em>_t</em> 2 Intercept &amp; Trend 2001 -5.4176 -5.1757 Stationary <em>Ln_PER_PEE</em><em>_t</em> 0 Intercept &amp; Trend 2004 -3.3665 -5.1757 Non-Stationary <em>∆Ln_PER_PEE</em><em>_t</em> 5 Intercept &amp; Trend 1995 -5.6226 -5.1757 Non-Stationary <em>Ln_PENR</em><em>_t</em> 7 Intercept &amp; Trend 2004 -7.6901 -5.1757 Stationary <em>Ln_SENR</em><em>_t</em> 3 Intercept &amp; Trend 1998 -5.0584 -5.1757 Non-Stationary <em>∆Ln_SENR</em><em>_t</em> 3 Intercept &amp; Trend 2016 -6.4199 -5.1757 Stationary <em>Ln_TENR</em><em>_t</em> 1 Intercept &amp; Trend 1998 -6.9768 -5.1757 Stationary Note(s): Lag selection based on Schwarz Information Criterion (SIC) &nbsp; As seen in the above table, there are different orders of integration for the time-series variables. Specifically, <em>Ln_PENR</em> and <em>Ln_TENR</em> are stationary at levels, while others are stationary only at the first difference. The bounds cointegration method is more appropriate in this case because it permits the combination of stationary and difference-stationary time series. <strong>4.3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ARDL Bounds Cointegration Test Results</strong> Table 4.3: Lag/Model Selection Criteria Table Number of Models Evaluated: 16 Dependent Variable: <em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em> S|N Model AIC Specification 1 16 -4.0889 ARDL(1, 0, 0, 0, 0) 2 15 -4.0552 ARDL(1, 0, 0, 0, 1) 3 12 -4.0477 ARDL(1, 0, 1, 0, 0) 4 14 -4.0448 ARDL(1, 0, 0, 1, 0) 5 8 -4.0445 ARDL(1, 1, 0, 0, 0) 6 11 -4.0212 ARDL(1, 0, 1, 0, 1) 7 13 -4.0121 ARDL(1, 0, 0, 1, 1) 8 10 -4.0118 ARDL(1, 0, 1, 1, 0) 9 7 -4.0066 ARDL(1, 1, 0, 0, 1) 10 6 -3.9994 ARDL(1, 1, 0, 1, 0) 11 4 -3.9970 ARDL(1, 1, 1, 0, 0) 12 9 -3.9894 ARDL(1, 0, 1, 1, 1) 13 3 -3.9672 ARDL(1, 1, 1, 0, 1) 14 5 -3.9626 ARDL(1, 1, 0, 1, 1) 15 2 -3.9589 ARDL(1, 1, 1, 1, 0) 16 1 -3.9357 ARDL(1, 1, 1, 1, 1) Note(s): * indicates chosen optimal lag specification based on the Akaike Information Criterion The Akaike criterion shows that ARDL(1, 0, 0, 0, 0) is the best lag specification for the ARDL model, thereby indicating that it is best to include only a single lag of the endogenous variable (<em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em>), and 0 lags of the other exogenous variables (<em>Ln_PER_PEE, Ln_PENR, Ln_SENR, </em>and <em>Ln_TENR</em>). On this basis, an ARDL model was estimated and the bounds cointegration method was applied to test for cointegration as seen in the following tables. Table 4.4: Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Model Estimates Dependent Variable: <em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em><em>_t</em> Regressors Coefficient Standard Error t-statistic Prob. <em>Ln_PER_RGDP _t-1</em> 0.723844 0.063884 11.33053 0.0000 <em>Ln_PER_PEE</em><em>_t</em> 0.006558 0.014438 0.454194 0.6529 <em>Ln_PENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.166945 0.048731 3.425881 0.0017 <em>Ln_SENR_t</em> 0.105751 0.044395 2.382033 0.0235 <em>Ln_TENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.033421 0.036354 0.919326 0.3650 <em>C</em> 2.80666 0.598588 4.688802 0.0001 &nbsp; Table 4.5: Bounds Cointegration Test &nbsp; Computed Wald (F-Statistic): 8.5420 10% level 5% level 2.5% level 1% level <em>k </em>= 4 I(0) I(1) I(0) I(1) I(0) I(1) I(0) I(1) <em>F</em>* 2.45 3.52 2.86 4.01 3.25 4.49 3.74 5.06 Source: Pesaran et al. <em>k</em> signifies the number of regressors <em>F</em>* corresponds to the model with unrestricted intercept and trend In the above table, the bounds test statistic (8.5420) surpasses the upper-bound (4.01) at the 5% level of significance and therefore leads to the rejection of the null hypothesis of &ldquo;no cointegration&rdquo;. Based on this result, a &ldquo;restricted&rdquo; error correction model was estimated as well as a long-run &lsquo;equilibrium&rsquo; model as seen in the subsequent tables and equations. Table 4.6a: Error Correction Model Dependent Variable: &Delta;<em> Ln_PER_RGDP</em><em>_t</em> Regressors Coefficient Standard Error t-statistic Prob. <em>∆Ln_PER_PEE</em><em>_t</em> 0.0065 0.0144 0.4541 0.6529 <em>∆Ln_PENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.1669 0.0487 3.4258 0.0017 <em>∆Ln_SENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.1057 0.0443 2.3820 0.0235 <em>∆Ln_TENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.0334 0.0363 0.9193 0.3650 <em>ECT _t-1</em> -0.2761 0.0638 -4.3227 0.0001 &nbsp; Table 4.6b: Long-Run Model Dependent Variable: <em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em><em>_t</em> Regressors Coefficient Standard Error t-statistic Prob. <em>Ln_PER_PEE</em><em>_t</em> 0.0237 0.0489 0.4850 0.6310 <em>Ln_PENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.6045 0.1253 4.8213 0.0000 <em>Ln_SENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.3829 0.1106 3.4602 0.0016 <em>Ln_TENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.1210 0.1500 0.8064 0.4261 <em>C</em> 10.1633 0.5757 17.6524 0.0000 &nbsp; In the error correction model, the error correction term (<em>ECT_t-1</em>) is expectedly negative and statistically significant at the 5% level (based on its <em>p</em>-value (0.0001)). Its magnitude (-0.2761) indicates a low but significant rate of adjustment to long-run equilibrium and specifically implies that approximately 27.61% of all discrepancies in long-run equilibrium will be corrected in each period. On the other hand, in the long-run model, the first long-run coefficient (<em>Ln_PER_PEE</em><em>_t</em>) is expectedly positive but its <em>p</em>-value (0.6310) indicates that it is statistically insignificant at the 5% level of significance, thereby implying that increment in <em>Ln_PER_PEE</em> will not cause <em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em> to increase. . Similarly, the fourth long-run coefficient (<em>Ln_TENR</em>) is expectedly positive but its <em>p</em>-value (0.4261) indicates that it is statistically insignificant at the 5% level of significance, thereby implying that increment in <em>Ln_TENR</em> will not cause <em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em> to increase. On the other hand, the second long-run coefficient (<em>Ln_PENR</em>) is expectedly positive and its <em>p</em>-value (0.0000) indicates that it is statistically significant at the 5% level of significance, thereby implying that increment in <em>Ln_PENR</em> will cause <em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em> to increase by 0.6045. Similarly, the third long-run coefficient (<em>Ln_SENR</em>) is expectedly positive and its <em>p</em>-value (0.0016) indicates that it is statistically significant at the 5% level of significance, thereby implying that increment in <em>Ln_SENR</em> will cause <em>Ln_PER_RGDP</em> to increase by 0.3829. The intercept also appears to be positive and statistically significant thereby indicating that the long-run model has a positive autonomous component measuring up to 10.1633 units. <strong>4.4&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Model Evaluation Results</strong> <strong>4.4.1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Test of Goodness-of-Fit</strong> Table 4.7: Test of Goodness-of-Fit Summary Model R² Adj. R² ARDL Model 0.9875 0.9854 ECM 0.6948 0.6567 &nbsp; The adjusted R² of the ARDL model has a magnitude of 0.9854 and therefore implies that the ARDL model explains as much as 98.54% of the variation in its endogenous variable. Further, the adjusted R² of the ECM has a magnitude of 0.6567 and therefore implies that the error correction model (ECM) explains as much as 65.67% of the variation in its endogenous variable. <strong>4.4.2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; T-Test and F-Test</strong> Table 4.8: F-Test Summary Model F-Statistic 5% Critical Value Prob. Remarks ARDL Model 490.1238 F(5,31) = 2.52 0.0000 Jointly Significant @ 5% ECM 15.2700 F(4,32) = 2.67 0.0000 Jointly Significant @ 5% &nbsp; The F-statistic (490.1238) for the ARDL model exceeds its 5% critical value (2.66), thereby implying that the parameters of the ARDL model are jointly significant at the 5% level of significance. Further, the F-statistic (15.2700) of the ECM also exceeds its 5% critical value (2.84), thereby implying that the parameters of the error correction model (ECM) are jointly significant at the 5% level of significance. Table 4.9: T-Test Summary T-Test for the Long-Run Estimates Regressors t-statistic 5% Critical Value Remarks <em>Ln_PER_PEE</em><em>_t</em> 0.4850 1.9600 Insignificant <em>Ln_PENR</em><em>_t</em> 4.8213 1.9600 Significant <em>Ln_SENR</em><em>_t</em> 3.4602 1.9600 Significant <em>Ln_TENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.8064 1.9600 Insignificant <em>C</em> 17.6524 1.9600 Significant &nbsp; T-Test for the Error Correction Model (ECM) Estimates &nbsp; Regressors t-statistic 5% Critical Value Remarks &nbsp; <em>∆Ln_PER_PEE</em><em>_t</em> 0.4541 1.9600 Insignificant &nbsp; <em>∆Ln_PENR</em><em>_t</em> 3.4258 1.9600 Significant &nbsp; <em>∆Ln_SENR</em><em>_t</em> 2.3820 1.9600 Significant &nbsp; <em>∆Ln_TENR</em><em>_t</em> 0.9193 1.9600 Insignificant &nbsp; <em>ECT _t-1</em> -4.3227 1.9600 Significant &nbsp; &nbsp; In the long-run model, the t-statistics for the first and fourth parameters are less than the 5% critical value (1.96), thereby indicating that the first and fourth parameters are statistically insignificant at the 5% level of significance, while the t-statistic for the second, third, and fifth parameters are greater than the 5% critical value (1.96), thereby indicating that they are statistically significant at the 5% level of significance. Similarly, in the ECM, the t-statistics for the first and fourth parameters are less than the 5% critical value (1.96), thereby indicating that the first and fourth parameters are statistically insignificant at the 5% level of significance, while the t-statistic for the second, third, and fifth parameters are greater than the 5% critical value (1.96), thereby indicating that they are statistically significant at the 5% level of significance. <strong>Normality Test</strong> Table 4.10: Jarque-Bera Normality Test Summary Model Skewness Kurtosis JB Statistic Prob. ARDL Model -0.5558 2.8731 1.9297 0.3810 ECM -0.7369 2.9430 3.3544 0.1868 &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In the ARDL model, the <em>p</em>-value (0.3810) of the J-B test exceeds the 0.05 benchmark, and therefore indicates that the residuals of the ARDL model are normally distributed. Further, in the ECM, the <em>p</em>-value (0.1868) of the J-B test also exceeds the 0.05 benchmark, and therefore indicates that the residuals of the error correction model (ECM) are normally distributed. <strong>4.4.4&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Heteroskedasticity Test</strong> Table 4.11: Breusch-Pagan-Godfrey Heteroskedasticity Test Summary Model BPG Statistic (Obs*R-sq) Prob. ARDL Model 4.3085 0.5059 ECM 7.2979 0.1209 &nbsp; In the ARDL model, the <em>p</em>-value (0.5059) of the BPG test exceeds the 0.05 benchmark, and therefore indicates that the residuals of the ARDL model are homoskedastic. Similarly, in ECM, the <em>p</em>-value (0.1209) of the BPG test also exceeds the 0.05 benchmark, and therefore indicates that the residuals of the error correction model (ECM) are homoskedastic. <strong>4.4.5&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Autocorrelation Test</strong> Table 4.12: Breusch-Godfrey Serial Correlation Test Summary Model BG Statistic (Obs*R-sq) Prob. ARDL Model 0.1021 0.7493 ECM 0.8776 0.3488 &nbsp; In the ARDL model, the <em>p</em>-value (0.7493) of the BG test exceeds the 0.05 benchmark, and therefore indicates that the residuals of the ARDL model are not serially correlated. Similarly, in ECM, the <em>p</em>-value (0.3488) of the BG test also exceeds the 0.05 benchmark, and therefore indicates that the residuals of the error correction model (ECM) are not serially correlated. <strong>4.4.6&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Functional Specification Test</strong> Table 4.13: RESET Model Specification Test Summary Model Test Statistics Value Degrees of Freedom Prob. ARDL Model t-statistic 0.805722 30 0.4267 F-statistic 0.649189 (1, 30) 0.4267 ECM t-statistic 0.533837 31 0.5973 F-statistic 0.284982 (1, 31) 0.5973 &nbsp; In the ARDL model, the F-statistic <em>p</em>-value (0.4267) of the RESET test exceeds the 0.05 benchmark, and therefore indicates that the ARDL model was adequately specified. Further, in the ECM, the F-statistic <em>p</em>-value (0.5973) of the RESET test exceeds the 0.05 benchmark, and therefore indicates that the error correction model (ECM) was adequately specified. <strong>4.4.7&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; CUSUMSQ Stability Test</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Cumulative Sum of Residuals (CUSUM) Squares test was used to examine the stability of the ARDL model. The result is captured in the following figure. Figure 4.6: CUSUMSQ Plot &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In interpreting the CUSUMSQ test, we may conclude that there is instability only if the CUSUMSQ plot falls outside the boundaries of the upper and lower dotted lines which signify the &ldquo;5% level of significance&rdquo;. In this regard, the plot of the CUSUMSQ test in the above figure shows that the ARDL model becomes momentarily unstable in year 2002. However, apart from 2002, the ARDL model appears to be stable in every other year as indicated by the confinement of the CUSUMSQ plot between the upper and lower dotted lines. Overall, considering the fact that this momentary period of instability does not coincide with any major event in Nigeria&rsquo;s education sector, we can conclude that instability is due to chance, and that the estimates of the model are reliable because apart from year 2002 the ARDL model appears to be stable.

The article, based on scientific analysis of literature sources, defines the&nbsp;process of formation and development of postgraduate pedagogical education in the United States, defines the term &ldquo;postgraduate pedagogical education&rdquo;, clarifies its main purpose and objectives in postgraduate training of teachers in the United States. The basic models in the basement of the innovative field of postgraduate education of the United States of America are characterized. The essence of the concepts &ldquo;competence&rdquo;, &ldquo;foreign language professional communicative competence&rdquo; and ways of applying the competence approach in teaching foreign languages are determined. The influence of multiculturalism in the USA on the formation of foreign language competencies in postgraduate training of US teachers is&nbsp;researched. The main goal of Ukrainian education, according to the Laws of Ukraine &ldquo;On&nbsp;Education&rdquo; (2016), &ldquo;On Higher Education&rdquo; (2015), &ldquo;On Innovation&rdquo; (2003), is to create the necessary conditions for the development and creative self-realization of the individual during life. Reorganization and improvement of postgraduate pedagogical education, which began in&nbsp;Ukraine at the beginning of the XXI century aimed on improving the&nbsp;system of postgraduate education, taking the example of the experience of one of the leading country in the world &ndash; the USA. <strong>The purpose of research</strong>: to study, research and borrow the experience of&nbsp;a&nbsp;leading country in the economic and educational fields &ndash; the United States of America, the main ways of formation&rsquo;s system of foreign language competencies in postgraduate training of US teachers. <strong>Research methods.</strong> To solve the tasks, to achieve the goal the following research methods were used: to study and analyze the scientific literature on the research topic (selection and understanding of didactic material); theoretical (content analysis, surveys, questionnaires, text discourse analysis); pedagogical-psychological and systemic (in order to characterize the features of professional training of teachers of the new formation); structural and logical. <strong>The results of the research.</strong> The role of scientific schools as system-forming in&nbsp;the creation and provision of educational and preparatory research programs, teacher development as a professional and formation of scientific and methodological competence of teachers in the conditions of essential changes in postgraduate pedagogical education is determined, as scientific provisions on selection and adult education. <strong>Conclusions.</strong> The main models that underlie the system of postgraduate education are identified: 1)&nbsp;the clinical model (the Clinical Model). Its&nbsp;essence lies in the close and well-thought-out connection of theory with practice and in the development of deep partnerships between universities and schools. The concept is based on the idea of teaching as a practical profession, according to which any theoretical position concerning teacher training must have immediate confirmation in real life; 2)&nbsp;the Added Value Model is potentially the most radical of American innovations in teacher education. Its essence is to evaluate the work of pedagogical faculties on the basis of&nbsp;the achievements of students taught by graduates of a particular faculty. Until recently, this idea was virtually unfeasible, as no state had databases linking three types of information: about the teacher, how he prepared his university, and about the results his students achieved; 3)&nbsp;the Value-added model can lead to an even greater outflow of the best teachers from the&nbsp;most difficult schools and classes. The model assumes that the effectiveness of&nbsp;a&nbsp;teacher&#39;s work largely depends on his/her training in the higher education institution, and not on the quality of the school staff, the&nbsp;management strategy followed by the principal, resources and professional support. It is proved that additional professional education is aimed at meeting educational and professional needs, professional development of a person, ensuring compliance of his qualifications with changing conditions of&nbsp;professional activity and social environments. The concept of &ldquo;competence&rdquo; is defined as an intellectual and personally conditioned ability of a person to practical activity, and the term &ldquo;competence&rdquo; as a meaningful component of such an opportunity in the form of knowledge, skills, abilities. The definition of &ldquo;foreign language professional communicative competence&rdquo; includes knowledge about languages, its functions, the&nbsp;development of skills in the field of speech activities (there are four main types &ndash; listening, reading, speaking, writing). Communicative competence involves knowledge of languages, its&nbsp;functions, skills development in the field of four main types of speech activity (listening, speaking, writing, reading,). The communicative competence of a student of foreign language communication is the ability to&nbsp;full-fledged language communication in all spheres of human activity with observance of social norms of language behavior. &nbsp; <strong>ШЛЯХИ ФОРМУВАННЯ ІНШОМОВНИХ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТЕЙ В ПІСЛЯДИПЛОМНІЙ ПІДГОТОВЦІ ВЧИТЕЛІВ У СПОЛУЧЕНИХ ШТАТАХ АМЕРИКИ</strong> У статті на основі аналізу наукових джерел визначено процес становлення та розвитку післядипломної педагогічної освіти США, визначено термін &quot;післядипломна педагогічна освіта&quot;, з&rsquo;ясовано її основну мету та завдання у післядипломній підготовці вчителів Сполучених Штатів Америки. Охарактеризовано основні моделі в основі інноваційної галузі післядипломної освіти Сполучених Штатів Америки. Визначено сутність понять &quot;компетентність&quot;, &quot;іншомовна професійна комунікативна компетентність&quot; та шляхи застосування компетентнісного підходу в навчанні іноземних мов. Досліджено вплив мультикультуралізму в США на формування іншомовних компетентностей у післядипломній підготовці вчителів США. Провідною метою української оcвіти, згідні із Законами України &quot;Про освiту&quot; (2016 р.), &quot;Про вищу освiту&quot; (2015 р.), &quot;Про іноваційну діяльність&quot; (2003 р.), є створення необхідних умов для розвитку і творчої самореалізації особистості протягом життя. Реорганізація та вдосконалення післядипломної педагогічної освіти, які розпочалися на Україні на початку ХХІ ст. мають за мету удосконалити систему післядипломної освіти, беручи за приклад досвід лідируючих країн світу, а cаме &ndash; США. <strong>Мета дослідження:</strong> вивчити, дослідити та запозичити досвід країни-лідера в економічній та освітній галузях &ndash; Сполучених Штатів Америки, основні шляхи щодо системи формування іншомовних компетентностей у післядипломній підготовці вчителів США. <strong>Методи дослідження.</strong> Щодо вирішення поставлених завдань, а також досягнення мети були використані наступні методи дослідження: вивчення та аналіз наукової літератури з теми дослідження (відбір та осмислення дидактичного матеріалу); теоретичний (контент-аналіз, опитування, анкети, аналіз дискурсу текстів); педагогіко-психологічний та системний (із метою характеристики особливостей професійної підготовки викладачів нової формації); структурно-логічний. <strong>Результати дослідження</strong>. Визначено роль наукових шкіл як системоутворюючих у створенні та забезпеченні освітніх та підготовчих дослідницьких програм, ровитку викладача як професіонала та формування науково-методичної компетентності викладачів в умовах сутнісних змін у післядипломній педагогічній освіті, оскільки набули подальшого розвитку наукові положення щодо відбору, а також структурування модернізації неперервної освіти дорослих. <strong>Висновки. </strong>Визначено основні моделі, які лежать в основі системи післядипломної освіти: 1) клінічна модель (the Clinical Model). ЇЇ суть полягає в тісному і продуманому зв&#39;язку теорії з практикою і в розвитку глибоких партнерських відносин між вузами і школами. В основі концепції лежить уявлення про навчання як про практичну професію, відповідно до якого будь-яке теоретичне положення, що стосується підготовки вчителів, повинно мати негайне підтвердження в реальному житті; 2) модель доданої вартості (the Added Value Model) &ndash; це потенційно найбільш радикальна з американських інновацій в галузі педагогічної освіти. Суть її полягає в оцінці роботи педагогічних факультетів на підставі досягнень учнів, яких навчають випускники того чи іншого факультету. До недавнього часу ця ідея була практично нездійсненною, оскільки ні в одному штаті не було баз даних, що зв&#39;язують в одне ціле три типи відомостей: про вчителя, яким чином підготував його вуз і про результати, яких домоглися його учні; 3) модель додаткової вартості може привести до ще більшого відтоку кращих вчителів з найважчих шкіл і класів. Модель передбачає, що ефективність праці вчителя в значній мірі залежить від його підготовки у вищому навчальному закладі, а не від якості шкільного колективу, стратегії управління, якої дотримується директор, ресурсів і професійної підтримки. З&rsquo;ясовано, що друга професійна освіта направлена на освітні та професійні потреби, розвиток людини як професіонала, відпівідність кваліфікації людини щодо мінливих умов професійної діяльності та соціального середовища. Визначено поняття &quot;компетентність&quot; як інтелектуальну та особистісно обумовлену здатність людини до практичної діяльності, а термін &quot;компетенція&quot; як змістовний компонент такої можливості у вигляді знань, умінь, навичок. З&rsquo;ясовано, що термін &quot;іншомовна професійна комунікативна компетентність&quot; &ndash; це здатність майбутнього випускника вузу діяти в режимі вторинної мовної особистості в професійно спрямованій ситуації спілкування з фахівцями інших країн, готовності до здійснення міжкультурної професійної взаємодії в полікультурному просторі в умовах міжнародної мобільності та інтеграції. Дефініція &quot;комунікативна компетенція&quot; включає знання про мову, її функціi, розвиток умінь в галузі видів мовленнєвої діяльності (виокремлюють чотири основних види &ndash; аудіювання, читання, говоріння, письмо). Поняття &quot;компетентність студента в практичному застосуванні іншомовного cпілкування&quot; &ndash; це вміння застосовувати набуті знання та навички з дотриманням мовленнєвих норм в соціумі, у будь-якій сфері.

Country reputation is a central target construct in research on country-of-origin effects, international public relations, and especially public diplomacy. Public Diplomacy is about building up international relationships in a networked environment and creating a favorable (foreign) public opinion about the country to advance its goals (Wu &amp; Wang, 2019; Zaharna, 2020). We can distinguish four important attitudinal key constructs relevant to public diplomacy: The country’s image, identity, reputation, and brand. Buhmann and Ingenhoff (2015) systematize the conceptual differences along two basic axes by differentiating between a) whether the primary perspective focuses essentially on internal (identity, brand) or external (image, reputation) contexts and b) whether the constitutive process relies primarily on individual perceptions (image, identity) or public communication and estimation (reputation, brand). The country's identity and image are primarily 'perceptive constructs' shaped by individual, subjective perceptions. Conversely, country brand and reputation are 'constructs of representation' developed within public communication which are chiefly acknowledged internationally and built on public estimation. Based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (Ajzen &amp; Fishbein, 1980; Fishbein &amp; Ajzen, 1975) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), these attitudinal constructs always comprise a component of beliefs (the cognitive component) and a component of emotions (the affective component) towards the image object. Country reputation is a multidimensional attitudinal construct articulated through five distinct dimensions. Four of these dimensions are cognitive and one is emotional. The four cognitive reputation components are defined as 1) Functional, assessing a nation's competitiveness, including its economy, innovation, and government efficiency; 2) Normative, evaluating the integrity, norms, values, and social and ecological responsibilities; 3) Cultural, representing the country's cultural assets and heritage, such as history, traditions, culinary delights, and sport; 4) Natural, concerning perceptions of the country's geographical features. The affective reputation component is called the emotional dimension, reflecting general feelings of attraction and fascination towards the country (Ingenhoff, 2017, 2018; Ingenhoff &amp; Chariatte, 2020). These dimensions collectively shape a country’s attitude towards a nation, encompassing cognitive beliefs and affective responses. All five dimensions of the attitudinal constructs can be analyzed in terms of their content, details of which are elaborated below based on the example of country reputation. Fields of Application/theoretical foundation Studies often examine a country's reputation in the context of agenda-setting processes on public opinion formation (McCombs &amp; Shaw, 1972). Thereby, the media portrayal of countries is investigated, highlighting the unequal visibility of countries in the news agenda and the importance of media frames (e.g., Brewer et al., 2003; Wanta et al., 2004; Jain &amp; Winner, 2013). Many of these studies examine the tonality and valence of media portrayal of countries or the countries' associations with specific issues. In their 2020 study, Ingenhoff and Chariatte emphasized the importance of considering the perspectives of foreign audiences (the so-called "listening approach") when assessing a country's reputation in public diplomacy. They conducted a thorough content analysis at different communication levels to examine the content and tone of strategic communication. This involved analyzing survey data, news media, and trace data and using structural equation modeling to evaluate both direct and indirect effects of communication on how a country is perceived and portrayed. In country perception studies, so-called country-of-origin effects or destination images are also frequently examined. However, these often only deal with certain facets of the country’s image (e.g., tourism, economy). References/combination with other methods Walter et al. (2022) examined the extent to which American media report and frame 55 countries. The sample consisted of the ten highest-circulating US news in 2018. Walter et al. used content analysis but applied recent methodological innovations using a machine learning topic network approach. They identified three central country frames that could serve as a basis for coding, namely "conflict," "economy," and "human interest." Conflict includes topics such as immigration, electoral politics, or foreign affairs, and the economy contains trade relationships. In contrast, human interest includes, for example, sports news or cultural characteristics such as food, fashion, or music. These coding categories can, among others, also be found in the study of Ingenhoff, Segev, and Chariatte (2020). They analyzed how a country's image varies among nearby and distant countries and whether online search behavior for information about a country is linked to its perception. They conducted a content analysis of Google searches and open-ended survey questions based on the five-dimensional country image model. In another multimethod study (2020), Ingenhoff and Chariatte expand the study’s results: They comprehensively analyze the country's reputation using a combination of media content analysis, Google search analysis, survey answers, and structural equation modeling. Example study: Ingenhoff et al. (2020) Theoretical foundation: The study by Ingenhoff, Segev, and Chariatte (2020) is rooted in theories of country stereotypes and news value theory. It investigates whether perceptions of a country differ between distant and nearby countries and considers the impact of digital cross-border sources of information, such as Google. Additionally, the study examines how Google queries from various countries align with open survey responses regarding Switzerland's image and reputation. The theoretical framework includes the five-dimensional model of country images, which encompasses functional, normative, cultural, natural, and emotional dimensions, each with specific subdimensions (Ingenhoff, 2017, 2018; Ingenhoff &amp; Chariatte, 2020). Methods of data collection: The study employed content analysis on data from multiple sources: Survey data: A representative survey was conducted in seven countries (N=3,556) in Fall 2016, collaborating with the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs/Presence Switzerland. Respondents answered the open question, “What immediately comes to mind when you think of Switzerland? Think about its characteristics and special features, as well as about current events, personalities, organizations, companies, products, etc. Please note down everything that comes to mind when you think about Switzerland”. Google Trends Data: Top and rising Google searches about Switzerland between 2004 and 2017 (N=3,839) were collected from the same countries using Google Trends. The units of analysis are the open survey answers and the Google search queries. These were coded into multiple categories using polytomous nominal scales. A comprehensive codebook based on the five-dimensional model of country images guided the coding process (see Table 1). Table 1. Coding scheme for country reputation applied in the study by Ingenhoff, Segev and Chariatte (2020). Country Dimensions Variables (based upon the five-dimensional country image model) Codes Reliability Nature dimension of the country image: relates to the natural qualities of the country 1.Landscape (aspects of geographical location, size, /weather/topography) 2. Preserved nature 3. Activities related to the landscape (e.g., good spot for winter sports) κ = .82, p &lt; .001 for the five country image dimensions κ = .78, p &lt; .001 for the variables of the subcategories of the country dimensions Functional dimension of the country image: relates to the political, economic and social aspects of a country’s competitiveness and effectiveness 1. Education system 2. Science and innovation 3. Products (e.g., Switzerland’s watches.) 4. Economy (economical wealth and autonomy, currency and exchange rates, tax system, investments, industry related information) 5. Infrastructure (e.g., transport system) 6. politics (political system, international relations, political votes, political actors like politicians or parties) 7. Living- and working conditions (job market, cost of living) 8. Security aspects. Normative dimension of the country image: relates to the integrity of a country and its norms and values 1. Environmental protection 2. Freedom and human rights 3. Civil rights 4. International solidarity (collaboration and engagement) 5. Ethical issues (e.g., bank scandals) 6. Conflict avoidance (e.g., peace, neutrality) 7. tolerance and openness (e.g., towards minorities, strangers) Culture dimension of the country image: relates to cultural aspects of Switzerland 1. Sports 2. Typical dishes 3. Cultural offer (e.g., theatre, design, architecture), 4. Personalities (e.g., athletes, tv stars) 5. Traditions 6. History 7. Cultural diversity Emotional dimension of the country image: relates to feelings of sympathy and fascination towards the country 1. Sympathy towards citizens 2. General positive/negative comments on the country Other (e.g., confusions with other countries) Example Study: Jain &amp; Winner (2013) Theoretical Foundation: Jain &amp; Winner's (2013) study is grounded in the theories of agenda-setting and agenda-building. Based on this approach, the authors assume that the media can adopt public relations messages (such as press releases) and that media coverage can shape the perception of countries. Therefore, the study analyzes a country’s information in press releases and its media portrayal and how this is connected to people’s attitudes toward a nation and its economic performance. By examining the transference of both issue salience and attribute salience (substantive and affective attributes), the authors explore how media portrayal impacts public attitudes and economic performance (Kiousis et al., 2007; McCombs et al., 1997). The study differentiates between substantive and affective attributes: Substantive attributes describe the qualities or characteristics of the issues, objects, or people being discussed. In this study, these are attributes based on the six dimensions of Anholt’s NBI (people, products and services, governance, tourism, culture, investment and immigration). Subattributes are more specific aspects within these broader categories. For example, subattributes within the 'people' category might include perceptions of the population as welcoming, friendly, or educated. On the other hand, affective attributes refer to the tone or emotional valence in which these substantive attributes are presented, which can be positive, negative, or neutral. Methods of data collection: Data were retrieved from the Factiva database, including press releases from PR Newswire US (N=598) and news articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (N=488), collected between April 1 and June 20, 2009. For the survey and economic performance results, the study consulted secondary data from the same year, which came from Simon Anholt’s Nation Brand Index, the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the US Department of Commerce. The analysis involved coding press releases and news articles to capture the salience and tone of the issue (see Table 2). Issue salience was recorded using dichotomous nominal scales (presence=1; absence=0), while tone was assessed on an ordinal scale (negative=1, neutral=2, positive=3). Table 2. Coding scheme for country issues and attributes applied in the study by Jain &amp; Winner (2013). Substantive attributes, i.e., variables of issue salience Subattributes (shortened description of items) Reliability People a) Welcoming people b) Friendly people c) Qualified/educated people Press releases: Holsti 0.90, κ = 0.67. For both variables of issue salience and codes: Holsti 0.96, κ = 0.66. Media articles: Holsti 0.97, κ = 0.70. For variables of issue salience: Holsti 0.93, κ = 0.70. For codes: Holsti 0.98 and κ = 0.66. Products and services a) Innovative products/services b) High quality products/services c) Creative place with cutting edge ideas Governance a) Competently and honestly governed b) Respect of citizen rights and fair treatment c) Responsible behavior in international peace and security d) Responsibly protect the environment e) Responsibly reduce the world poverty Tourism a) Like to visit the country if money were no object b) Country is rich in natural beauty c) Historic buildings and monuments d) Host of international events Culture a) Excels at sports b) Rich cultural heritage c) Interesting place for contemporary culture (films, music,…) Immigration and Investment a) Willingness to live and work for substantial period in the country b) Quality of life c) Good place to study d) Businesses to invest in e) Equal opportunity Literature: Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 50(2), 179-211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T Ajzen, I., &amp; Fishbein, M. (1980). Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior. Prentice-Hall. Buhmann, A., &amp; Ingenhoff, D. (2015). Advancing the country image construct from a public relations perspective: from model to measurement. Journal of Communication Management, 19(1), 62-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcom-11-2013-0083 Brewer, P. R., Graf, J., &amp; Willnat, L. (2003). Priming or framing: Media influence on attitudes toward foreign countries. Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands), 65(6), 493-508. https://doi.org/10.1177/0016549203065006005 Fishbein, M. and Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Addison-Wesley. Ingenhoff, D. (2017). A validated 5-dimensional, country image measurement scale for public diplomacy. Analyzing value drivers and effects of country-images on stakeholders’ behavior in seventeen countries. International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), International Communication Section, Cartagena, Colombia, July 16-20, July. Ingenhoff, D. (2018). Reputation. In Heath, R.L., &amp; Johansen, W. (eds.). International encyclopedia of strategic communication. Vol. III, Wiley. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119010722.iesc0148 Ingenhoff, D., &amp; Chariatte, J. (2020). Solving the public diplomacy puzzle. Developing a 360-degree listening and evaluation approach to assess country images. CPD Perspectives (Paper 2). Figueora Press. https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/sites/default/files/useruploads/u47441/Solving%20the%20Public%20Diplomacy%20Puzzle_1.9.21.pdf Ingenhoff, D., Segev, E., &amp; Chariatte, J. (2020). The Construction of country images and stereotypes: From public views to google searches. International Journal of Communication, 14, 92-113. Jain, R., &amp; Winner, L.H. (2013). Country reputation and performance: The role of public relations and news media. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 9, 109-123. https://doi.org/10.1057/pb.2013.7 Kiousis, S., Popescu, C., &amp; Mitrook, M. (2007). Understanding influence on corporate reputation: An examination of public relations efforts, media coverage, public opinion, and financial performance from an agenda-building and agenda-setting perspective. Journal of Public Relations Research, 19(2), 147-165. https://doi.org/10.1080/10627260701290661 McCombs, M. E., &amp; Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176-187. https://doi.org/10.1086/267990 McCombs, M. E. (1997). Building consensus: The news media’s agenda-setting roles. Political Communication, 14(4), 433-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/105846097199236 Walter, D., Ophir, Y., Pruden, M. &amp; Golan, G. (2022). Watching the whole world: The Media framing of foreign countries in US news and its antecedents. Journalism Studies, 23(15), 1994-2014. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2022.2137838 Wanta, W., Golan, G., &amp; Lee, C. (2004). Agenda setting and international news: Media influence on public perceptions of foreign nations. Journalism &amp; Mass Communication Quarterly, 81(2), 364-377. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900408100209 Wu, D., &amp; Wang, J. (2019). Country image in public diplomacy: From messages to relationships. In D. Ingenhoff, C. White, A. Buhmann, &amp; S. Kiousis (Eds.), Bridging disciplinary perspectives of country image, reputation, brand, and identity (pp.212-229). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315271224-12 Zaharna, R. S. (2020). Communication logics of global public diplomacy. In N. Snow, &amp; N.J. Cull (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy (pp. 96-111). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429465543-13

Fig. 1: A Start. I could write or I could weave.I could write or I could weave…Write, weave. Weave.Then a colleague and friend says to me: why do you weave?I weave to put myself back together again.I weave the pieces of me that are shattered and broken.I weave because the rhythm, flow, feel, pattern and solidity comforts me.I weave because my body tells me to.I weave to breathe more slowly, more deeply.I weave because the threads that create the strands of my life need a language.… This article reflects on my relationship with weaving and what it offers to the remaining threads of my life. Weaving is embodied, procedural and experiential: it is personal, cultural, and spiritual for me. It is a language that allows me sacred time and space, whether by myself (although I’m really never alone) or with other people. It is an extension of my breath, from my body, in co-creation with earth and sky that manifests as a solid object in my hands. It was when my colleague suggested I write about why I weave that I realised such reflection could help me tap into knowledge. Nithikul Nimkulrat says that knowledge is generated from within the researcher-practitioner’s artistic experience. The procedural and experiential knowledge thus becomes explicit as a written text and/or as visual representations. … With the slow pace of a craft-making process, the practitioner-researcher is able to generate ‘reflection-in-action’ and document the process. (1) For me, knowledge becomes an embodied state of being while I’m weaving: while my hands move, my body grounds, my heart calms, my mind detaches from thoughts, letting one flow to the next, as I watch one stitch lead / follow the next. Until the row becomes the spiral becomes the base becomes the basket. Each stitch documenting my reflections in the process of weaving the whole. The regenerative aspect of this process has been powerful and impactful for me because of my relationship with time and space, my relationship with my Country, my relationship with people, my relationship with sovereignty. I don’t have the words to describe how weaving allows me to embody a relationship with that tiny little spark of creativity in me, so I weave it instead. I see that spiral fractal in everything around me. Weaving, for me, has become a way to listen to them speak. The spiral centre of each round woven basket is my favourite part. I love spirals. Fibonacci sequence. Golden Ratio. Fractals. I’ve heard stories about how some people can look at a specific symbol or drawing and immediately transform their reality from reading the immense wisdom it held. I can only imagine what that must mean and feel like, but when I look at a spiral, anywhere, in anything, I can see through space and time differently. I imagine that must be what our DNA looks like. I feel an immense sense of connectedness when I see that smallest spiral circle core. Reflection in action. I believe we carry our Ancestors in our DNA, or maybe they carry us. I believe this ancient beautiful land we are on was carved out by the Ancestors. Human, non-human, and more-than-human: I see one now. As I write this. On my Country. In my nest. I live in a nest amidst the hills. And so, when I weave, I weave myself into that nest. Freja Carmichael writes: “whether old or new forms, First Nations fibre practices are grounded in histories and knowledges that run deep and interconnect across the lands and waters. Our many nations inherit specific fibre traditions relative to Ancestral, spiritual, environmental and historical contexts all of which are interconnected with culture” (44). While I weave nests, baskets, bags, mats, to my west sits an ancient volcano. An ancient creation ancestor. She called to me in my dreams although I did not know why. Fig. 2: An Aerial Shot. When I weave with my bare feet resting on earth, I feel the pulse of electromagnetic energy, while the warmth of the sun renourishes my face and skin. I feel my heart rate slow, my breathing deepens and my body relaxes. Andrea Hinch-Bourns writes: wherever we are, we can sit down upon the earth, let the dirt run through our fingers, take off our shoes and squish the dirt through our toes, and if we listen carefully, we will hear our ancestors talk to us in the language of our people. This knowledge is contained in all of us, through what is referred to as, ‘blood memory’ … and ‘molecular or cellular memory’ … . This intuition is carried within all of us regardless of whether we are connected to our culture, speak our language, or live somewhere other than our communities. It is something innate, powerful, which draws us together as a collective people. (20) I gather a few individual raffia strands and press them closely together, wrap them with another thread, and reshape them from single strands into a firm spiral base, like the spiral energy at the base of my spine. Grief and love curl themselves through my body and into my hands. I exhale the emotions out and inhale the scent and sounds of my Country, imbuing the threads in my hands with the gratitude that tracks up my back, along meridian points, like the movement of those Seven Sisters embedded in the landscape of my body. I sit straighter, breathe and remember. Weaving can shift my consciousness into a different state of being, allowing me to imagine even more. Such a place, a state of mind, seems to be filled with the potential to transform. In recent years I have, at times, physically, mentally, and emotionally been unable to speak. I don’t like talking, but the act of weaving feels like a conversation, one in which I am involved, wholeheartedly. A conversation that holds potential to transform. Whatever that might look like. The image below of 12 baskets speaks of a three-month conversation I experienced with a group of people, who individually and as a whole grounded me with reciprocity. Fig. 3: 12 Gifts. Aboriginal peoples in Australia have been weaving since the beginning. Please don’t make me attach a linear number of years to that, it’s just not going to align with the spiral base of my basket. In their research exploration of the insider-outsider experience in research spaces, Radley, Ryan, and Dowse “describe weaving as method and cultural process as our individual strands weave together with collective ways of knowing, being and doing openly and freely” (414). They extend the work of Chew, and articulate how the metaphor of weaving as a cultural practice conveys “a model for planning and decision-making that acknowledges ancestral wisdom”; it is, for them, “an intangible knowledge process, narrative, belonging and knowledge transference” (414). They emphasise that the Western notion of “metaphor” does not necessarily convey this conceptual, and I would add embodied, framework. In trying to articulate what weaving is and does, means for me, I have to access my whole being – cognitive, experiential and embodied. At the spiral centre of it, I have to be creative, and creativity is a direct connection to the divine. Country is a physical and metaphysical manifestation of divine source. Tapping into my creativity taps me into my Country and my Ancestors. When I’m tapped in, I listen better, and when I listen better, I recognise other connections and communities around me. The different strands of each community, human, non-human, more-than-human, at first seem unconnected and separate, but these more-than-metaphor threads co-create a basket or nest with me. The final physical object I can touch, feel, and hold in my hands is my cognitive unconsciousness manifested in a more-than-metaphor object. Shay Welch states that cognitive embodied metaphor theory posits that how we conceive the world is a function of our embodied interaction with the world and, as such, most of our depictions, linguistic representations, imaginative operations, and abstract thought are metaphorical with respect to our spatial-locomotive-sensory activities and experiences. That is, most Western theorists reject the idea that metaphors are embodied, that they have meaning and are meaningful. (28) When I hold the threads of raffia, when I shape them, bend them, bind them, and strengthen them, I am in co-creation with the world around me and in me. My internal and external landscapes manifest the nest that holds and nurtures me and I, in return, love hard on it. Gregory Cajete, a Tewa man, states that the metaphoric mind is the oldest mind: connected to the creative center of nature, the metaphoric mind has none of the limiting conditioning of the cultural order. It perceives itself as part of the natural order, a part of the Earth mind. Its processing is natural and instinctive. It is inclusive and expansive in its processing of experience and knowledge … . Because its processes are tied to creativity, perception, image, physical senses and intuition, the metaphoric mind reveals itself through abstract symbols, visual/spatial reasoning, sound, kinesthetic expression, and various forms of ecological and integrative thinking. (51) Weaving has taught me to calm my mind and body, reconnect with my heart, and centre peace in my soul. While most of my weaving has been done without other humans around, any sense of loneliness and isolation is eased by my Country: by the galahs, the magpies, the cockatoos, the crows, the wrens, the clouds, the winds, the sounds, the stars, the air, and the earth. I no longer ever feel lonely, even when I am alone. In co-creating the nest in my hands with the nest I am nestled in, I weave myself back together. Māori researcher Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes: the project of creating is not just about the artistic endeavours of individuals but about the spirit of creating which Indigenous communities have exercised over thousands of years. Imagination enables people to rise above their own circumstances, to dream new visions and to hold on to old ones. It fosters inventions and discoveries, facilitates simple improvements to peoples lives and uplifts our spirits. Creating is not the exclusive domain of the rich nor of the technologically superior, but of the imaginative. (158) Weaving, is at times, my portal to imaginative realms. Once, after a women’s ceremony in north-east Arnhem-Land, the women told us – us women from the heavily colonised and disconnected New South Wales east coast – to not forget what they had taught us and to always return to them in our imaginations. According to Welch, some scholars refer to this as the inscape or the inner space – the source of insight and intuition (27). And according to Ermine (1995), one important aspect of knowledge creation occurs through introspection, the way in which knowledge creation becomes a spiritual experience. He goes on to explain that as knowledge and understanding of the world comes from within, it is through rituals and ceremonies, and the experience of self-actualisation, that knowledge creation occurs and “is synonymous with the soul, the spirit, the self, or the being” (103). Weaving, the practice and the knowing it brings, returns me to a state of embodied being. Anjilkurri Radley acknowledges that, given that all things are connected, “what I perceive as not knowing is only a lack of connectedness” (quoted in Radley, Ryan, and Dowse 423). As I gather together the strands of my life, weaving becomes both the process and language for me to connect my knowings and unknowings. The reviewer for this article pointed out to me how this relates to that spiral, with embodied knowing and practicing circling back on itself. With each moment of return something more has been revealed. “There is a whole ritual in weaving … and for me, it’s a meditation … from where we actually start, the centre part of a piece, you’re creating loops to weave into, then you move into the circle” (Aunty Ellen Trevorrow cited in Bell 44). Weaving helps me listen better. My ears hear differently, pick up differently the languages of earth and sky. The vibrations reverberate in a deep part of my inner landscape. The threads are like the string that keeps me connected to the sky world. Weaving becomes a language that connects my inner and outer worlds, crafting each basket into a story. Stories that keep me connected to communities. Communities that include what Jace Weaver refers to as “the wider community of Creation itself” (xiii). Stories like that Songspiral of those Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters creation story that we now read in the sky as the Pleiades: “those faint, gentle stars have touched all our lives on a multitude of levels. Their celestial influence in all spheres of life is prolific while their esoteric, spiritual nature in world mythology is profound. Beyond their symbolic meaning, the practical application of the Pleiades in the sciences – especially in measurements, geodesics, geometry, architecture and navigation – is considerable” (Andrews 8). Those Seven Sisters speak to me of my Creation Story and I see their emplaced myth in both the landscape of my body and on my Country. A resting site of theirs nearby. Such emplaced myth speaks of connection and community. The solidity of the raffia strands keeps me grounded in earth, while the rhythm of weaving tugs on my string to the Milky Way. My great, great Aunt (my Nan really) taught me to crochet when I was little. We would sit together out the back of the kitchen and I would listen to her tell stories about locals while we crocheted ourselves together in a rug. Lifetimes later, I learnt how to weave after collecting pandanus, stripping, dying, drying it, sat in a circle on the earth with Aunts and Grandmothers. My sinful left-handedness called to mind my late Mum’s voice – “you cacky-handed bitch” – making me try with my right hand out of shame when I see not one other woman is using her left hand! Eventually, I give in to the calling of my naturally inclined hand to hold the needle and I switch over, requiring me to learn left to right all over again. Now, another lifetime later, I mostly weave alone. But that’s another story and one that’s changing as I sit on my Country with family, little ones, and Elders, hopelessly trying to teach the kids to mirror me, not follow me. From weaving with Yolŋu yapas, to weaving alone, to weaving with mob, the threads of each experience always bring me back to connection. Back together. Joseph Couture says that “Native ‘seeing’ is a primary dynamic, an open and moving mindscape. This process determines and drives the Native habit to be fully alive in the present, without fear of self and others, non-compulsively and non-addictively in full relationship to all that is – in relationship with the ‘is’-ness of a self-organizing ecology, a cosmic community of ‘all my relations” (48). Weaving that relationship became a language for me, allowing me to find the words to write. Once it’s finished, I will give the basket away. I only ever start weaving an item with a person in mind to gift it to. From my heart to my hands, I try to imbue each strand with love, with strength, with harmony. Sometimes the baskets emerge slightly lopsided and uneven in their base or bulgy in some spots in the side. Sometimes I weave embroidered trimming in swirls around the top edge. Holding the emerging basket in my hands, each one takes its own form in co-creation with the world around me. I have no idea how each basket will turn out, its size, its shape, its depth, until it says to me in the process of embodied co-creation, it’s time, it’s done. And so I gather the final strands and weave into the whole. “Sometimes knowledge is received as a gift at a moment of need; sometimes it manifests itself as a sense that ‘the time is right’ to hunt, or counsel, or make a decisive turn in one’s life path” (Castellano 24). Why do I weave? To weave myself whole again. To remember. “From fish traps and cradles to coffins, a basket can hold many things: food, babies, love, trinkets, water, sustenance, bones, burdens, grief and secrets. Like a gathering up of ‘all those shattered pieces’ that have been taken, lost or forgotten, a basket can hold stories, ceremonies and dances, for a new remembering” (Harkin 156). I stop and start this article so many times. I stop because of tears and fears. I start again because of love. The threads of raffia I am using feel alive in my hands. I acknowledge and pay respect to Pandanus and briefly in my imagination return to north-east Arnhem Land: the sky, the smell, the hooked stick to pull the strands of pandanus down, filling bags to take back to camp to prepare for stripping and dying. I run my fingers down a few strands, recalling through my fingers a nightmare as a child – a thread of hair, expanding, igniting a horror in me that even waking up didn’t dispel. Once, when I told a sista about this dream, she said perhaps someone had sung me as a child. The threads of raffia don’t feel like the terror of the hair strand, though. Instead, they feel like home and each time I touch the threads, pushing through, curling over, pulling up, the rhythm, the flow of the pattern, centres me, grounds me while my bare feet rest on the earth. On my Country. That black soil that grew me up. The smell of first rain on its layer of dry dust is the best smell in the world. Petrichor, my sons would say. And I weave the elements of earth, rain, and air into my nest, the basket that will carry love after transmuting my fears with each thread. Seneca dancer Rosy Simas writes, “recent scientific study verifies what many Native people have always known: that traumatic events in our ancestors’ lives persist in our bodies, blood, and bones. These events leave molecular scars that adhere to our DNA” (29). The stories I carry in my body, in my DNA, the stories I carry for my descendants, may not be able to be expressed in spoken English, but my baskets hold them. Fig. 4: The Whole. Radley, Ryan, and Dowse refer to this as “intentionally trusting ancestors and their gifts of cellular memory to guide [us] when something is, or is not, right” and explain how it underscores their ethical and cultural research protocols (435). Dancer Monique Mojica, from the Guna and Rappahannock nations, expresses how “our bodies are our libraries – [with] references in memory, an endless resource, a giant database of stories. Some we lived, some were passed on, some dreamt, some forgotten, some we are unaware of, or dormant, awaiting the key that will release them” (97). I carry my Ancestors in my DNA and the threads that hold us together become solid in my hands. And so, I breathe and weave. References Andrews, Munya. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: Stories from Around the World. North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2004. Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be. North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. Cajete, Gregory. "Philosophy of Native Science." American Indian Thought (2004): 45-57. Carmichael, Elisa J. How Is Weaving Past, Present, Futures? Dissertation. Queensland University of Technology, 2017. Castellano, Marlene Brant. "Updating Aboriginal Traditions of Knowledge." Indigenous Knowledges in Global Contexts: Multiple Readings of Our World (2000): 21-36. Couture, Joseph E. A Metaphoric Mind: Selected Writings of Joseph Couture. Athabasca: University Press, 2013. Ermine, Willie, M. Battiste, and J. Barman. "Aboriginal Epistemology." First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds (1995): 101-12. Harkin, Natalie. "Weaving the Colonial Archive: A Basket to Lighten the Load." Journal of Australian Studies 44.2 (2020): 154-166. Hinch-Bourns, Andrea Colleen. In Their Own Words, in Their Own Time, in Their Own Ways: Indigenous Women's Experiences of Loss, Grief, and Finding Meaning through Spirituality. Canada: University of Manitoba, 2013. Mojica, Monique. "Stories from the Body: Blood Memory and Organic Texts." Native American Performance and Representation (2009): 97-109. Nimkulrat, Nithikul. "Hands-On Intellect: Integrating Craft Practice into Design Research." International Journal of Design 6.3 (2012): 1-14. Radley, Anjilkurri, Tess Ryan, and Kylie Dowse. "Ganggali Garral Djuyalgu (Weaving Story): Indigenous Language Research, The Insider–Outsider Experience and Weaving Aboriginal Ways of Knowing, Being, and Doing into Academia." WINHEC: International Journal of Indigenous Education Scholarship 1 (2021): 411-448. Simas, Rosy. “My Making of We Wait in the Darkness.” Dance Research Journal 48.1 (2016): 29. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed, 1999. Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Welch, Shay. “Dance as Native Performative Knowledge.” Native American and Indigenous Philosophy 18.1 (2018): 23-35.

What are the possibilities of a body? This is a question that is answered best by thinking prosthetically. After all, the possibilities of a body extend beyond flesh and bone. Asked another way, one might query: what are the affective capacities of bodies—animal or otherwise? Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari focus on affectivity as capacity, on what the body does or can do; thinking through Baruch Spinoza’s writing on the body, they state, “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects” (257). If bodies are defined by their affective capacities, I wonder: how can prosthetics be used to alter dominant and dominating relationships between the human and the non-human animal, particularly as these relationships bear on questions of race? In this essay, I forward a contemporary media installation, “The Slug Princess”, as a productive site for thinking through the prosthetic possibilities around issues of race, animality, and aesthetics. I contend that the Degenerate Art Ensemble’s installation works through uncommon prosthetics to activate what Deleuze and Guattari describe as becoming-animal. While animality has historically been mobilized to perpetuate Orientalist logics, I argue that DAE’s becoming-slug rethinks the capacities of the body prosthetically, and in so doing dismantles the hierarchy of the body normativity.The Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) is a collective of artists with international showings co-directed by Haruko Crow Nishimura, originally from Japan, and Joshua Kohl, from the United States. The ensemble is based in Seattle, Washington, USA. The group’s name is a reference to the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, Germany, organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party. The exhibition staged 650 works from what Nazi officials referred to as “art stutterers”, the pieces were confiscated from German museums and defined as works that “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill” (Spotts 163). DAE “selected this politically charged moniker partly in response to the murder in Olympia [Washington] of an Asian American youth by neo-Nazi skinheads” (Frye). DAE’s namesake is thus an embrace of bodies and abilities deemed unworthy by systems of corrupt power. With this in mind, I argue that DAE’s work provides an opportunity to think through intersections of prostheticity, animality, and race.“The Slug Princess” is part of a larger exhibition of their work shown from 19 March to 19 June 2011 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The installation is comprised of two major elements: a crocheted work and a video projection. For me, both are prosthetics.A Crocheted Prosthetic and Orientalist AnimalityThe crocheted garment is not immediately recognizable as a prosthetic. It is displayed on a mannequin that stands mostly erect. The piece, described as a headdress, is however by no means a traditional garment. Yellow spirals and topographies flow and diverge in tangled networks of yarn that sometimes converge into recognizable form. The knit headdress travels in countless directions, somehow assembling as a wearable fibrous entity that covers the mannequin from head to ground, spreading out, away, and behind the figuration of the human. In slumped orbs, green knit “cabbages’ surround the slug princess headdress, exceeding the objects they intend to represent in mass, shape, and affect. In this bustling excess of movement, the headdress hints at how it is more than a costume, but is instead a prosthetic.The video projection makes the prosthetic nature of the crocheted headdress evident. It is a looped performance of Nishimura that runs from ceiling to floor and spans the semi-enclosed space in which it is displayed. In the video, Nishimura walks, then crawls – slowly, awkwardly – through a forest. She also eats whole cabbages, supporting procedure with mouth, foot, and appendage, throwing the function of her body parts into question. The crocheted element is vital to her movement and the perception of her body’s capacities.As Nishimura becomes slug princess, the DAE begins to intervene in complex regimes of racial identification. It is imperative to note that Nishimura’s boy gets caught up in interpretive schemas of Western constructions of Asians as animals. For example, in the early diaspora in the United States, Chinese men were often identified with the figure of the rat in 19th-century political cartoons. Mel Y. Chen points to the ways in which these racialized animalities have long reinforcing the idea of the yellow peril through metaphor (Chen 110-111). These images were instrumental in conjuring fear around the powerfully dehumanizing idea that hordes of rats were infesting national purity. Such fears were significant in leading to the Chinese exclusion acts of the United States and Canada. Western tropes of Asians find traction in animal symbolism. From dragon ladies to butterflies, Asian femininity in both women and men has been captured by simultaneous notions of treachery and passivity. As Nishimura’s body is enabled by prosthetic, it is also caught in a regime of problematic signs. Animal symbolism persists throughout Asian diasporic gender construction and Western fantasies of the East. Rachel C. Lee refers to the “process whereby the human is reduced to the insect, rodent, bird, or microbe” as zoe-ification, which she illustrates as a resolute means of excluding Asian Americans from species-being (Lee Exquisite 48). DAE’s Slug Princess, I argue, joins Lee’s energies herein by providing and performing alternative modes of understanding animality.The stakes of prosthetics in becoming-animal lie in the problem of domination through definition. Orientalist animality functions to devalue Asians as animals, ultimately justifying forms of subordination and exclusion. I want to suggest that becoming-slug, as I will elaborate below, provides a mode of resisting this narrow function of defining bodies by enacting prosthetic process. In doing so, it aligns with the ways in which prosthetics redefine the points of delineation against normativity. As Margarit Shildrick illuminates, “once it is acknowledged that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material technologies constantly disorder our boundaries, either through prosthetic extensions or through the internalization of mechanical parts, it is difficult to maintain that those whose bodies fail to conform to normative standards are less whole or complete than others” (24). DAE’s Slug Princess transmutates how animality functions to Orientalize Asians as the degenerate other, heightening the ways in which prosthetics can resist the racialized ideologies of normative wholeness.Why Prosthetics? Or, a Comparative Case in Aesthetic AnimalityDAE is of course not alone in their animalistic interventions. In order to isolate what I find uniquely productive about DAE’s prosthetic performance, I turn to another artistic alternative to traditional modes of Orientalist animality. Xu Bing’s performance installation “Cultural Animal” (1994) at the Han Mo Art Center in in Beijing, China can serve as a useful foil. “Cultural Animal” featured a live pig and mannequin in positions that evoked queer bestial sexuality. The pig was covered in inked nonsensical Roman letters; the full body of the mannequin was similarly tattooed in jumbled Chinese characters. The piece was a part of a larger project entitled “A Case Study of Transference”. According to Xu’s website, “the intention was both to observe the reaction of the pig toward the mannequin and produce an absurd random drama—an intention that was realized when the pig reacted to the mannequin in an aggressively sexual manner” (Xu). The photographs, which were a component of the piece, indeed evoke the difficulty of the concept of transference, imbricating species, languages, and taboos. The piece more generally enacts the unexpected excesses of performance with non-scripted bodies. The pig at times caresses the cheek of the mannequin. The sensuous experience is inked by the cultural confusion that images the seeming sensibility of each language. Amidst the movement of the pig and the rubbings of the ink, the mannequin is motionless, bearing a look of resigned openness. His eyes are closed, with a slight furrowing of the brow and calm downturned lips. The performance piece enacts crossings that reorient the historical symbolic force of racialization and animality. These forms of species and cultural miscegenation evoke for Mel Y. Chen a form of queer relationality that exemplifies “animalities that live together with race and with queerness, the animalities that we might say have crawled into the woodwork and await recognition, and, concurrently, the racialized animalities already here” (104). As such, Chen does the work of pointing out how Xu destabilizes notions of proper boundaries between human and animal, positing a different form of human-animal relationality. In short, Xu’s Cultural Animal chooses relationality. This relationality does not extend the body’s capacities. I argue that by focusing in on the pivotal nature of prosthesis, DAE’s slug activates a becoming-animal that goes beyond relationship, instead rethinking what a body can do.Becoming-Slug: Prosthetics as InterventionBy way of differentiation, how might “The Slug Princess” function beyond symbolic universalism and in excess of human-animal relations? In an effort to understand this distinction, I forward DAE’s installation as a practice of becoming-animal. Becoming-animal is a theoretical intervention in hierarchy, highlighting a minoritarian tactic to resist domination, akin to Shildrick’s description of prosthetics.DAE’s installation enacts becoming-slug, as illustrated in an elaboration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept they argue: “Becoming-animal always involves a pack” “a multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guatttari 239). The banner of becoming-animal is “I am legion”. DAE is and are a propagation of artists working together. They enact legion. Led by a pack of collaborators, DAE engage a range of artists in continual, ongoing, and fluctuating process. Their current collaborators include (and surpass): architect/designer Alan Maskin, costume designer ALenka Loesch, dancer/singer Dohee Lee, performance artist/expressionist/songwriter/shape-shifter Okanomodé, and sound/installation artist Robb Kunz. For the broader exhibition at the Frye, they listed the biographies of fifteen artists and the names of around 200 artists. Yet, it is not the mere number of collaborators that render DAE a multiplicity – it is the collaborative excess of their process that generates potential at the intersection of performance and prosthetic. Notably, it is important that the wearable prosthetic headpiece used in “Slug Princess” was created in collaboration. “The contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 243). Created by Many Greer but worn by Nishimura, it weighs on Nishimura’s body in ways that steer her performance. She is unable to stand erect as the mannequin in the exhibition. The prosthetic changes her capacities in unpredictable ways. The unexpected headdress causes her to hunch over and crawl, pushing her body into slow contact with the earth. As the flowing garment slows her forward progress, it activates new modes of movement. Snagging, and undulating, Nishimura moves slowly over the uncertain terrain of a forest. As Greer’s creation collides with Nishimura’s body and the practice of the dance, they enact becoming-slug. This is to suggest, then, following Deleuze and Guattari’s affective understanding of becoming-animal, that prosthetics have a productive role to play in disrupting normative modes of embodiment.Further, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, becoming-animal is non-affiliative (Deleuze and Guattari 238). Becoming-animal is that which is “not content to proceed by resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent an obstacle or stoppage” (Deleuze and Guattari 233). Likewise, Nishimura’s becoming-slug is neither imitative (305) nor mimetic because it functions in the way of displaced doing through prosthetic process. Deleuze and Guattari describe in the example of Little Hans and his horse, becoming-animal occurs in putting one’s shoes on one’s hands to move, as a dog: “I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by analogy” (258). The headdress engages an active bodily process of moving as a slug, rather than looking like a slug. Nishimura’s body begin as her body human begins, upright, but it is pulled down and made slow by the collaborative force of the wearable piece. As such, DAE enacts “affects that circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse [slug] ‘can do’” (257). This assemblage of affects pushes beyond the limited capacities of the screen, offering new productive entanglements.The Stuplime Loop as ProstheticTo the extent that conceiving of a headdress as a collaborative bodily prosthetic flows from common understandings of prosthetic, the medial interface perhaps stirs up a more foreign example of prosthesis and becoming-animal. The medial performance of DAE’s “The Slug Princess” operates through the video loop, transecting the human, animal, and technological in a way that displaces being in favor of becoming. The looping video creates a spatio-temporal contraction and elongation of the experience of time in relation to viewing. It functions as an experiential prosthetic, reworking the ability to think in a codified manner—altering the capacities of the body. Time play breaks the chronological experience of straight time and time as mastery by turning to the temporal experience as questioning normativity. Specifically, “The Slug Princess” creates productive indeterminacy through what Siane Ngai designates as “stuplimity”. Ngai’s punning contraction of stupidity and sublimity works in relation to Deleuze’s thinking on repetition and difference. Ngai poses the idea of stuplimity as beginning with “the dysphoria of shock and boredom” and culminating “in something like the ‘open feeling’ of ‘resisting being’—an indeterminate affective state that lacks the punctuating ‘point’ of individuated emotion” (284). Ngai characterizes this affecting openness and stupefying: it stops the viewer in their/her/his tracks. This importation of the affective state cannot be overcome through the exercise of reason (270). Departing from Kant’s description of the sublime, Ngai turns to the uglier, less awe-inspiring, and perhaps more debase form of aesthetic encounter. This is the collaboration of the stupid with the sublime. Stuplimity operates outside reason and sublimity but in alliance with their processes. Viewers seem to get “stuck” at “The Slug Princess”, lost in the stuplimity of the loop. Some affect of the looping videos generates not thoughtfulness or reflection, but perhaps cultural stupidity – the relative and temporary cessation or abatement of cultural logics and aesthetic valuations. The video loop comes together with the medial enactment of becoming-slug in such a manner that performs into stuplimity. Stuplimity, in this case, creates an opening of an affectively stupid or illegible (per Xu) space/time alternative being/becoming. The loop is, of course, not unique to the installation and is a common feature of museum pieces. Yet, the performance, the becoming-slug itself, creates sluggishness. Ngai posits that sluggishness works out the boredom of repetition, which I argue is created through the loop of becoming-slug. The slug princess’ slowness, played in the loop creates a “stuplimity [that] reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as totality” (271). That is, the loop, by virtue of its sluggishness, opens up becoming-animal not as a finite thing, but as an ongoing, cycling, and thoughtlessly tedious process. DAE’s installation thus demonstrates an attempt to adopt prosthetics to rethink the logics of control and power. In his writing on contemporary shifts in prosthetic function, Paul Preciado argues that digitalization is a core component of the transition from prosthetics to what emerge as “microprosthetic”, in which “power acts through molecules that incorporate themselves into our [bodies]” (78-79). I would like to consider the stuplime loops of becoming-slug to counter what Preciado describes as an “ensemble of new microprosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols” (33). Emerging in the same fashion as microproesthetics, which function as modes of control, the stuplime loops instead suspend the logics of control and power enabled by dominant modes of microprosthetic technologies. Rather than infesting one’s body with modes of control, the stuplime loops hijack the digital message and present the possibility of thinking otherwise. In her writing on queer cyborgs, Mimi Nguyen argues that “as technologies of the self, prostheses are both literal and discursive in the digital imaginary. They are a means of habitation and transformation, a humanmachine mixture engaged as a site of contest over meanings – of the self and the nonself” (373). Binaries perhaps structure a thinking between human and animal, but prosthetics as process goes beyond the idea of the cyborg as a mixture and maps a new terrain altogether.ReferencesChen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.Frye. “Degenerate Art Ensemble.” Frye Museum. 2017. &lt;http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/3816/&gt;.Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nguyen, Mimi. “Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants: Race, Sexuality, and Prosthetic Sociality in Digital Space.” American Studies: An Anthology. Eds. Janice A. Radway, Kevin K. Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 281-305.Preciado, Beatriz [Paul]. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitis in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Shildrick, Margarit. “‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics.” Hypatia 30.1 (2015): 13-29.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 2003.Xu, Bing. “Cultural Animal.” 2017. &lt;http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/1994/cultural_animal&gt;.

Introduction: How Do We Learn What We Know? “Deaf.” How do we learn what we know about being deaf and about deafness? What’s the difference between “being deaf” and “deafness” as a particular kind of (non) hearing? Which would you rather be, deaf or blind: children commonly ask this question as they make their early forays into imagining the lives of people different from them. Hearing people cannot know what it is like to be deaf, just as deaf people cannot know what it is like to hear ... or can they? Finally, how can we tell fresh and authentic stories of “being deaf” and the state of “deafness” that disrupt our familiar—perhaps even caricatured—patterns of understanding? In this special “deaf” edition of M/C Journal we wanted to create a body of work in which deaf writers and thinkers would have their say. Mindful that "Deaf history may be characterized as a struggle for Deaf individuals to 'speak' for themselves rather than to be spoken about in medical and educational discourses" (Bauman 47), we were particularly keen to place the contributions of deaf writers and thinkers alongside the mainstream hearing culture. This is why we have chosen not to identify each writer in this edition as deaf or hearing, preferring to leave that biographical auditory detail to the writers themselves. We already knew that "there isn't a large body of literature about the deaf by the deaf" (Henry Kisor 3). Thomas Couser writes that "this should not be surprising, for a number of factors militate against deaf autobiography ... making them unlikely and rare entities" (226). And so we welcomed the diversity of topics and range of genres to this edition: they included a playful ficto-critical exploration of deafness; personal reflections on deafness (ranging from regarding it as a condition of hearing loss to a state of being); poetry; a filmography; and several fresh analyses of representations of deafness, hearing technology and deaf people’s lives in theatre, film and television (this was a particularly popular theme); the poetics of embodiment (indeed, embodiment was a recurring theme across many of the submissions); a commentary on the role of interpreters in deaf-hearing relationships; and an analysis of the role of the Web 2.0 and other technology in deaf people’s communications. However, we noted that most of the uncommissioned submissions in response to our call for papers came from hearing people. We had to seek out contributions from deaf writers and thinkers and wondered why this was so. Mainstream publication avenues for writing by deaf people on the topic of deafness are rare in Australia: perhaps deaf writers lack the necessary confidence or belief that they would be read? In this edition, they certainly reveal that they have much to say ... and inspire us to lean in and think carefully about their words. A Deaf Knowingness In writing her poem “The Triton”, Sandra Hoopman was inspired by her frequent visits to her deaf grandmother at her old Lambert Street, Kangaroo Point home, where she had a huge triton on her wrought iron veranda. Her grandmother would put the triton up to her ear and show Sandra how to 'listen' to it so that she could ‘hear’ the sea. Her poetry recalls to mind Robert Panara's most-quoted poem, “On His Deafness”, in which he imagined that he might even hear 'the rustle of a star!' Following Sandra Hoopman’s poem, we are pleased to feature the essay “Body Language” by Jessica White, shortlisted for the ABR 2010 Calibre Prize, and Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist for 2008 for her first novel A Curious Intimacy (Penguin 2008). In her essay, Jessica playfully explores the idea of not having a singular fixed identity by traversing a dialogue between the imagination and the character of Jessica, showing different selves at play and in conversation, and again in conversation with others at the ficto-critical room and with the ideas articulated by different authors. As with post-structuralist explorations, the essay emphasises the active and formative nature of language, story and ideas, which help us to deconstruct and reformulate versions of our lives and its possibilities. Play is a device that enables people to move beyond the confines of the social world. The joyful spirit of White’s essay is signalled when she writes: For example, there are still immense possibilities thrown up by theorising a jouissance, or pleasure, in the disabled body. As Susan Wendell points out, “paraplegics and quadriplegics have revolutionary things to teach us about the possibilities of sexuality which contradict patriarchal culture’s obsessions with the genitals” (120). Thus if there were more of a focus on the positive aspects of disability and on promoting the understanding that disability is not about lack, people could see how it fosters creativity and imagination. White’s essay is a ‘picaresque’, following a traveller who narrates her adventures and encounters. It is a wonderful model for narratives of difference as it departs, refreshingly, from mainstream Hollywood-style plot conventions, i.e of progress through conflict towards a climax and resolution. Instead, the picaresque allows for a variety of roles, settings and pathways for the wanderer, multiple characters and illuminating dialogues. It demonstrates literally as well as figuratively, productive encounters with the Other, jolting us into new understandings, ways of knowing and possibilities of being. In this way, White’s essay “Body Language” sets a thematically rich tone for this special “deaf” issue of M/C Journal. Through her essay and the following narratives, commentaries, articles and essays, we are immersed in the theme of the importance (and liberating possibilities) of contesting fixed and limited images, disrupting the representations and labels that are so readily assigned to the deaf or deafness. Different strategies and styles are employed, from figurative creative writing or life narrative to the critical essay or media analysis. Yet all contributions emphasise shifting perceptions, commence from a position of not being comfortable with the given representations or ideas that surround deaf identity. The personal narratives and essays assert a strong sense of disjuncture between deaf reality and common representations and ideas of deafness. Reading these contributions, we gain an acute sense of not being at one with the image or idea of a deaf person, not being at one with the social world, not being any one thing but rather many different and varying things and roles. The conditions of possibility are touched upon in the personal reflective pieces, resonating with the critical essays in their exploration of the possibilities of destabilizing hegemonic representations. For example, in “Becoming Deaf”, Karen McQuigg’s personal reflective essay, she describes several stages of the deaf experience. Her description of her son’s responses and adaptations is moving, and Karen mines a range of emotional responses to deafness. She shares with the reader the advice and support she received from other people: some readers will remember with affection the role of Elizabeth Hastings and John Lovett in the Australian Deaf community. McQuigg’s reflections sharply highlight the fluid nature of our individual experience and understanding of deafness. She (and we do too) shifts from what was experienced and understood initially as a blank, a not-comprehending—a ‘blank’ that is linked with loss and constraints, grief, suffering and isolation—to a discovery of how those views and experiences can change, along with changing environment and opportunities. This comes across also in Christy L Reid’s piece “Journey of a Deaf-Blind Woman”: possibilities are linked with where the narrator is living, with life events as varied as training and job opportunities, changes in health, marriage, the birth and development of children, child rearing, and of personal triumphs. Michael Uniacke’s personal essay “Fluid Identities: A Journey of Terminology” has much in common with Jessica White’s essay as he too engages playfully with his ideas. He uses language and figurative play to challenge the reader’s understandings of deaf identity, and to demonstrate the fluid and multiple nature of identity. For example, his opening anecdote about the Hearing Impaired Businessman plays to an embodiment of the idea that many people have, through categories and labels, of a deaf person, as Other, a caricature figure with no interiority or humour or nuanced life. Uniacke engages with this figure in a kind of dialogue, making him surreal, highlighting his typecast nature. By the end of his essay, Michael has shown us how identity can be context-specific and composed of many parts. In “Interpreters in Our Midst”, Breda Carty takes us on a jaunty, personal and engaging commentary that provokes the reader into taking a fresh look at the role of interpreters in mediating/translating relationships between deaf and hearing people. She asks, ‘When interpreters are in our midst, whose interests are they representing? And why are those interests not always clear to the observer?’ Originally written as a short piece for the Australian Sign Language Interpreters' Association (ASLIA), the article is informed by Breda’s immersion in particular professional and personal communities and experiences. While the tone of her commentary is light-hearted, using film screen representations of interpreters to illustrate her points, Breda nevertheless succeeds in politicizing the subject of interpretation and interpreters. She makes us aware of the social assumptions and hierarchies that structure our understanding of interpreting, which, if left unexamined, might seem a neutral and apolitical practice. Rebecca Sánchez makes an exciting contribution to the field of poetry. In her paper “Hart Crane's Speaking Bodies: New Perspectives on Modernism and Deafness”, Rebecca writes about looking for ideas about deafness in unexpected places, namely the poetry of hearing modernist Hart Crane. Taking up the theme of embodiment, evident in several other papers in this edition, Rebecca offers an interesting connection between a poetics of embodiment—Crane was influenced by Walt Whitman, a trail-blazer in embodied language in American poetry—and the more literal embodiment of manual languages. Although Hart Crane was not writing about deafness per se, his work explores the potential of embodied languages to alter the ways in which we interact with one another. When asked to define deafness, most people’s first response is to think of levels of hearing loss, of deficiency, or disability. By contrast, Crane’s non-literal approach provides a more constructive understanding of what communicative difference can mean, and how it can affect our und,erstanding of language itself. Rebecca’s essay's strength arises from its demonstration of Crane's desire to imagine the possibility of a language that lives within the body as rich and enabling, as are manual languages. Miriam Nathan Lerner’s professional training as a librarian is evident in her filmography “The Narrative Function of Deafness and Deaf Characters in Film”. During 2010, she is collaborating with a technical support faculty member at the Rochester National Technical Institute of the Deaf to design a website with quick-time windows so that the reader can click on and watch film clips of the works she references in her filmography. A lively, chatty introduction to some forty-three films with deaf characters and deafness, in which she provides her admittedly quirky approach to categorisation, Miriam Lerner’s filmography will one day be recognised in the same breath as Jonathon Miller’s “Rustle of a Star: An Annotated Bibliography of Deaf Characters in Fiction.” (Miller was also a librarian: they obviously possess the requisite skills of categorisation!) Pamela Kincheloe’s article “Do Androids Dream of Electric Speech? The Construction of Cochlear Implant Identity on American Television and the ‘New Deaf Cyborg’” offers an important analysis of popular (mis)conceptions of deafness and ‘assistive technologies’ as is evident from American television representations of deaf people with Cochlear Implants. She notes the prevalence of cochlear implants in television drama, identifies a couple of very limited narrative frames that dominate such representations, and discusses their implications. In her discussion of the ‘abject’ horror associated in television series with the cochlear implant recipient (often already a corpse) Kincheloe asserts that the Cochlear Implant technology is increasingly used in such narratives to convey intensified anxieties, not only about the deaf Other, but also about technology and the emergent ‘cyborgs’, humans modified by technology. Sharon Pajka-West’s well-researched article “Deaf Characters in Adolescent Fiction”, excerpted from her doctorate thesis, originated in a request from a young deaf reader for a book with which she could connect. Pajka-West takes us on her pursuit to fulfil this request, giving us many fascinating insights along the way. Her blog is essential reading not only for anyone interested in the field of adolescent literature, but also for those who understand the significance of providing young deaf readers access to literature in which the multiple possibilities for deaf lives, deaf identities, and deafness are canvassed. In her article “Marginalising the Mainstream: A Signed Performance of The Miracle Worker”, Caroline Heim places deaf issues centre-stage. Her thesis is that a way needs to be found to increase access to theatrical events for the deaf. She tackles this by viewing a Crossbow Production performance of The Miracle Worker (the story of the teaching relationship between Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan from different perspectives: accessibility, funding, plot construction and actors’ interpretation, the detail of production design (sound, colour and tactile) and the use of theatrical device, and post performance discussion. Arguably, Heim’s article might have benefited from more focus on the concept of inclusion, rather than exclusion. The claim that not enough money is given to providing ‘access’ for the deaf to mainstream productions may be difficult to uphold as a stand-alone argument when the budget of the majority of Australian theatre companies would highlight the fiscal difficulty they have just getting productions on the stage. All the same, Heim’s article provokes us, the reader, into investigating the many layered meanings of ‘access’ and also reminds us, yet again, of theatre’s potential magic in engaging audiences across all spheres of life. In her essay “Looking across the Hearing Line”, Nicole Matthews has written a stimulating paper on youth, Deaf people, and new media. Her paper is especially interesting as an exploration of the intersection between disability and Web 2.0 technologies. In particular, Matthews picks up a thread of Web 2.0 technologies relating to visual communication and expression to provide some insights into the emerging, complex nature of Deaf users’ engagement with digital media in contrast with the continuing problems of inaccessibility and exclusion in the mainstream world. Conclusion: Learning Our Knowingness from What We Don’t Know This special “deaf” issue of M/C Journal is not a “project”, in the Modern sense of that word, i.e. a unified collective effort to define identity, in this case deaf identity, or to consolidate and express a unique world view. Nor does it seek to enlighten the public about what it is to be deaf. Such a totalising project would inevitably suppress heterogeneity and the specificities of people’s lives. Rather, this collection offers many different particular and localised accounts - some personal and poetic, some analytical, some working through critique - which explore the conditions of possibility for human subjects, and in particular, people who are deaf. The contributions highlight in very different ways the complex and shifting fields within which people’s lives and experiences are formed. These works give us insight into the varied and changing social and environmental conditions that not only shape our lives but are in turn shaped by who we are and by our practices and choices. The constraints and possibilities of people’s lives change significantly and differ widely. They are linked inextricably with where people are, in terms of geography or location, and with the circumstances they find themselves in or create for themselves: circumstances of gender, family, social networks, economics, education, work, lifestyle, health or illness, physical abilities, differences and limitations. These works stress the highly contingent nature of human social development and the fluidity of deaf experience rather than identity. Identity shifts and takes on meaning in relation to others and situations; we come to know who we are through a process of differentiating ourselves from others and from identities that we do not feel comfortable with. In almost all of these accounts here experiences of deafness are not the same those conjured up by labels or stereotypes. This act of disassociation from the usual notions of deafness, highlights that our received language and labels do not give us knowledge. Disavowal reminds us that we do not know, except through some disruptive encounter with the Other, whether that is the otherness of our own deafness or the deafness of others. These writings that demonstrate the particularity and detail of deaf people’s experiences, enable us to know the limits and inaccuracies of the labels and identities so commonly assigned to deafness and the deaf. Thus, we come back to the beginning and find our equivocal, tentative answers to the question, ‘how do we learn what we know about being deaf and deafness?’ We learn what we know in various ways, yet hearing or deaf, we are exposed to particular ideas of deafness, limiting labels and assumptions that reinforce ‘ableist’ values. These writings have demonstrated the proliferation of limited stereotypes; they recur in narratives, news stories, television and films, and have power regardless of their disconnection from the real, and from the lived experience of deafness. It is a significant starting point to recognise the limitations of what we think we already know, through our media and social institutions, of deafness. These essays and writings represent a different epistemology; they explore not what deafness is or how it can be defined, but different ways of knowing deafness. References Couser, G. Thomas. “Signs of Life: Deafness and Personal Narrative” Ch. 6 in Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Bauman, H-Dirksen L. “Voicing Deaf Identity: Through the ‘I’s’ and Ears of an Other.” In S. Smith, and J. Watson, eds., Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 47-62. Kisor, Henry. What’s That Pig Outdoors? A Memoir of Deafness. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.

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

Photo ID 158378414 © Eduard Muzhevskyi | Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT There is a debate about the ethical implications of using human embryos in stem cell research, which can be influenced by cultural, moral, and social values. This paper argues for an adaptable framework to accommodate diverse cultural and religious perspectives. By using an adaptive ethics model, research protections can reflect various populations and foster growth in stem cell research possibilities. INTRODUCTION Stem cell research combines biology, medicine, and technology, promising to alter health care and the understanding of human development. Yet, ethical contention exists because of individuals’ perceptions of using human embryos based on their various cultural, moral, and social values. While these disagreements concerning policy, use, and general acceptance have prompted the development of an international ethics policy, such a uniform approach can overlook the nuanced ethical landscapes between cultures. With diverse viewpoints in public health, a single global policy, especially one reflecting Western ethics or the ethics prevalent in high-income countries, is impractical. This paper argues for a culturally sensitive, adaptable framework for the use of embryonic stem cells. Stem cell policy should accommodate varying ethical viewpoints and promote an effective global dialogue. With an extension of an ethics model that can adapt to various cultures, we recommend localized guidelines that reflect the moral views of the people those guidelines serve. BACKGROUND Stem cells, characterized by their unique ability to differentiate into various cell types, enable the repair or replacement of damaged tissues. Two primary types of stem cells are somatic stem cells (adult stem cells) and embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells exist in developed tissues and maintain the body’s repair processes.[1] Embryonic stem cells (ESC) are remarkably pluripotent or versatile, making them valuable in research.[2] However, the use of ESCs has sparked ethics debates. Considering the potential of embryonic stem cells, research guidelines are essential. The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) provides international stem cell research guidelines. They call for “public conversations touching on the scientific significance as well as the societal and ethical issues raised by ESC research.”[3] The ISSCR also publishes updates about culturing human embryos 14 days post fertilization, suggesting local policies and regulations should continue to evolve as ESC research develops.[4] Like the ISSCR, which calls for local law and policy to adapt to developing stem cell research given cultural acceptance, this paper highlights the importance of local social factors such as religion and culture. I. Global Cultural Perspective of Embryonic Stem Cells Views on ESCs vary throughout the world. Some countries readily embrace stem cell research and therapies, while others have stricter regulations due to ethical concerns surrounding embryonic stem cells and when an embryo becomes entitled to moral consideration. The philosophical issue of when the “someone” begins to be a human after fertilization, in the morally relevant sense,[5] impacts when an embryo becomes not just worthy of protection but morally entitled to it. The process of creating embryonic stem cell lines involves the destruction of the embryos for research.[6] Consequently, global engagement in ESC research depends on social-cultural acceptability. a. US and Rights-Based Cultures In the United States, attitudes toward stem cell therapies are diverse. The ethics and social approaches, which value individualism,[7] trigger debates regarding the destruction of human embryos, creating a complex regulatory environment. For example, the 1996 Dickey-Wicker Amendment prohibited federal funding for the creation of embryos for research and the destruction of embryos for “more than allowed for research on fetuses in utero.”[8] Following suit, in 2001, the Bush Administration heavily restricted stem cell lines for research. However, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005 was proposed to help develop ESC research but was ultimately vetoed.[9] Under the Obama administration, in 2009, an executive order lifted restrictions allowing for more development in this field.[10] The flux of research capacity and funding parallels the different cultural perceptions of human dignity of the embryo and how it is socially presented within the country’s research culture.[11] b. Ubuntu and Collective Cultures African bioethics differs from Western individualism because of the different traditions and values. African traditions, as described by individuals from South Africa and supported by some studies in other African countries, including Ghana and Kenya, follow the African moral philosophies of Ubuntu or Botho and Ukama, which “advocates for a form of wholeness that comes through one’s relationship and connectedness with other people in the society,”[12] making autonomy a socially collective concept. In this context, for the community to act autonomously, individuals would come together to decide what is best for the collective. Thus, stem cell research would require examining the value of the research to society as a whole and the use of the embryos as a collective societal resource. If society views the source as part of the collective whole, and opposes using stem cells, compromising the cultural values to pursue research may cause social detachment and stunt research growth.[13] Based on local culture and moral philosophy, the permissibility of stem cell research depends on how embryo, stem cell, and cell line therapies relate to the community as a whole. Ubuntu is the expression of humanness, with the person’s identity drawn from the “’I am because we are’” value.[14] The decision in a collectivistic culture becomes one born of cultural context, and individual decisions give deference to others in the society. Consent differs in cultures where thought and moral philosophy are based on a collective paradigm. So, applying Western bioethical concepts is unrealistic. For one, Africa is a diverse continent with many countries with different belief systems, access to health care, and reliance on traditional or Western medicines. Where traditional medicine is the primary treatment, the “’restrictive focus on biomedically-related bioethics’” [is] problematic in African contexts because it neglects bioethical issues raised by traditional systems.”[15] No single approach applies in all areas or contexts. Rather than evaluating the permissibility of ESC research according to Western concepts such as the four principles approach, different ethics approaches should prevail. Another consideration is the socio-economic standing of countries. In parts of South Africa, researchers have not focused heavily on contributing to the stem cell discourse, either because it is not considered health care or a health science priority or because resources are unavailable.[16] Each country’s priorities differ given different social, political, and economic factors. In South Africa, for instance, areas such as maternal mortality, non-communicable diseases, telemedicine, and the strength of health systems need improvement and require more focus[17] Stem cell research could benefit the population, but it also could divert resources from basic medical care. Researchers in South Africa adhere to the National Health Act and Medicines Control Act in South Africa and international guidelines; however, the Act is not strictly enforced, and there is no clear legislation for research conduct or ethical guidelines.[18] Some parts of Africa condemn stem cell research. For example, 98.2 percent of the Tunisian population is Muslim.[19] Tunisia does not permit stem cell research because of moral conflict with a Fatwa. Religion heavily saturates the regulation and direction of research.[20] Stem cell use became permissible for reproductive purposes only recently, with tight restrictions preventing cells from being used in any research other than procedures concerning ART/IVF. Their use is conditioned on consent, and available only to married couples.[21] The community's receptiveness to stem cell research depends on including communitarian African ethics. c. Asia Some Asian countries also have a collective model of ethics and decision making.[22] In China, the ethics model promotes a sincere respect for life or human dignity,[23] based on protective medicine. This model, influenced by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), [24] recognizes Qi as the vital energy delivered via the meridians of the body; it connects illness to body systems, the body’s entire constitution, and the universe for a holistic bond of nature, health, and quality of life.[25] Following a protective ethics model, and traditional customs of wholeness, investment in stem cell research is heavily desired for its applications in regenerative therapies, disease modeling, and protective medicines. In a survey of medical students and healthcare practitioners, 30.8 percent considered stem cell research morally unacceptable while 63.5 percent accepted medical research using human embryonic stem cells. Of these individuals, 89.9 percent supported increased funding for stem cell research.[26] The scientific community might not reflect the overall population. From 1997 to 2019, China spent a total of $576 million (USD) on stem cell research at 8,050 stem cell programs, increased published presence from 0.6 percent to 14.01 percent of total global stem cell publications as of 2014, and made significant strides in cell-based therapies for various medical conditions.[27] However, while China has made substantial investments in stem cell research and achieved notable progress in clinical applications, concerns linger regarding ethical oversight and transparency.[28] For example, the China Biosecurity Law, promoted by the National Health Commission and China Hospital Association, attempted to mitigate risks by introducing an institutional review board (IRB) in the regulatory bodies. 5800 IRBs registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry since 2021.[29] However, issues still need to be addressed in implementing effective IRB review and approval procedures. The substantial government funding and focus on scientific advancement have sometimes overshadowed considerations of regional cultures, ethnic minorities, and individual perspectives, particularly evident during the one-child policy era. As government policy adapts to promote public stability, such as the change from the one-child to the two-child policy,[30] research ethics should also adapt to ensure respect for the values of its represented peoples. Japan is also relatively supportive of stem cell research and therapies. Japan has a more transparent regulatory framework, allowing for faster approval of regenerative medicine products, which has led to several advanced clinical trials and therapies.[31] South Korea is also actively engaged in stem cell research and has a history of breakthroughs in cloning and embryonic stem cells.[32] However, the field is controversial, and there are issues of scientific integrity. For example, the Korean FDA fast-tracked products for approval,[33] and in another instance, the oocyte source was unclear and possibly violated ethical standards.[34] Trust is important in research, as it builds collaborative foundations between colleagues, trial participant comfort, open-mindedness for complicated and sensitive discussions, and supports regulatory procedures for stakeholders. There is a need to respect the culture’s interest, engagement, and for research and clinical trials to be transparent and have ethical oversight to promote global research discourse and trust. d. Middle East Countries in the Middle East have varying degrees of acceptance of or restrictions to policies related to using embryonic stem cells due to cultural and religious influences. Saudi Arabia has made significant contributions to stem cell research, and conducts research based on international guidelines for ethical conduct and under strict adherence to guidelines in accordance with Islamic principles. Specifically, the Saudi government and people require ESC research to adhere to Sharia law. In addition to umbilical and placental stem cells,[35] Saudi Arabia permits the use of embryonic stem cells as long as they come from miscarriages, therapeutic abortions permissible by Sharia law, or are left over from in vitro fertilization and donated to research.[36] Laws and ethical guidelines for stem cell research allow the development of research institutions such as the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, which has a cord blood bank and a stem cell registry with nearly 10,000 donors.[37] Such volume and acceptance are due to the ethical ‘permissibility’ of the donor sources, which do not conflict with religious pillars. However, some researchers err on the side of caution, choosing not to use embryos or fetal tissue as they feel it is unethical to do so.[38] Jordan has a positive research ethics culture.[39] However, there is a significant issue of lack of trust in researchers, with 45.23 percent (38.66 percent agreeing and 6.57 percent strongly agreeing) of Jordanians holding a low level of trust in researchers, compared to 81.34 percent of Jordanians agreeing that they feel safe to participate in a research trial.[40] Safety testifies to the feeling of confidence that adequate measures are in place to protect participants from harm, whereas trust in researchers could represent the confidence in researchers to act in the participants’ best interests, adhere to ethical guidelines, provide accurate information, and respect participants’ rights and dignity. One method to improve trust would be to address communication issues relevant to ESC. Legislation surrounding stem cell research has adopted specific language, especially concerning clarification “between ‘stem cells’ and ‘embryonic stem cells’” in translation.[41] Furthermore, legislation “mandates the creation of a national committee… laying out specific regulations for stem-cell banking in accordance with international standards.”[42] This broad regulation opens the door for future global engagement and maintains transparency. However, these regulations may also constrain the influence of research direction, pace, and accessibility of research outcomes. e. Europe In the European Union (EU), ethics is also principle-based, but the principles of autonomy, dignity, integrity, and vulnerability are interconnected.[43] As such, the opportunity for cohesion and concessions between individuals’ thoughts and ideals allows for a more adaptable ethics model due to the flexible principles that relate to the human experience The EU has put forth a framework in its Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being allowing member states to take different approaches. Each European state applies these principles to its specific conventions, leading to or reflecting different acceptance levels of stem cell research. [44] For example, in Germany, Lebenzusammenhang, or the coherence of life, references integrity in the unity of human culture. Namely, the personal sphere “should not be subject to external intervention.”[45] Stem cell interventions could affect this concept of bodily completeness, leading to heavy restrictions. Under the Grundgesetz, human dignity and the right to life with physical integrity are paramount.[46] The Embryo Protection Act of 1991 made producing cell lines illegal. Cell lines can be imported if approved by the Central Ethics Commission for Stem Cell Research only if they were derived before May 2007.[47] Stem cell research respects the integrity of life for the embryo with heavy specifications and intense oversight. This is vastly different in Finland, where the regulatory bodies find research more permissible in IVF excess, but only up to 14 days after fertilization.[48] Spain’s approach differs still, with a comprehensive regulatory framework.[49] Thus, research regulation can be culture-specific due to variations in applied principles. Diverse cultures call for various approaches to ethical permissibility.[50] Only an adaptive-deliberative model can address the cultural constructions of self and achieve positive, culturally sensitive stem cell research practices.[51] II. Religious Perspectives on ESC Embryonic stem cell sources are the main consideration within religious contexts. While individuals may not regard their own religious texts as authoritative or factual, religion can shape their foundations or perspectives. The Qur'an states: “And indeed We created man from a quintessence of clay. Then We placed within him a small quantity of nutfa (sperm to fertilize) in a safe place. Then We have fashioned the nutfa into an ‘alaqa (clinging clot or cell cluster), then We developed the ‘alaqa into mudgha (a lump of flesh), and We made mudgha into bones, and clothed the bones with flesh, then We brought it into being as a new creation. So Blessed is Allah, the Best of Creators.”[52] Many scholars of Islam estimate the time of soul installment, marked by the angel breathing in the soul to bring the individual into creation, as 120 days from conception.[53] Personhood begins at this point, and the value of life would prohibit research or experimentation that could harm the individual. If the fetus is more than 120 days old, the time ensoulment is interpreted to occur according to Islamic law, abortion is no longer permissible.[54] There are a few opposing opinions about early embryos in Islamic traditions. According to some Islamic theologians, there is no ensoulment of the early embryo, which is the source of stem cells for ESC research.[55] In Buddhism, the stance on stem cell research is not settled. The main tenets, the prohibition against harming or destroying others (ahimsa) and the pursuit of knowledge (prajña) and compassion (karuna), leave Buddhist scholars and communities divided.[56] Some scholars argue stem cell research is in accordance with the Buddhist tenet of seeking knowledge and ending human suffering. Others feel it violates the principle of not harming others. Finding the balance between these two points relies on the karmic burden of Buddhist morality. In trying to prevent ahimsa towards the embryo, Buddhist scholars suggest that to comply with Buddhist tenets, research cannot be done as the embryo has personhood at the moment of conception and would reincarnate immediately, harming the individual's ability to build their karmic burden.[57] On the other hand, the Bodhisattvas, those considered to be on the path to enlightenment or Nirvana, have given organs and flesh to others to help alleviate grieving and to benefit all.[58] Acceptance varies on applied beliefs and interpretations. Catholicism does not support embryonic stem cell research, as it entails creation or destruction of human embryos. This destruction conflicts with the belief in the sanctity of life. For example, in the Old Testament, Genesis describes humanity as being created in God’s image and multiplying on the Earth, referencing the sacred rights to human conception and the purpose of development and life. In the Ten Commandments, the tenet that one should not kill has numerous interpretations where killing could mean murder or shedding of the sanctity of life, demonstrating the high value of human personhood. In other books, the theological conception of when life begins is interpreted as in utero,[59] highlighting the inviolability of life and its formation in vivo to make a religious point for accepting such research as relatively limited, if at all.[60] The Vatican has released ethical directives to help apply a theological basis to modern-day conflicts. The Magisterium of the Church states that “unless there is a moral certainty of not causing harm,” experimentation on fetuses, fertilized cells, stem cells, or embryos constitutes a crime.[61] Such procedures would not respect the human person who exists at these stages, according to Catholicism. Damages to the embryo are considered gravely immoral and illicit.[62] Although the Catholic Church officially opposes abortion, surveys demonstrate that many Catholic people hold pro-choice views, whether due to the context of conception, stage of pregnancy, threat to the mother’s life, or for other reasons, demonstrating that practicing members can also accept some but not all tenets.[63] Some major Jewish denominations, such as the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements, are open to supporting ESC use or research as long as it is for saving a life.[64] Within Judaism, the Talmud, or study, gives personhood to the child at birth and emphasizes that life does not begin at conception:[65] “If she is found pregnant, until the fortieth day it is mere fluid,”[66] Whereas most religions prioritize the status of human embryos, the Halakah (Jewish religious law) states that to save one life, most other religious laws can be ignored because it is in pursuit of preservation.[67] Stem cell research is accepted due to application of these religious laws. We recognize that all religions contain subsets and sects. The variety of environmental and cultural differences within religious groups requires further analysis to respect the flexibility of religious thoughts and practices. We make no presumptions that all cultures require notions of autonomy or morality as under the common morality theory, which asserts a set of universal moral norms that all individuals share provides moral reasoning and guides ethical decisions.[68] We only wish to show that the interaction with morality varies between cultures and countries. III. A Flexible Ethical Approach The plurality of different moral approaches described above demonstrates that there can be no universally acceptable uniform law for ESC on a global scale. Instead of developing one standard, flexible ethical applications must be continued. We recommend local guidelines that incorporate important cultural and ethical priorities. While the Declaration of Helsinki is more relevant to people in clinical trials receiving ESC products, in keeping with the tradition of protections for research subjects, consent of the donor is an ethical requirement for ESC donation in many jurisdictions including the US, Canada, and Europe.[69] The Declaration of Helsinki provides a reference point for regulatory standards and could potentially be used as a universal baseline for obtaining consent prior to gamete or embryo donation. For instance, in Columbia University’s egg donor program for stem cell research, donors followed standard screening protocols and “underwent counseling sessions that included information as to the purpose of oocyte donation for research, what the oocytes would be used for, the risks and benefits of donation, and process of oocyte stimulation” to ensure transparency for consent.[70] The program helped advance stem cell research and provided clear and safe research methods with paid participants. Though paid participation or covering costs of incidental expenses may not be socially acceptable in every culture or context,[71] and creating embryos for ESC research is illegal in many jurisdictions, Columbia’s program was effective because of the clear and honest communications with donors, IRBs, and related stakeholders. This example demonstrates that cultural acceptance of scientific research and of the idea that an egg or embryo does not have personhood is likely behind societal acceptance of donating eggs for ESC research. As noted, many countries do not permit the creation of embryos for research. Proper communication and education regarding the process and purpose of stem cell research may bolster comprehension and garner more acceptance. “Given the sensitive subject material, a complete consent process can support voluntary participation through trust, understanding, and ethical norms from the cultures and morals participants value. This can be hard for researchers entering countries of different socioeconomic stability, with different languages and different societal values.[72] An adequate moral foundation in medical ethics is derived from the cultural and religious basis that informs knowledge and actions.[73] Understanding local cultural and religious values and their impact on research could help researchers develop humility and promote inclusion. IV. Concerns Some may argue that if researchers all adhere to one ethics standard, protection will be satisfied across all borders, and the global public will trust researchers. However, defining what needs to be protected and how to define such research standards is very specific to the people to which standards are applied. We suggest that applying one uniform guide cannot accurately protect each individual because we all possess our own perceptions and interpretations of social values.[74] Therefore, the issue of not adjusting to the moral pluralism between peoples in applying one standard of ethics can be resolved by building out ethics models that can be adapted to different cultures and religions. Other concerns include medical tourism, which may promote health inequities.[75] Some countries may develop and approve products derived from ESC research before others, compromising research ethics or drug approval processes. There are also concerns about the sale of unauthorized stem cell treatments, for example, those without FDA approval in the United States. Countries with robust research infrastructures may be tempted to attract medical tourists, and some customers will have false hopes based on aggressive publicity of unproven treatments.[76] For example, in China, stem cell clinics can market to foreign clients who are not protected under the regulatory regimes. Companies employ a marketing strategy of “ethically friendly” therapies. Specifically, in the case of Beike, China’s leading stem cell tourism company and sprouting network, ethical oversight of administrators or health bureaus at one site has “the unintended consequence of shifting questionable activities to another node in Beike's diffuse network.”[77] In contrast, Jordan is aware of stem cell research’s potential abuse and its own status as a “health-care hub.” Jordan’s expanded regulations include preserving the interests of individuals in clinical trials and banning private companies from ESC research to preserve transparency and the integrity of research practices.[78] The social priorities of the community are also a concern. The ISSCR explicitly states that guidelines “should be periodically revised to accommodate scientific advances, new challenges, and evolving social priorities.”[79] The adaptable ethics model extends this consideration further by addressing whether research is warranted given the varying degrees of socioeconomic conditions, political stability, and healthcare accessibilities and limitations. An ethical approach would require discussion about resource allocation and appropriate distribution of funds.[80] CONCLUSION While some religions emphasize the sanctity of life from conception, which may lead to public opposition to ESC research, others encourage ESC research due to its potential for healing and alleviating human pain. Many countries have special regulations that balance local views on embryonic personhood, the benefits of research as individual or societal goods, and the protection of human research subjects. To foster understanding and constructive dialogue, global policy frameworks should prioritize the protection of universal human rights, transparency, and informed consent. In addition to these foundational global policies, we recommend tailoring local guidelines to reflect the diverse cultural and religious perspectives of the populations they govern. Ethics models should be adapted to local populations to effectively establish research protections, growth, and possibilities of stem cell research. For example, in countries with strong beliefs in the moral sanctity of embryos or heavy religious restrictions, an adaptive model can allow for discussion instead of immediate rejection. In countries with limited individual rights and voice in science policy, an adaptive model ensures cultural, moral, and religious views are taken into consideration, thereby building social inclusion. While this ethical consideration by the government may not give a complete voice to every individual, it will help balance policies and maintain the diverse perspectives of those it affects. Embracing an adaptive ethics model of ESC research promotes open-minded dialogue and respect for the importance of human belief and tradition. By actively engaging with cultural and religious values, researchers can better handle disagreements and promote ethical research practices that benefit each society. This brief exploration of the religious and cultural differences that impact ESC research reveals the nuances of relative ethics and highlights a need for local policymakers to apply a more intense adaptive model. - [1] Poliwoda, S., Noor, N., Downs, E., Schaaf, A., Cantwell, A., Ganti, L., Kaye, A. D., Mosel, L. I., Carroll, C. B., Viswanath, O., &amp; Urits, I. (2022). Stem cells: a comprehensive review of origins and emerging clinical roles in medical practice. 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Journal of law and the biosciences, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsab019 https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/8/1/lsab019/6299199 [30] Chen, H., Wei, T., Wang, H. et al. Association of China’s two-child policy with changes in number of births and birth defects rate, 2008–2017. BMC Public Health 22, 434 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-12839-0 [31] Azuma, K. Regulatory Landscape of Regenerative Medicine in Japan. Curr Stem Cell Rep 1, 118–128 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40778-015-0012-6 [32] Harris, R. (2005, May 19). Researchers Report Advance in Stem Cell Production. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2005/05/19/4658967/researchers-report-advance-in-stem-cell-production [33] Park, S. (2012). South Korea steps up stem-cell work. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2012.10565 [34] Resnik, D. B., Shamoo, A. E., &amp; Krimsky, S. (2006). Fraudulent human embryonic stem cell research in South Korea: lessons learned. Accountability in research, 13(1), 101–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989620600634193. [35] Alahmad, G., Aljohani, S., &amp; Najjar, M. F. (2020). Ethical challenges regarding the use of stem cells: interviews with researchers from Saudi Arabia. BMC medical ethics, 21(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00482-6 [36]Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies. https://www.aabb.org/regulatory-and-advocacy/regulatory-affairs/regulatory-for-cellular-therapies/international-competent-authorities/saudi-arabia [37] Alahmad, G., Aljohani, S., &amp; Najjar, M. F. (2020). Ethical challenges regarding the use of stem cells: Interviews with researchers from Saudi Arabia. BMC medical ethics, 21(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00482-6 [38] Alahmad, G., Aljohani, S., &amp; Najjar, M. F. (2020). Ethical challenges regarding the use of stem cells: Interviews with researchers from Saudi Arabia. BMC medical ethics, 21(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00482-6 Culturally, autonomy practices follow a relational autonomy approach based on a paternalistic deontological health care model. The adherence to strict international research policies and religious pillars within the regulatory environment is a great foundation for research ethics. However, there is a need to develop locally targeted ethics approaches for research (as called for in Alahmad, G., Aljohani, S., &amp; Najjar, M. F. (2020). Ethical challenges regarding the use of stem cells: interviews with researchers from Saudi Arabia. BMC medical ethics, 21(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00482-6), this decision-making approach may help advise a research decision model. For more on the clinical cultural autonomy approaches, see: Alabdullah, Y. Y., Alzaid, E., Alsaad, S., Alamri, T., Alolayan, S. W., Bah, S., &amp; Aljoudi, A. S. (2022). Autonomy and paternalism in Shared decision‐making in a Saudi Arabian tertiary hospital: A cross‐sectional study. Developing World Bioethics, 23(3), 260–268. https://doi.org/10.1111/dewb.12355; Bukhari, A. A. (2017). Universal Principles of Bioethics and Patient Rights in Saudi Arabia (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/124; Ladha, S., Nakshawani, S. A., Alzaidy, A., &amp; Tarab, B. (2023, October 26). Islam and Bioethics: What We All Need to Know. Columbia University School of Professional Studies. https://sps.columbia.edu/events/islam-and-bioethics-what-we-all-need-know [39] Ababneh, M. A., Al-Azzam, S. I., Alzoubi, K., Rababa’h, A., &amp; Al Demour, S. (2021). Understanding and attitudes of the Jordanian public about clinical research ethics. Research Ethics, 17(2), 228-241. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016120966779 [40] Ababneh, M. A., Al-Azzam, S. I., Alzoubi, K., Rababa’h, A., &amp; Al Demour, S. (2021). Understanding and attitudes of the Jordanian public about clinical research ethics. Research Ethics, 17(2), 228-241. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016120966779 [41] Dajani, R. (2014). Jordan’s stem-cell law can guide the Middle East. Nature 510, 189. https://doi.org/10.1038/510189a [42] Dajani, R. (2014). Jordan’s stem-cell law can guide the Middle East. Nature 510, 189. https://doi.org/10.1038/510189a [43] The EU’s definition of autonomy relates to the capacity for creating ideas, moral insight, decisions, and actions without constraint, personal responsibility, and informed consent. However, the EU views autonomy as not completely able to protect individuals and depends on other principles, such as dignity, which “expresses the intrinsic worth and fundamental equality of all human beings.” Rendtorff, J.D., Kemp, P. (2019). Four Ethical Principles in European Bioethics and Biolaw: Autonomy, Dignity, Integrity and Vulnerability. In: Valdés, E., Lecaros, J. (eds) Biolaw and Policy in the Twenty-First Century. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05903-3_3 [44] Council of Europe. Convention for the protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (ETS No. 164) https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=treaty-detail&amp;treatynum=164 (forbidding the creation of embryos for research purposes only, and suggests embryos in vitro have protections.); Also see Drabiak-Syed B. K. (2013). New President, New Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Policy: Comparative International Perspectives and Embryonic Stem Cell Research Laws in France. Biotechnology Law Report, 32(6), 349–356. https://doi.org/10.1089/blr.2013.9865 [45] Rendtorff, J.D., Kemp, P. (2019). Four Ethical Principles in European Bioethics and Biolaw: Autonomy, Dignity, Integrity and Vulnerability. In: Valdés, E., Lecaros, J. (eds) Biolaw and Policy in the Twenty-First Century. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05903-3_3 [46] Tomuschat, C., Currie, D. P., Kommers, D. P., &amp; Kerr, R. (Trans.). (1949, May 23). Basic law for the Federal Republic of Germany. https://www.btg-bestellservice.de/pdf/80201000.pdf [47] Regulation of Stem Cell Research in Germany. Eurostemcell. (2017, April 26). https://www.eurostemcell.org/regulation-stem-cell-research-germany [48] Regulation of Stem Cell Research in Finland. Eurostemcell. (2017, April 26). https://www.eurostemcell.org/regulation-stem-cell-research-finland [49] Regulation of Stem Cell Research in Spain. Eurostemcell. (2017, April 26). https://www.eurostemcell.org/regulation-stem-cell-research-spain [50] Some sources to consider regarding ethics models or regulatory oversights of other cultures not covered: Kara MA. Applicability of the principle of respect for autonomy: the perspective of Turkey. J Med Ethics. 2007 Nov;33(11):627-30. doi: 10.1136/jme.2006.017400. PMID: 17971462; PMCID: PMC2598110. Ugarte, O. N., &amp; Acioly, M. A. (2014). The principle of autonomy in Brazil: one needs to discuss it ... Revista do Colegio Brasileiro de Cirurgioes, 41(5), 374–377. https://doi.org/10.1590/0100-69912014005013 Bharadwaj, A., &amp; Glasner, P. E. (2012). Local cells, global science: The rise of embryonic stem cell research in India. Routledge. For further research on specific European countries regarding ethical and regulatory framework, we recommend this database: Regulation of Stem Cell Research in Europe. Eurostemcell. (2017, April 26). https://www.eurostemcell.org/regulation-stem-cell-research-europe [51] Klitzman, R. (2006). Complications of culture in obtaining informed consent. The American Journal of Bioethics, 6(1), 20–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265160500394671 see also: Ekmekci, P. E., &amp; Arda, B. (2017). Interculturalism and Informed Consent: Respecting Cultural Differences without Breaching Human Rights. Cultura (Iasi, Romania), 14(2), 159–172.; For why trust is important in research, see also: Gray, B., Hilder, J., Macdonald, L., Tester, R., Dowell, A., &amp; Stubbe, M. (2017). Are research ethics guidelines culturally competent? Research Ethics, 13(1), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016116650235 [52] The Qur'an (M. Khattab, Trans.). (1965). Al-Mu’minun, 23: 12-14. https://quran.com/23 [53] Lenfest, Y. (2017, December 8). Islam and the beginning of human life. Bill of Health. https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2017/12/08/islam-and-the-beginning-of-human-life/ [54] Aksoy, S. (2005). Making regulations and drawing up legislation in Islamic countries under conditions of uncertainty, with special reference to embryonic stem cell research. Journal of Medical Ethics, 31:399-403.; see also: Mahmoud, Azza. "Islamic Bioethics: National Regulations and Guidelines of Human Stem Cell Research in the Muslim World." Master's thesis, Chapman University, 2022. https://doi.org/10.36837/ chapman.000386 [55] Rashid, R. (2022). When does Ensoulment occur in the Human Foetus. Journal of the British Islamic Medical Association, 12(4). ISSN 2634 8071. https://www.jbima.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2-Ethics-3_-Ensoulment_Rafaqat.pdf. [56] Sivaraman, M. &amp; Noor, S. (2017). Ethics of embryonic stem cell research according to Buddhist, Hindu, Catholic, and Islamic religions: perspective from Malaysia. Asian Biomedicine,8(1) 43-52. https://doi.org/10.5372/1905-7415.0801.260 [57] Jafari, M., Elahi, F., Ozyurt, S. &amp; Wrigley, T. (2007). 4. Religious Perspectives on Embryonic Stem Cell Research. In K. Monroe, R. Miller &amp; J. Tobis (Ed.), Fundamentals of the Stem Cell Debate: The Scientific, Religious, Ethical, and Political Issues (pp. 79-94). Berkeley: University of California Press. https://escholarship.org/content/qt9rj0k7s3/qt9rj0k7s3_noSplash_f9aca2e02c3777c7fb76ea768ba458f0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520940994-005 [58] Lecso, P. A. (1991). The Bodhisattva Ideal and Organ Transplantation. Journal of Religion and Health, 30(1), 35–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27510629; Bodhisattva, S. (n.d.). The Key of Becoming a Bodhisattva. A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life. http://www.buddhism.org/Sutras/2/BodhisattvaWay.htm [59] There is no explicit religious reference to when life begins or how to conduct research that interacts with the concept of life. However, these are relevant verses pertaining to how the fetus is viewed. ((King James Bible. (1999). Oxford University Press. (original work published 1769)) Jerimiah 1: 5 “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee…” In prophet Jerimiah’s insight, God set him apart as a person known before childbirth, a theme carried within the Psalm of David. Psalm 139: 13-14 “…Thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…” These verses demonstrate David’s respect for God as an entity that would know of all man’s thoughts and doings even before birth. [60] It should be noted that abortion is not supported as well. [61] The Vatican. (1987, February 22). Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation Replies to Certain Questions of the Day. Congregation For the Doctrine of the Faith. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html [62] The Vatican. (2000, August 25). Declaration On the Production and the Scientific and Therapeutic Use of Human Embryonic Stem Cells. Pontifical Academy for Life. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdlife/documents/rc_pa_acdlife_doc_20000824_cellule-staminali_en.html; Ohara, N. (2003). Ethical Consideration of Experimentation Using Living Human Embryos: The Catholic Church’s Position on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Human Cloning. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Retrieved from https://article.imrpress.com/journal/CEOG/30/2-3/pii/2003018/77-81.pdf. [63] Smith, G. A. (2022, May 23). Like Americans overall, Catholics vary in their abortion views, with regular mass attenders most opposed. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/23/like-americans-overall-catholics-vary-in-their-abortion-views-with-regular-mass-attenders-most-opposed/ [64] Rosner, F., &amp; Reichman, E. (2002). Embryonic stem cell research in Jewish law. Journal of halacha and contemporary society, (43), 49–68.; Jafari, M., Elahi, F., Ozyurt, S. &amp; Wrigley, T. (2007). 4. Religious Perspectives on Embryonic Stem Cell Research. In K. Monroe, R. Miller &amp; J. Tobis (Ed.), Fundamentals of the Stem Cell Debate: The Scientific, Religious, Ethical, and Political Issues (pp. 79-94). Berkeley: University of California Press. https://escholarship.org/content/qt9rj0k7s3/qt9rj0k7s3_noSplash_f9aca2e02c3777c7fb76ea768ba458f0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520940994-005 [65] Schenker J. G. (2008). The beginning of human life: status of embryo. Perspectives in Halakha (Jewish Religious Law). Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics, 25(6), 271–276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10815-008-9221-6 [66] Ruttenberg, D. (2020, May 5). The Torah of Abortion Justice (annotated source sheet). Sefaria. https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/234926.7?lang=bi&amp;with=all&amp;lang2=en [67] Jafari, M., Elahi, F., Ozyurt, S. &amp; Wrigley, T. (2007). 4. Religious Perspectives on Embryonic Stem Cell Research. In K. Monroe, R. Miller &amp; J. Tobis (Ed.), Fundamentals of the Stem Cell Debate: The Scientific, Religious, Ethical, and Political Issues (pp. 79-94). Berkeley: University of California Press. https://escholarship.org/content/qt9rj0k7s3/qt9rj0k7s3_noSplash_f9aca2e02c3777c7fb76ea768ba458f0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520940994-005 [68] Gert, B. (2007). Common morality: Deciding what to do. Oxford Univ. Press. [69] World Medical Association (2013). World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. JAMA, 310(20), 2191–2194. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2013.281053 Declaration of Helsinki – WMA – The World Medical Association.; see also: National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (1979). The Belmont report: Ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/read-the-belmont-report/index.html [70] Zakarin Safier, L., Gumer, A., Kline, M., Egli, D., &amp; Sauer, M. V. (2018). Compensating human subjects providing oocytes for stem cell research: 9-year experience and outcomes. Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics, 35(7), 1219–1225. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10815-018-1171-z https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6063839/ see also: Riordan, N. H., &amp; Paz Rodríguez, J. (2021). Addressing concerns regarding associated costs, transparency, and integrity of research in recent stem cell trial. Stem Cells Translational Medicine, 10(12), 1715–1716. https://doi.org/10.1002/sctm.21-0234 [71] Klitzman, R., &amp; Sauer, M. V. (2009). Payment of egg donors in stem cell research in the USA. Reproductive biomedicine online, 18(5), 603–608. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1472-6483(10)60002-8 [72] Krosin, M. T., Klitzman, R., Levin, B., Cheng, J., &amp; Ranney, M. L. (2006). Problems in comprehension of informed consent in rural and peri-urban Mali, West Africa. Clinical trials (London, England), 3(3), 306–313. https://doi.org/10.1191/1740774506cn150oa [73] Veatch, Robert M. Hippocratic, Religious, and Secular Medical Ethics: The Points of Conflict. Georgetown University Press, 2012. [74] Msoroka, M. S., &amp; Amundsen, D. (2018). One size fits not quite all: Universal research ethics with diversity. Research Ethics, 14(3), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016117739939 [75] Pirzada, N. (2022). The Expansion of Turkey’s Medical Tourism Industry. Voices in Bioethics, 8. https://doi.org/10.52214/vib.v8i.9894 [76] Stem Cell Tourism: False Hope for Real Money. Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI). (2023). https://hsci.harvard.edu/stem-cell-tourism, See also: Bissassar, M. (2017). Transnational Stem Cell Tourism: An ethical analysis. Voices in Bioethics, 3. https://doi.org/10.7916/vib.v3i.6027 [77]Song, P. (2011) The proliferation of stem cell therapies in post-Mao China: problematizing ethical regulation, New Genetics and Society, 30:2, 141-153, DOI: 10.1080/14636778.2011.574375 [78] Dajani, R. (2014). Jordan’s stem-cell law can guide the Middle East. Nature 510, 189. https://doi.org/10.1038/510189a [79] International Society for Stem Cell Research. (2024). Standards in stem cell research. International Society for Stem Cell Research. https://www.isscr.org/guidelines/5-standards-in-stem-cell-research [80] Benjamin, R. (2013). People’s science bodies and rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Stanford University Press.

Playing in childhood we are presented with foundational puzzles. Many of these arise directly from our negotiations with the laws of physics; others arise from the deliberate activities of our elders, teachers and siblings. As we sit on our grandmother’s knee we are presented with a range of playful and deceptive games. Something as simple as a loop of wool can initiate this play: now it is a straight thread; now it is a loop. Something as simple as the opening hand is the potential source of a problem that may stay with us for a lifetime: now it is a hand with open palm; now it is a fist that hides. Something as simple as a dropped toy ball can initiate the motive to engage with the world as a problem: now it is here, at hand; now it is gone, down there and rolling away. While each of these events is real, the space and time of such play can be described as an illusion. The figure of this illusion is itself a loop within which a special kind of logic pertains. This logic is illustrated in D. W. Winnicott’s concept of illusory experience and in John Dewey’s concept of perplexity as the source of human thinking. As illusions, loops are puzzling; as real objects and events, loops pre-figure and offer to mediate the development of our understanding of our being in the world. Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) a British child psychoanalyst, spent much of his time exploring the relationships that children form with objects. His work offers accounts of an extraordinary array of everyday engagements that children have with simple things such as their own toes and bits of string. A key aspect of Winnicott’s theories of the formative years is the sustaining of a loop, or in Winnicott’s terms, "an intermediate state" between the child and reality. I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own. We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings. (Winnicott 3) Social groups establish preferred forms to account for dynamic systems in everyday life. The hand, for example, might be generally agreed to be an open hand, at rest, which means that fingers are curved towards the palm and the palm is down. The number of variations in the way in which a hand might be found, and described, is so large as to be able to symbolise an entire language. From the outside, to a non-signer, it is an illusion that hand-signing is language, just as it is an illusion that spoken and written languages are languages to those who do not share the particular language illusion. Within the range of possible hand gestures, a loop or tension-of-illusion is established: those in the loop can comprehend the signing as language; those outside the loop can only pretend that the illusion works. Recalling that the word "illusion" takes its origin in the Latin for play ("ludere") it comes as no surprise that initiation games frequently use spurious loop activities to trap the outsider in ways that will embarrass the new-comer. The sense of mockery in the word "illusion" is made evident as the new-comer has no way of determining the validity of the pretend inside information. Suggestions that they drink some foul concoction can only be answered by drinking the concoction: there is no way from the outside of the illusion group to resolve the challenge. To enter the inside of the loop, the new-comer has to cross some kind of line in a way that leaves a mark: the affect of embarrassment is often enough. Our ability to suspend disbelief and sustain the illusion as loop is a fundamental requirement of our social being and of our cognitive development. "Once upon a time" is a call to step inside the loop of fiction where things may emerge that cannot otherwise emerge. While this loop may be seen as nothing more than an inner fantasy world, it is impossible to sustain this concept unless we deny the common reality of such a world. The world of the loop is not some kind of denial of an outer reality, nor is it an assertion of an inner freedom that can remain separate to an external reality. We may claim to make words mean whatever we wish them to mean in an inner and private dimension, but in making such a claim we must use a common meaning of "meaning" and we must use the syntax and grammar of a language. Much as we might wish for such an interiority, Winnicott requires us to recognise the further need for an "intermediate area of experience". This intermediate area is the public space of shared illusion: It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (Winnicott 2) In this intermediate area, it is possible to sustain illusions only in relation to a presumed other reality. That is, the logics of illusion are logics that apply, if differently, in the outer and inner realms of experience. The reality of a loop may seem soft. Loops are readily formed without substantial alteration of the loop forming material. Loops are also frightening in their potential operation as capturing devices. The forces they can activate are deadly. As dynamic objects, loops offer their own interpretation of Winnicott’s concept of illusion. At some point the game or play of illusions terminates in a disclosure of closure that instructs the play. The closed hand that hides the marble opens to reveal the marble. One moment in the play of logics is elected or given a priority. The relative stability of this pattern is made obvious in certain forms of illusion that take illusions as their "fixed" shape. Knitting, for example, consists of loops interlocked with loops. As anyone who has pulled knitting apart knows, interlocking is fundamentally an illusion in its making and a disillusion in its pulling apart. Knitting can then be seen, in this sense to be "fake". Fakes "Fake" does not mean "false" except that we have come to see the dressing up of things as being insubstantial and therefore not warranting attention. Worse, we see "fake" as being morally repugnant in that a fake thing takes the place of a real thing. But "fake" also means "a coil of rope". In this case, the fake is substantial while ever it exists. Thus, a fake is a kind of benevolent illusion. The shape that the coil of rope makes is no less real, in time, than the ship-deck on which it is formed. When it is uncoiled, the rope takes on its "true" or active shape. Should the uncoiled rope form a loop, this loop is potentially malevolent. It may take the leg of a sailor. In childhood, this game is played out using simple loops and slip knots that hold but let go when pulled. The dynamic forms are sometimes the illusion; sometimes it is the static form that is the illusion. That is, the pragmatic interpretation allows for the display of the fake as a cognitive toy. Any state of the dynamic form may take priority at any one time for the purposes of the use of the system. When we sit down, our height differences are reduced: this fake is a crucial part of our social world. Loops Winnicott lets us see the life-long significance of the looping and faking that we daily use to sustain our dynamic worlds . In our loop worlds we establish a space "between thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral erotism and the true object-relationship" (Winnicott 2). Within the loop, the status of objects and systems is open to transformation, just as, over time, in the material world, objects and systems are transformed. The valency of any object or system, viewed from within the loop, is fundamentally indeterminate and hence open. It is within this loop-logic that we can understand the ironic singing of songs whose content is radically alternative to the situation of the singing: children can be heard singing songs filled with sexual connotations without there being any awareness of the inappropriate content; many people can hear and sing along with Bette Midler’s rendition of "God is watching us" without the irony striking home that God is doing this from a distance of total indifference. The tongue in Bette’s cheek could not get any bigger, but from within the loop, the song can have any value the singer selects. While we may sustain fantasy worlds as intermediate worlds, Winnicott makes obvious that "the mother’s main task (next to providing opportunity for illusion) is disillusionment" (Winnicott 12). At some point the disjunction between illusion and reality becomes perplexing. The ball that the child drops does evade the child’s grasp. It is not simply a matter of sustaining the mood. Either the ball can be recovered or else it cannot. Perplexity and the Dialectic of Loss John Dewey (1859-1952) is a major figure in American pragmatist schools of philosophy and in educational philosophy, especially problem-based theories of learning. His work bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and covers all the major social and cultural issues of his day. As a thorough thinker, Dewey offers to provide explanations for most aspects of what is practically required of us in our living socially responsible lives. Even our "negative" affects, such as perplexity, are presented by Dewey as indicators of our practical connection with reality. For Dewey, perplexity is a key feature of the state of mind that initiates the growth of the individual through engagement with the problematics of the world in which they live. Dewey points out that "thinking begins as soon as the baby who has lost the ball that he is playing with begins to foresee the possibility of something not yet existing—its recovery" (How We Think 89). Losing the ball creates a difficulty, seeing that the ball might be recovered, the child is then able to move to resolve the difficulty, through action, in the real world. In this simple form we can determine the process of thesis (loss), anti-thesis (promise of recovery or remedy), synthesis (resolution of the problem with an enhanced understanding of the process). The theological allusions should not be discounted in this model. Nor should we forget Winnicott’s caution here "that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed". The ball game is still a game that retains the general forgiveness of the loop in that the real loss is mitigated by the surrounding and support "illusion" that the parent will recover the ball for the child. It may be socially frowned on, but adults still drop things just to instigate the "illusion" that others will recover their loss (for an extended account of Dewey’s notion of perplexity, see Russell). Still, the loss of the ball is a problem that holds very real interest for the baby and therefore the problem is perplexing. According to Dewey: "Interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action; it is the sign of their organic union" (Middle Works 160). Being "entirely taken up with" (p. 160) the loss of the ball, the baby experiences the situation in what McLuhan describes as "depth". In the depth approach attention is able to shift from content to attention itself: "Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness in particular" (McLuhan 247). Conclusion The capacity of consciousness to take an interest, in Dewey’s terms, is the same capacity that consciousness displays in the sustaining of the loop of illusion. For Dewey, "interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action". This annihilation, in Winnicott’s gentler terms, is more of respite in the long journey. For Winnicott "no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality". The intermediary illusions remain illusions even if they are instructive. For Dewey, the focus on perplexity allows that the strain is integrated in an affect-complex that both sustains the illusion ("I can get the ball back") in the manner of a hypothesis ("I had the ball, I lost the ball—losing the ball was a process, regaining the ball could also be a process—I can have the ball again"). Granted, Dewey, as a pragmatist, starts with a real world process. Nonetheless, his approach points to the deeper connections between consciousness itself and the operations of the psychological development of the individual. From the perspective of perplexity, the puzzles of childhood are also the puzzles of the adult. As adults we continue to play with loops of all kinds. We maintain intermediary spaces and we conspire in the social illusions of language References Dewey, John. How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1933. Dewey, John. The Middle Works, 1899-1924. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Vol. 7. Carbondale and Edwardsville: South Illinios U P, 1979. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet, 1964. Russell, Keith. "The Problem of the Problem and Perplexity." Themes and Variations in PBL. Proc. of the 5th International Biennial PBL Conference, 7-10 Jul. 1999, U of Quebec. U of Newcastle: PROBLARC, 1999. 180-95. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Russell, Keith. "Loops and Fakes and Illusions" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] &lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php&gt;. Chicago Style Russell, Keith, "Loops and Fakes and Illusions" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), &lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php&gt; ([your date of access]). APA Style Russell, Keith. (2002) Loops and Fakes and Illusions. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). &lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php&gt; ([your date of access]).

Introduction While individuals from marginalised and vulnerable communities have long been confronted with the task of developing coping strategies, COVID-19 lockdowns intensified the conditions under which resilience and wellbeing were/are negotiated, not only for marginalised communities but for people from all walks of life. In particular, the pandemic has highlighted in simple terms the stark divide between the “haves” and “have nots”, and how pre-existing physical conditions and material resources (or lack thereof), including adequate income, living circumstances, and access to digital and other resources, have created different conditions for people to be able to physically isolate, avoid working in conditions that put them at greater risk of exposure to the virus, and maintain up-to-date information. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, and its conditions have tested our capacity for resilience to varying degrees. Poor mental health has become an increasingly urgent concern, with almost one in ten people contemplating suicide during Victoria’s second wave and prolonged lockdown in 2020 (Ali et al.; Czeisler &amp; Rajaratnam; Paul). The question of what enables people to cope and adapt to physical distancing is critical for building a more resilient post-pandemic society. With the understanding that resilience is comprised of an intersection of material and immaterial resources, this project takes as its focus the material dimensions of everyday resilience. Specifically, “Objects for Everyday Resilience” explores the intersection of material objects and everyday resilience, focussing on the things that have supported mental and physical health of different sections of the community in Melbourne, Australia, during the pandemic. People in the Victorian city of Melbourne, Australia – including the research team authors of this article – experienced 262 days of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than any other city in the world. The infection rate was high, as was the death rate. Hospitals were in crisis attempting to deal with the influx (McReadie). During lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, all movement in the city was restricted, with 9 pm to 5 am curfews and a five-kilometre travel limit. Workplaces, schools, businesses, sports and leisure clubs were closed. One person per household could shop. Masks were mandatory at all times. PCR testing was extensive. People stayed in their homes, with no visitors. The city limits were closed by roadblocks. Rare instances of air travel required a hard-to-get exemption. Vaccines were delayed. The state government provided financial support for most workers who lost income from their regular work due to the restrictions. However, the financial assistance criteria rejected many casual workers, including foreign students who normally supported themselves through casual employment (McReadie). The mental health toll of protracted lockdowns on Melbourne residents was high (Klein, Tyler-Parker, and Bastian). Yet people developed measures of resilience that helped them cope with lockdown isolation (Gerrand). While studies of resilience have been undertaken during the pandemic, including increased attention towards the affordances of online platforms in lockdown, relatively little attention has been paid to whether and how material objects support everyday resilience. The significant amount of literature on objects and things (e.g. Whitlock) offers a wide range of potential applications when brought to bear on the material conditions of resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic as it continues to unfold. As ethnographer Paula Zuccotti notes in her study of objects that people used in lockdowns around the world, “Future Archeology of a Global Lockdown”, the everyday items we use tell us stories about how we exist (Zuccotti). Paying attention to the intersection of objects with resilience in everyday contexts can enable us to view resilience as a potential practice that can shape the conditions of social life that produce adversity in the first place (Chalmers). By studying relationships between material objects and people in conditions of adversity, this project aims to enhance and extend emerging understandings of multisystemic resilience (Ungar). Objects have been central to human history, culture, and life. According to Maurizio Ferraris, objects are characterised by four qualities: sensory-ness, manipulability, ordinariness, and relationality. “Unlike the three spheres of biological life – the mineral, the vegetable and the animal – objects and things have been customarily considered dependent on humans’ agency and presence” (Bartoloni). In everyday life, objects can enhance resilience when they are mobilised in strategies of resourcefulness and “making do” (de Certeau). Objects may also support the performance of identity and enable inter-subjective relations that create a sense of agency and of being at home, wherever one is located (Ahmed et al.; Gerrand). From an existential perspective, the experience of being confined in lockdown, “stuck” in one place, challenges cosmopolitan connectedness and sense of belonging. It also bears some similarities to the experiences of migrants and refugees who have endured great uncertainty, distance, and immobility due to detention or vintage of migration (Yi-Neumann et al.). It is possible that certain objects, although facilitating resilience, might also trigger mixed feelings in the individuals who relied on them during the lockdown (Svašek). From domestic accoutrements to digital objects, what kinds of things supported wellbeing in situations of confinement? Multisystemic Resilience in Lockdown It is especially useful to consider the material dimensions of resilience when working with people who have experienced trauma, marginalisation, or mental health challenges during the pandemic, as working with objects enables interaction beyond language barriers and enables alternatives to the re-telling of experiences. Resilience has been theorised as a social process supported (or inhibited) by a range of “everyday” intersecting external and contextual factors at individual, family, social, institutional, and economic resource levels (Ungar; Sherrieb et al.; Southwick et al.). The socio-ecological approach to resilience demonstrates that aspects of individual, family, and community resilience can be learned and reinforced (Bonanno), but they can also be eroded or weakened, depending on the dynamic interplay of various forces and influences in the social ecology of an individual or a group. This means that while factors at the level of the individual, family, community, or institutions may strengthen resistance to harms or the ability to overcome adversity in one context, the same factors can promote vulnerability and erode coping abilities in others (Rutter). Our project asked to what extent this social-ecological understanding of resilience might be further enhanced by attending to nonhuman materialities that can contribute or erode resilience within human relations. We were particularly interested in understanding the potential of the exhibition for creating an inclusive and welcoming space for individuals who had experienced long COVID lockdowns to safely reflect on the material conditions that supported their resilience. The aim of this exercise was not to provide answers to a problem, but to draw attention to complexity, and generate additional questions and uncertainties, as encouraged by Barone and Eisner. The exhibition, through its juxtaposition of (lockdown-induced) loneliness with the conviviality of the public exhibition format, enabled an exploration of the tension between the neoliberal imperative to physically isolate oneself and the public messaging concerning the welfare of the general populace. Our project emerged from insights collected on the issue of mental health during “Living Lab” Roundtables undertaken in 2020 by our Centre For Resilient and Inclusive Societies, convened as part of the Foundation Project (Lam et al.). In particular, we deployed an object-based analysis to investigate the art- and object-based methodology in the aftermath of a potentially traumatising lockdown, particularly for individuals who may not respond as well to traditional research methods. This approach contributes to the emerging body of work exploring the affordances of visual and material methods for capturing feelings and responses generated between people and objects during the pandemic (Watson et al.). “Objects for Everyday Resilience” sought to facilitate greater openness to objects’ vitality (Bennett) in order to produce new encounters that further understandings of multisystemic resilience. Such insights are critically tied to human mental health and physical wellbeing. They also enabled us to develop shared resources (as described below) that support such resilience during the period of recovery from the pandemic and beyond. Arts and Objects as Research The COVID-19 pandemic provoked not only a global health response, but also a reorientation of the ways COVID-related research is conducted and disseminated. Javakhishvili et al. describe the necessity of “a complex, trauma-informed psycho-socio-political response” in the aftermath of “cultural/societal trauma” occurring at a society-wide scale, pointing out the prevalence of mental health issues following previous epidemics (1). As they note, an awareness of such trauma is necessary “to avoid re-traumatization and to facilitate recovery”, with “safety, trustworthiness, transparency, collaboration and peer support, empowerment, choice” among the key principles of trauma-informed policies, strategies, and practices (3). Our project received funding from the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS) in July 2021, and ethics approval in November 2021. Centring materiality, in November 2021 we circulated a “call for objects” through CRIS’ and the research team’s social media channels, and collected over 40 objects from participants of all ages for this pilot study. Our participants comprised 33 women and 10 men. Following is a breakdown of the self-described cultural background of some participants: Five Australian (including one ‘6th generation Australian’); four Vietnamese; two Caucasian; one Anglo-Australian; one Asian; one Brazilian; one British; one Caucasian/English Australian; one Filipino; one Filipino-Australian; one German/Portuguese/US; one Greek Australian; one Iranian; one Irish and Welsh; one Israeli; one Half German, Half Middle Eastern; one Middle Eastern; one Singaporean; one White British. Participants’ objects and stories were analysed by the team both in terms of their ‘people, place, and things’ affordances – enhancing participants’ reflections of life in the pandemic – and through the prism of their vibrancy, drawing on object-oriented ontology and materiality as method (Ravn). Our participants were encouraged to consider how their chosen object(s) supported their resilience during the pandemic. For example, some objects enabled linking with memories that assist in elaborating experiences of loss or grief (Trimingham Jack and Devereux). To guide those submitting objects, we asked about: 1) their relationship to the object, 2) the meaning of the object, and 3) which features of resilience are mobilised by the object. From an analysis of our data, we have developed a working typology of objects to understand their particular relationship role to features of resilience (social capital, temporality) and to thematise our data in relation to emerging priorities in research in multisystemic resilience, materiality, and mental health. Things on Display Whilst we were initially unable to gather in person, we built an online Instagram gallery (@objectsforeverydayresilience) of submitted objects, with accompanying stories from research participants. Relevant hashtags in several languages were added to each post by the research team to ensure their widest possible visibility. This gallery features objects such as a female participant’s jigsaw puzzle which “helped me to pass the downtime in an enjoyable way”. Unlike much of her life in lockdown that was consumed by chores that “did not necessarily make me feel content or happy”, jigsaw puzzles made this participant “happy for that time I was doing them, transport[ing] me out of the confines of the lockdown with landscapes and images from across the globe”. Another female participant submitted a picture of her worn sneakers, which she used to go on what she called her “sanity walks”. To counteract the overwhelm of “being in the house all the time with 3 (autistic) children who were doing home learning and needed a lot of support”, while attempting to work on her PhD, going for walks every day helped clear my mind, get some fresh air, keep active and have some much needed quiet / me time. I ordered these shoes online because we couldn’t go to the shops and wore them almost daily during the extended lockdowns. Books were also popular. During lockdowns, according to a female participant, reading helped me connect with the outside world and be able to entertain myself without unhealthy coping mechanisms such as scrolling endlessly through TikTok. It also helped me feel less alone during the pandemic. Another female participant found that her son’s reading gave her time to work. Olfactory objects provided comfort for a participant who mourned the loss of smell due to mask wearing: perfumes were my sensory transport during this time – they could evoke memories of places I’d travelled to, seasons, people, feelings and even colours. I could go to far-off places in my mind through scent even though my body was largely stationary within my home. (Female participant) Through scent objects, this participant was “able to bring the world to meet me when I was unable to go out to meet the world”. Other participants sought to retreat from the world through homely objects: throughout lockdown I felt that my bed became an important object to my sanity. When I felt overwhelmed, I would come to bed and take a nap which helped me feel less out of control with everything going on in the world. (Female participant) For an essential worker who injured her leg whilst working in a hospital, an Ikea couch enabled recovery: “the couch saved my throbbing leg for many months. It served as a place to eat, paint and rest.” (Female participant) While pets were not included as objects within this project, several participants submitted their pets’ accoutrements. A female participant who submitted a photograph of her cat’s collar and tree movingly recounts how while I was working online in lockdown, this cat tree kept my cat entertained. She was so enthusiastic while scratching (covered in her fur) she somehow managed to remove her collar. I call Bouny my Emotional support cat … . She really stepped up her treatments of me during the pandemic. My mother had advanced dementia and multiple lockdowns [which] meant I could not see her in the weeks leading up to her death. These objects highlight the ways in which this participant found comfort during lockdown at a time of deep grief. For other participants, blankets and shawls provided sources of comfort “since much of lockdown was either in cool weather or deepest winter”. I found myself taking [my shawl] whenever I went out for any of the permitted activities and I also went to bed with it at night. The soft texture and the warmth against my face, neck and shoulders relaxed my body and I felt comforted and safe. (Female participant) Another used a calming blanket during lockdown “for time-outs on my bed (I was confined to a tiny flat at the time and separated from my family). It gave me a safe space”. (Female participant) In a similar vein, journalling provided several participants with “a safe space to explore thoughts and make them more tangible, acting as a consistent mindful practice I could always turn to”. The journal provided consistency throughout the ever-changing lockdown conditions and a strong sense of stability. Recording thoughts daily allowed me to not only process adversity, but draw attention to the areas in my life which I was grateful for … even from home. (Female participant) In addition to fostering mindfulness, the creative practice of journalling enabled this participant to exercise her imagination: writing from the perspectives of other people, from friends to strangers, also allowed me to reflect on the different experiences others had during lockdown. I found this fostered empathy and motivated me to reach out and check in on others, which in turn also benefited my own mental health. (Female participant) Creative practices were critical to sustaining many participants of this study. The Norman family, for example, submitted an acrylic on canvas artwork, Surviving COVID in Port Melbourne (2021), as their object of resilience: this work represents the sentiments and experiences of our family after a year of successive COVID lockdowns. Each section of the canvas has been completed a member of our family – 2 parents and a 21, 18 and 14 year-old. (Norman family) Likewise, musical instruments and sound objects – whether through analogue or digital means – helped participants to stay sane in long lockdowns: wen I didn’t know what to do with myself I always turned to the guitar. (Male participant) Music was so important to us throughout the lockdowns. It helped us express and diffuse big feelings. We played happy songs to amplify nice moments, funny songs to cheer each other up, angry songs to dance out rage. (Family participants) Curating the Lockdown Lounge To enhance the capacity of our project’s connections to the wider community, and respond to the need we felt to gather in person to reflect on what it meant for each of us to endure long lockdowns, we held an in-person exhibition after COVID-19 restrictions had eased in Melbourne in November 2022. The decision to curate the “Lockdown Lounge” art and research exhibition featuring objects submitted by research participants was consistent with a trauma-informed approach to research as described above. According to Crowther, art exhibits have the potential to redirect viewers’ attention from “aesthetic critique” to emotional connection. They can facilitate what Moon describes as “relational aesthetics”, whereby viewers may connect with the art and artists, and enhance their awareness of the self, artist, and the world. As a form of “guided relational viewing” (Potash), art exhibits are non-coercive in that they invite responses, discussion, and emotional involvement while placing no expectation on viewers to engage with or respond to the exhibition in a particular way. When considering such questions, our immersive in-person exhibition featured a range of object-based installations including audio-visual and sound objects, available for viewing in our Zine, The Lockdown Lounge (Walimunige et al.). The living room design was inspired by French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira’s immersive living room installation, “Dreams Don’t Have Titles”, at the 59th Venice Art Biennale’s French pavilion (Sedira), attended by project co-lead Vivian Gerrand in June 2022. The project team curated the gallery space together, which was located at Deakin University’s city conference venue, “Deakin Downtown”, in Melbourne, Australia. Fig. 1: The Lockdown Lounge, living room. “What Got You through Lockdown?” research exhibition and experience, Deakin Downtown, Melbourne, 21-25 November 2022. In the centre of the Lockdown Lounge’s living room (see fig. 1), for example, a television screen played a looped collection of popular YouTube videos, many of which had gone viral in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, admonishing Victorians to avoid non-essential activities through the example of an illicit dinner party held that resulted in a spike in coronavirus cases in March 2020 (ABC News). This short video excerpt of the Premier’s press conference concluded with his advice not to “get on the beers”. While not on display in this instance, many visitors would have been familiar with the TikTok video remix made later in the pandemic that featured the same press conference, with Premier Andrews’s words spliced to encourage listeners to “get on the beers!” (Kutcher). We recalled the ways in which such videos provided light relief through humour at a time of grave illness and trauma: when army trucks were being summoned to carry the deceased from Northern Italian hospitals to makeshift gravesites, those of us privileged to be at home, at a remove from the ravages of the virus, shared videos of Italian mayors shouting at their constituents to “vai a casa!” (Go home!). Or of Italians walking fake dogs to have an excuse to go outside. We finished the loop with a reproduction of the viral Kitten Zoom Filter Mishap, in which in online American courtroom defendant Rod Ponton mistakenly dons a cat filter while telling the judge, ‘I am not a cat’. The extraordinary nature of living in lockdown initially appeared as an opportunity to slow down, and this pandemic induced immobility appeared to prompt a kind of “degrowth” as industries the world over paused operation and pollution levels plummeted (Gerrand). In reflection of this, we included videos in our YouTube playlist of wild animals returning to big cities, and of the waters of Venice appearing to be clear. These videos recalled how the pandemic has necessitated greater appreciation of the power of things. The spread of the novel coronavirus’s invisible variants has permanently altered the conditions and perceptions of human life on the planet, forcing us to dwell on the vitality intrinsic to materiality, and renewing awareness of human lives as taking place within a broader ecology of life forms (Bennett). Within this posthuman perspective, distinctions between life and matter are blurred, and humans are displaced from a hierarchical ontological centre. In an essay titled “The Go Slow Party”, anthropologist Michael Taussig theorises a “mastery of non-mastery” that yields to the life of the object. This yielding – a necessary response to the conditions of the pandemic – can enable greater attentiveness to the interconnectedness and enmeshment of all things, leading to broader understandings of self and of resilience. To understand how participants responded to the exhibition, we asked them to respond to the following questions in the form of open-ended comments: What if anything affected you most? Did any of the objects resonate with you? Did the exhibition provide a safe environment for you to reflect on your sense of resilience during the pandemic? Fig. 2: Research exhibition participant standing beside artwork by the Norman family: Surviving COVID in Port Melbourne, acrylic on canvas (2021), The Lockdown Lounge. Through curating the art exhibition, we engaged in what Wang et al. describe as “art as research”, whereby the artist-researcher aims to “gain a deeper understanding of what art, art creation, or an artistic installation can do or activate … either in terms of personal experiences or environmental circumstances” (15). As Wang et al. write, “the act of creating is simultaneously the act of researching”, neither of which can be distinguished from one another (15). Accordingly, the process of curating the gallery space triggered memories of living in lockdown for members of our team, including one male youth researcher who remembers: as the space gradually began to be populated with object submissions … the objects began to find their place … . We slowly developed an understanding of the specific configurations of objects and the feelings that these combinations potentially could invoke. As we negotiated where my object might be placed, I felt an odd sense of melancholy seeing my record player and guitar at the exhibition, reminiscing about the music that I used to play and listen to with my family when we were all in lockdown … . As my Bon Iver record spun, and the familiar melodies rung out into the space, I felt as if I was sharing an intimate memory with others … . It also reminded me of the times when I had felt the most uplifted, when I was with family, near and far, knowing that we all were a unit. Another of our youth researcher team members served as an assistant curator and agreed to monitor the gallery space by being there for most of the five days of the exhibition’s opening to the public. She describes her work in the gallery thus: my role involved general exhibition upkeep – setup, answering visitor inquiries and monitoring the space – which meant being in the exhibition space for around 7.5 hours a day. Although it cannot be fully compared to living through Melbourne’s lockdowns, being in a space meant to mimic that time meant that comparisons naturally arose. I can see similarities between the things that supported my resilience during the lockdowns and the things that made my time at the gallery enjoyable. Through engaging with the gallery, this researcher was reminded of how spending time engaging in hands-on tasks made physical distancing more manageable. Spending time in the exhibition space also facilitated her experience of the lockdowns and the material conditions supporting resilience. She reflects that the hands-on, creative tasks of setting up the exhibition space and helping design a brochure reminded me of how I turned to baking so I could create something using my hands … . In the beginning, I approached my time at the gallery as a requirement of my work in this project … . Looking back now, I believe I understand both the person I was those years ago, and resilience itself, a little bit better. Fig. 3: Research exhibition participant wearing an Oculus virtual reality headset, watching the film Melbourne Locked Down (van Leeuwen), The Lockdown Lounge, November 2022. As these examples demonstrate, complex assemblages of people, places, and things during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and are, “suffused with multisensory and affective feelings”; exploring the ways affect is distributed through socio-spatialities of human experience enables researchers to better unpack individuals’ COVID experiences in ways that include their surroundings (Lupton). This was further evident in the feedback received from participants who attended the exhibition. Exhibition Feedback Feedback from participants suggested that the public exhibition format enabled them to explore this tension between isolation and orientation to the greater good in a safe and inclusive way (e.g. fig. 2). For Harry (29/m/Argentinian/New Zealand), interacting with the exhibition “reminded me that I wasn’t the only one that went through it”, while Sam (40/m/Chinese Australian) resonated with “many … people’s testimonials” of how objects helped support their resilience during long periods of confinement. Sam further added that participating in the exhibition was a “pleasant, friendly experience”, and that “everyone found something to do”, speaking to the convivial and inclusive nature of the exhibition. This resonates with Chaplin’s observation that “the production and reception of visual art works are social processes” that cannot be understood with reference to aesthetic factors alone (161-2). In the quotes above, it is evident that participants’ experience of the exhibition was inherently entwined with the sociality of the exhibition, evoking a sense of connection to others who had experienced the pandemic (in Harry’s case), and other exhibition attendees, whom he observed “all found something to do”. Additionally, participants’ responses highlighted the crucial role of the “artist researcher”, whom Wang et al. describe as qualitative researchers who use “artistically inspired methods or approaches” to blend research and art to connect with participants (10). In particular, the curation of the exhibition was something participants highlighted as key to facilitating their recollections of the pandemic in ways that were relatable. Nala (19/f/East-African Australian) commented that “the room’s layout allowed for this the most”: “the room was curated so well, it encaptured [sic] all the various stages of COVID lockdown – it made me feel like I was 16 again”. Returning to Wang et al.’s description of “art as research” as a means through which artist researchers can “gain a deeper understanding of what art, art creation, or an artistic installation can do or activate” (15), participant responses suggest that the curation of Lockdown Lounge as a trauma-informed art exhibition allowed participants to re-experience the pandemic lockdowns in ways that did not re-traumatise, but enabled the past and present to coexist safely and meaningfully for participants. Conclusion: Object-Oriented Wellbeing From different sections of the community, “Objects for Everyday Resilience” collected things that tell stories about how people coped in long lockdowns. Displaying the objects and practices that sustained us through the peak of the COVID-19 health crisis helped our participants to safely reflect on their experiences of living through long lockdowns. The variety of objects submitted and displayed draws our attention to the complex nuances of resilience and its material and immaterial intersections. These contributions composed, as fig. 1 illustrates, an almost accidentally curated diorama of a typical lockdown scene, imitating not only the materiality of living room itself but something also, through the very process of contribution, of the strange collectivity that the city of Melbourne experienced during lockdown periods. Precisely partitioned within domestic zones (with important differences for many “essential workers”, residents of public housing high-rises, and other exceptions), lockdowns enforced a different and necessarily unifying rhythm: attention to daily briefings on COVID numbers, affective responses to the heaves and sighs of infection rates, mourning over a new and untameable cause of loss of life, and routine check-ins on newly isolated friends and family. In hindsight, as the city has regained – perhaps redoubled, a sign of impatience with earlier governmental languages of austerity and moderation? – its economic and hedonistic pulse, there are also signs that any lockdown collectivity – which we also acknowledge was always partial and differentiated – has dispersed into the fragmentation of social interests and differences typical of late capitalism. The fascination with “public” objects – the Northface jacket of the state premier, COVID masks and testing kits, even toilet paper rolls, serving metonymically for a shared panic over scarcity – has receded. To the point, less than two years on, of this media attention being a scarcely remembered dream. The Lockdown Lounge is an example of a regathering of experiences through a process that, through its methods, also serves as a reminder of a common sociality integral to resilience. Our project highlights the role of objects- and arts-based research approaches in understanding the resources required to enhance and enable pandemic recovery and multisystemic wellbeing. Acknowledgments We would like to thank the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies for their funding and support of the Objects for Everyday Resilience Project. Thanks also to the Alfred Deakin Institute’s Mobilities, Diversity and Multiculturalism Stream for providing a supplementary grant for our research exhibition. Objects for Everyday Resilience received ethics clearance from Deakin University in November 2021, project ID: 2021-275. References ABC News. “’No Getting on the Beers’ at Home with Mates as Coronavirus Clampdown Increases.” Daniel Andrews Coronavirus Press Conference, 22 Mar. 2020. &lt;https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2020/mar/23/no-getting-on-the-beers-at-home-with-mates-as-coronavirus-clampdown-increases-video&gt;. Ahmed, Sara, et al. 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Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus &amp; Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette, 2011. Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. Compestine, Ying Chang. Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party. New York: Square Fish, 2009. Dalton, David. “Altamont: End of the Sixties, Or Big Mix-Up in the Middle of Nowhere?” Gadfly Nov/Dec 1999. April 2014 ‹http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html›. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Tarcher Putnam, 1980. Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian Magazine 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a Meme.html›. Hair, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Prod. Michael Butler. Book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Music by Galt MacDermot; Musical Director: Galt MacDermot. 1968. 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Who can be represented in art? How can we make it? How can we experience it? [...] It has provided an open space of possibility for many to test their sense of self and how they might communicate this to a wider world. (Gormley)On Friday 17 July 2009, from 12.00 am to 1.00 am, I was on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, as part of British sculptor Antony Gormley’s One &amp; Other project. Over a period of 100 days, 2,400 people were randomly selected (from 34,000 applicants) to occupy this site for sixty minutes each. Gormley’s sculptures have mostly focused on explorations of the human form in relation to memory, environment and community and the questions they raise about existence, mortality and metaphysics resonate with my own personal concerns and performance work (see: Gormley). One &amp; Other (2009), a participatory incarnation of his work, was, he claimed “about the democratisation of art.” It was also video-streamed live over the Internet and it became, particularly due to Sky Arts’s involvement as a project partner, a media event (Antony Gormley’s ‘One &amp; Other’). Ever since I can remember, I have had a fear of heights. Without a sturdy barrier I either retreat rapidly to a safe distance, freeze or drop to the ground. The relationship between my private sense of self, myself as performer, an iconic public space, an unpredictable (and partly unseen) audience, the critical gaze of the media, and, not least, the artist’s intention, quickly became a complex web to negotiate. How much was I prepared to risk, reveal, or mask in desiring to serve another’s artistic purpose? This article explores the invitation to disclose/expose set against this set of circumstances, focusing on the tensions between the desire to perform, my deep personal fear of heights (acrophobia), the media’s greedy commodification of disclosure and the complicity of the participant. Also considered is the unstable notion of communicating authentic disclosure(s) within a performative framework, and, finally, the transformational possibilities of such disclosure. While recognising that claims to truth and authenticity—and to some degree transformation—within solo (autobiographical) performance are problematic (Heddon 26), I do not see my phobia as culturally-produced here; I use these terms to signify the actuality of a significant shift in levels of personal fear experienced whilst on the plinth. As a performer with a background in devising, acting, biographical theatre and site-specific performance, the framework for discussion centres on writing from these fields, and also draws on performance art, particularly Eelka Lampe’s examination of the work of Rachel Rosenthal (291), an interdisciplinary performance artist whose work has drawn significantly on autobiographical elements and on both Western and Asian performance trainings and vocabularies. Media sources directly relevant to Gormley’s project are also considered. Congratulations!Participation in One &amp; Other was a matter of luck, offering a unique opportunity to become part of Gormley’s oeuvre. I placed myself in the draw and was thrilled when, on 6 June 2009, the congratulatory e-mail arrived. However, the reality of what I was to participate in soon began to dawn upon me. An hour, at midnight, on a plinth 4.4m x 1.7m at a height of 8m. Although there would be a safety net, there would be no barrier. Every move or sound that I made would also be watched by Webcams and transmitted live to unknowable individuals. The peculiarity of this event was bewildering, but I put my misgivings aside and focused on the question everybody asked me, “So what are you going to do?” (see fig. 1). Figure 1. Image: Adam J. Ledger. Performer: Jill Dowse. One &amp; Other. 2009.Resorting to habit, I immediately regarded the opportunity as an artistic endeavour and started to create a performance piece, layering site- and time-specific discoveries with personal associations, memories and jokes about acrophobia. The use of autobiographical material as an aid to both understanding and devising biographical theatre is not foreign to me, but using it as a primary source was new, and I was wary of the potential for appearing self-indulgent, for the performance to be, to use Howell’s terminology, “ego show” rather than revelation (158). My first two ideas, which were subsequently abandoned, appear to me now as attempts to deflect the content of my performance away from myself, thereby resisting disclosure. Others planned a plinth-as-soapbox approach, drawing attention to various charitable and socio-political causes (“Participants, Oliver”; “Participants, Bushewacker”; “Participants, RachelW”). These seemed worthy and worthwhile, and forced me to re-consider my approach and examine my own ideals and concerns, but I was reluctant to advocate for a single cause. This reluctance was compounded by several further factors—the live coverage threatened a post hoc call to account for anything I might say or do, leaving me open to misinterpretation and criticism from the public or media. The experience of TV’s Big Brother participants, to which Gormley’s project has often been compared and criticised as a cheapening of cultural values (Brooker), is called to mind. Despite its limitations, however, one of the attractions of the soapbox performance is that it does at least refract attention away from the individual and onto the cause. The consideration of my acrophobia was renewed, leading me to consider withdrawing from the project. Gormley’s desire to “make a portrait of the UK now” is a complex proposition (qtd. in Antony Gormley’s ‘One &amp; Other’). How might it be possible to be myself on an illuminated plinth, for a full hour, in public? Gormley, while acknowledging the performative nature of the project as “a combination of the stocks and the stage” also asserts that “whether acted or real…the inner condition of the individual will be revealed” (Gormley). While his point is debatable in a general sense, for me it was not the possible disclosure of this inner condition (via words) that was traumatic but the prospective public personal humiliation of both my private self (via irrational conduct in a public arena) as well as professional humiliation (an inability to perform) as a result of unforeseeable and potentially debilitating behavioural responses. This conflict—I “bottle out” if I withdraw, I face difficult challenges if I continue—led directly to the first consideration of tactics for survival. My notebook records, “I’d like to do something that allows me space to respond, to contemplate being up there. And something which allows me to be hidden” (Workbook 118). The paradoxical desire to be “hidden” on a raised plinth exposes the key tension within which tactics were discovered and structured. As I re-worked my first idea, I realized that I was straying once again from the theatre world I usually inhabit, which involves creating performances in which a role(s) or character is adopted, to the field of performance art, where autobiographical material and personal disclosure are often expressed and negotiated as central concerns. If acting is, as Joseph Chaikin proposes, “a demonstration of self with or without a disguise”, then my usual “disguise” of role/character would be (at least partially) shed, leaving my “demonstration of self” more exposed (2) (see fig. 2). Figure 2. Image: Adam J. Ledger. Performer: Jill Dowse. One &amp; Other. 2009.Controlling the PerformanceNotions of “self” within acting and performance have been explored by many performance theorists (Schechner, Phelan and Lane, Auslander, Zarrilli, Carlson), but, here I draw on Lampe’s discussion of the work of Rachel Rosenthal, since her performances move beyond mimesis. Rosenthal often performs several “fragments” of herself (which she also identifies as differentiable personae) within a single performance (Lampe 296). These personae are at different distances from her “daily” self. Lampe’s “Model of Performing/Non-Performing” is an illustration of a matrix of performance modes which moves from the “not performing” Self which is self-contained, “feeling unobserved”, through to the “Self in Ritual”, which is also self-contained and may be observed/unobserved (Lampe 291). Lampe identifies the “not performing” self as having “least control over performative display” and the Self in Ritual as having the “most control over performative display” (300). The question of control, both of my fear and of the revelation and communication of that fear, and within an environment over which I had very limited control, was paramount. This model offers a way of understanding how and why I shifted through various modes of disclosure, creating, for example an “Aesthetic Persona,” (“performing a part of oneself”), as in the playing out of a “fantasy” of myself as a winged creature, and moving towards “Techniques of Virtuosity,” (which includes “transforming the self”) seen, for example, in my use of adornment, mask and ritualistic elements. In exploring the elements of martyrdom in the artist Orlan’s work (an artist who has described her work as “carnal art” and who sought to reinvent herself and ideas of beauty via often unusual plastic surgery), Tanya Augsburg (298) suggests thatto be a martyr […] involves self-sacrifice and loss of social status; one undergoes humiliation, pain, even death for the sake of a higher purpose. Martyrdom as a self-conscious loss of self is nevertheless the result of free choice – even if that choice stems from a sense of obligation or duty.Whilst I recognise all these ingredients in my process, I now identify my struggle as the struggle against martyrdom, the assembling of the tactics necessary to resist and minimize the possibility and impact of any quasi-martyrdom.PerspectivesEkow Eshun, Artistic Director of London’s Institute for Contemporary Art and Chair of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, also acknowledged the project’s “performativity” and the media fuelled the pressure to “do” or perform (qtd. in Antony Gormley’s ‘One &amp; Other’). Yet when the project began on 6 July and I viewed the live streaming, it became clear that this was not an easily manageable context for any kind of presentation. I realised that I could not organise my performance in any way that I am used to and that in regarding the site as some kind of stage I had earlier made several false assumptions. The spatial dynamic gives the on-site onlooker, as Patricia Bickers points out, “a depressingly foreshortened view from above or below which diminishes, in every sense, both audience and participant”, whereas the live feed offers a “privileged view” (12). In this spectatorial confusion, how would I know where to direct myself? Secondly, it would be impossible to speak to onlookers in Trafalgar Square with a conversational or natural tone—amplification would be necessary. Thirdly, I also noticed that most onlookers stayed for a short time and then left, probably at least partly as a result of these factors. Was it likely that on-line viewers would watch for a whole hour? What, therefore, was the point of creating a dramaturgically sound piece for an audience whose presence would be so unpredictable?Gormley’s partner in the project was Sky Arts, with the event produced by Artichoke. The weekly Sky Arts programme dedicated to presenting the week’s “highlights from the plinth” was unashamedly concerned with the level of “entertainment” offered, hosted by a condescending presenter (Antony Gormley’s ‘One &amp; Other’). Celebrities and media pundits got their spot on the sofa to make their sound bites and choose their “Top 5 plinthers”. It was cheap TV, with participants routinely objectified, commodified and codified, labelled alternately crazy, funny, boring, and so on. This programme, as well as much of the media surrounding the project, failed to understand and respond in any meaningful way to what each individual brought to it.Given the unconducive performance arena, I made a radical shift of emphasis from word to image, from sound to silence, from script to improvisation. Many of the personal memories and associations I had explored in my first idea were subsumed into representative (but also personally associated) objects, symbols, adornments and actual signs. Although my clothing would be my own and I would look like “myself,” I would wear a pair of wings and a sign stating, “SCARED OF HEIGHTS.” I assembled a suitcase of objects for use in possible improvisations that would be unrehearsed and responsive to the given moment. Plan B, in case of disabling fear, was to ask to come down from the plinth. The sign drew attention to my fear, thereby diminishing, to some extent, its power to humiliate. It displayed my vulnerability and invited spectators to contextualise my behaviour and perhaps even to empathise. Wings have many symbolic cultural meanings, many of which overlap with my own interest in and fantasies of flight and “winged-ness.” Although these two elements were personally relevant, I also hoped that even a fleeting glance at this figure might engage the viewer momentarily with the irony in the juxtaposition of wings, which suggests the possibility or desire to fly, with the written message indicating a fear of heights, which would thereby limit the possibility or pleasure of flight. There are various modes of disclosure. Words, gesture and expression are three. Since a camera’s tendency is to focus on the face, and in particular the eyes, as the site of reading emotion, my instinct was to have in my arsenal some means of disguising, masking or otherwise concealing my eyes, thus partially withholding the full expression of emotion. My desire to hide, which might be interpreted as a desire for privacy, could at least be partially brought about. I took a joke “disguise” mask (spectacles, nose and moustache) and glow-in-the-dark Halloween skeleton spectacles (associated with my fear of death), both of which belong to my son. I set up the potential for other small, wry acts of resistance, including in my suitcase a pair of binoculars and a Polaroid camera, for turning the tables on those who looked upon and made images of me. Rather than using these personal objects to evoke or represent emotional memory, as performance artists such as Cristina Castrillo do (Aston 177), my personal objects acted primarily as both public sign or symbol, and as a comfort blanket of familiarity for my period of extremis—literally, props.The HourIn the “Welcome Lounge” I signed a Mephistopholean contract with Sky Arts, effectively handing over copyright of this hour of my life, agreed to an interview with an interviewer who had trouble listening, and allowed them to take photos of me, “for Antony”. The hour itself, however, proved quietly revelatory (see: http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Jill.).The first few minutes were exhausting as I acclimatised to my bizarre surroundings. But this intensity subsided somewhat as I realised my fear was manageable and that it would be neither traumatic nor debilitating. Oddly, I could not even see the Webcams out in the darkness. To return to Lampe’s analysis, I identify, throughout the hour, a shifting between different registers of performance, or personae, recognising myself as performer, my private self, my masked self (transformable) and an impossible fantasy of myself (adorned). Elements of ritual—repetition, mask, heightened awareness and responses—permeated the hour. These different registers seem to indicate different levels and means of disclosure dependent on the degree of control exercised through them. The self-contained episode of dancing while wearing the child’s disguise spectacles, while possibly amusing, might, for example, suggest an attitude towards my disclosure, an ironic stance towards the situation. Furthermore, and paradoxically, the feigning, or performing of control, in that dance, led to an actual increase of confidence. Whilst dancing, I felt a distancing between my outer, communicating self, which danced happily, enjoying the repetitive action as well as a sense of the odd figure I cut, and my private self, relieved to be behind a mask able to take this time to process and recover from what had been happening up until this point (see fig. 3). Figure 3. Image: Adam J. Ledger. Performer: Jill Dowse. One &amp; Other. 2009.A few minutes before leaving the plinth, I took out the marker pen and added the words “A BIT LESS…” to the beginning of the sign. I realised that a real transformation had taken place, and marked it for myself, while simultaneously disclosing it to the observer. Yet after the event, I was astonished to discover that the veracity of my public self-disclosure was called into question. Some people, including the security guard who was only a few feet from me, asked me if I was really scared of heights. Clearly, my “inner condition” was not revealed, or rather, perhaps, it was not trusted because “performance is not the real world” (Heddon 28). If it is true that to act means “to feign, to simulate, to represent, to impersonate,” then mine was not a predominantly “acted” performance (Kirby 40). Claire MacDonald claims that “when a performance artist stands up in front of an audience she is assumed to be performing as herself” (189), but does that also suggest that their statements are to be believed or that their gestures might not be feigned? Perhaps this simply reveals a contemporary distrust of anyone placed on a pedestal and putting on a “show,” be it plinther or politician. The relationship between the power and control I have over myself to the power and control exercised by other agencies remains ambivalent. At many points during the process, I was complicit in perpetuating the commodification of myself and the project: my small acts of resistance—deciding against uploading a photo to my “profile”, refusing the “Sky Arts” emblazoned umbrella offered on the day in favour of my own anonymous one (though this was partly an aesthetic choice), refusing the radio mike so that those on the Internet could not easily hear any voluntary or involuntary sound I may make—are hardly radical. It was dangerously easy, within this heightened period, for me to succumb to a carefully orchestrated media machine which performed interest in the individual while mitigating against the possibility of gaining deeper insights or connections. I have been surprised to discover how deeply I care what others think of me. I still recognise the desire that I remember from adolescence to be, through performance, more visible, applauded, approved of. Although it is vital to learn not to attach undue importance to judgements with questionable value, the media has a certain (albeit highly contested) authority, and it can therefore be difficult to ignore opinions, and particularly negative ones, when they are broadcasted or published for anyone to hear or read. I feel fortunate that my vulnerability (and disclosure of such) was manageable, as if one willingly steps into a public arena, one must expect to be judged and be prepared not to be given a public right of reply.Nonetheless, if one strips back the negative aspects of the media circus which surrounded it, One &amp; Other was a meaningful event in which to have taken part. The public exposure against which I had armed myself proved unexpectedly peaceful and empowering and I experienced Gormley’s assertion that One &amp; Other offered participants the opportunity to “test their sense of self and how they might communicate this to a wider world” (qtd. in Antony Gormley’s “One &amp; Other”). Artistically, I discovered that my attraction to certain performance styles and methodologies is implicitly and deeply linked to aspects of my own personality and how I desire to communicate. Finally, it has forced me to re-think and re-imagine my relationship with fear and challenge, recognising, even in the core of fear, the potential for transformation. ReferencesAntony Gormley’s “One &amp; Other”. Pres. Clive Anderson. Dir. Peter Dick. Prod. Liberty Bell Productions. British Sky Broadcasting Ltd, London. 24 July, 1 Aug., 8 Aug., 23 Aug., 28 Aug., 4 Sep., 11 Sep., 18 Sep., 26 Sep., 10 Oct., and 16 Oct. 2009. Aston, Elaine. Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook. London: Routledge, 1999.Augsburg, Tanya. “Orlan’s Performative Transformations.” The Ends of Performance. Eds. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 5–314. Auslander, Philip. Performance. 2. London: Routledge, 2003. Bickers, Patricia. Editorial. Art Monthly 9 Sep. 2009. 12.Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker’s screen burn”. Guardian Newspaper 11 July 2009. 13 Sep. 2009. &lt; http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jul/11/screenburn-antony-gormley &gt;.Carlson, Marvin. Performance. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004.Chaikin, Joseph. The Presence of the Actor. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Dowse, Jill. Workbook. MS.Gormley, Antony. “Conclusion of ‘One &amp; Other’ October 2009”. antonygormley.com 2009. 29 Nov. 2009 &lt; http://antonygormley.com &gt;.Gormley, Antony. “Sculptures”. antonygormley.com. 2009. 7 Dec. 2009 &lt; http://antonygormley.com/#/sculptures/chronology &gt;.Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008.Howell, John. "Solo in Soho." Performance Art Journal IV. 1 and 2 (1979/80): 152–159.Kirby, Michael. “On Acting and Not-Acting.” Acting (Re)Considered. 2nd ed. Ed. Phillip B. Zarrilli. London: Routledge, 2002. 40–52. Lampe, Eelka. “Rachel Rosenthal Creating Her Selves.” Acting (Re)Considered. 2nd ed. Ed. Phillip B. Zarrilli. London: Routledge, 2002. 291–304.MacDonald, Claire. “Assumed Identities: Feminism, Autobiography and Performance Art.” The Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Julia Swindells. London: Taylor and Frances, 1995. 187–95One &amp; Other. Artichoke, Headshift and Sky Arts. 2009. 6 May 2009 &lt; http://www.oneandother.co.uk/ &gt;.“Participants, Oliver”. One &amp; Other. Artichoke, Headshift and Sky Arts. 2009. 6 May 2009 &lt; http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Oliver &gt;.“Participants, Bushewacker ”. One &amp; Other. Artichoke, Headshift and Sky Arts. 2009. 6 May 2009 &lt; http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Bushewacker &gt;.“Participants, Jill”. One &amp; Other. Artichoke, Headshift and Sky Arts. 2009. 6 May 2009 &lt; http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Jill &gt;.“Participants, RachelW”. One &amp; Other. Artichoke, Headshift and Sky Arts. 2009. 6 May 2009 &lt; http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/RachelW &gt;.Phelan, Peggy, and Jill Lane, eds. The Ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998.Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1988.Zarrilli, Phillip B., ed. Acting (Re)Considered. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.

“Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it”-- Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future”The attacks of 9/11 generated a public discourse of suspicion, with Osama bin Laden occupying the role of the quintessential “most wanted” for nearly a decade, before being captured and killed in May 2011. In the novel, Falling Man (DeLillo), set shortly after the attacks of September 11, Justin, the protagonist’s son, and his friends, the two Siblings, spend much of their time at the window of the Siblings’ New York apartment, “searching the skies for Bill Lawton” (74). Mishearing bin Laden’s name on the news, Robert, the younger of the Siblings, has “never adjusted his original sense of what he was hearing” (73), and so the “myth of Bill Lawton” (74) is created. In this paper, I draw on postclassical, cognitive narratology to “defamiliarise” processes undertaken by both narrator and reader (Palmer 28) in order to explore how narrative elements impact on readers’ and characters’ perceptions of the terrorist. My focus on select episodes within the novel “pursue[s] the author’s means of controlling his reader” (Booth i), and I refer to a generic reader to identify a certain intuitive reaction to the text. Assuming that “the written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implications” (Iser 281), I trace a path from the uttered or printed word, through the reading act, to the process of meaning-making. I demonstrate how renaming the terrorist, and other language games, challenge the notion that terror can be synonymous with a locatable, destructible source by activating a suspicion towards the text in particular, and towards language in general.Falling Man tells the story of Keith who, after surviving the attacks on the World Trade Centre, shows up injured and disoriented at the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne, and their son, Justin. The narrative, set at different periods between the day of the attacks and three years later, focuses on Keith’s and Lianne’s lives as they attempt to deal, in their own ways, with the trauma of the attacks and with the unexpected reunion of their small family. Keith disappears into games of poker and has a brief relationship with another survivor, while Lianne searches for answers in the writings of Alzheimer sufferers, in places of worship, and in conversations with her mother, Nina, and her mother’s partner, Martin, a German art-dealer with a questionable past. Each of the novel’s three parts also contains a short narrative from the perspective of Hammad, a fictional terrorist, starting with his early days in a European cell under the leadership of the real terrorist, Mohamed Atta, through the group’s activities in Florida, to his final moments aboard the plane that crashes into the World Trade Centre. DeLillo’s work is noted for treating language as central to society and culture (Weinstein). In this personalised narrative of post-9/11, DeLillo’s choices reflect his “refusal to reproduce the mass media’s representations of 9/11 the reader is used to” (Grossinger 85). This refusal is manifest not so much in an absence of well-known, mediated images or concepts, but in the reshaping and re-presenting of these images so that they appear unexpected, new, and personal (Apitzch). A notable example of such re-presentation is the Falling Man of the title, who is introduced, surprisingly, not as the man depicted in the famous photograph by Richard Drew (Leps), but a performance artist who uses the name Falling Man when staging his falls from various New York buildings. Not until the final two sentences of the novel does DeLillo fully admit the image into the narrative, and even then only as Keith’s private vision from the Tower: “Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life” (246). The bin Laden/Bill Lawton substitution shows a similar rejection of recycled concepts and enables a renewed perspective towards the idea of bin Laden. Bill Lawton is first introduced as an anonymous “man” (17), later to be named Bill Lawton (73), and later still to be revealed as bin Laden mispronounced (73). The reader first learns of Bill Lawton in a conversation between Lianne and the Siblings’ mother, Isabel, who is worried about the children’s preoccupation at the window:“It has something to do with this man.”“What man?”“This name. You’ve heard it.”“This name,” Lianne said.“Isn’t this the name they sort of mumble back and forth? My kids totally don’t want to discuss the matter. Katie enforces the thing. She basically inspires fear in her brother. I thought maybe you would know something.”“I don’t think so.”“Like Justin says nothing about any of this?”“No. What man?”“What man? Exactly,” Isabel said. (17)If “the piling up of data [...] fulfils a function in the construction of an image” (Bal 85), a delayed unravelling of the bin Laden identity distorts this data-piling so that by the time the reader learns of the Bill Lawton/bin Laden link, an image of a man is already established as separate from, and potentially exclusive of, his historical identity. The segment beginning immediately after Isabel’s comment, “What man? Exactly” (17), refers to another, unidentified man with the pronoun “he” (18), as if to further sway the reader’s attention from the subject of that man’s identity. Fludernik notes that “language games” are a key feature of the postmodern text (Towards 221), adding that “techniques of linguistic emasculation serve implicitly to question a simple and naive view of the representational potential of language” (225). I propose that, in Falling Man, bin Laden is emasculated by the Bill Lawton misnomer, and is thereby conceptualised as two entities, one historical and one fictional. The name-switch activates what psychologists refer to as a “dual-process,” conscious and unconscious, that forms the reader’s experience of the narrative (Gerrig 37), creating a cognitive dissonance between the two. Much like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit drawing, bin Laden and Bill Lawton exist as two separate entities, occupying the same space of the idea of bin Laden, but demanding to be viewed singularly for the process of recognition to take place. Such distortion of a well-known figure conveys the sense that, in this novel, “all identities are either confused [...] or double [...] or merging [...] or failing” (Kauffman 371), or, occasionally, doing all these things simultaneously.A similar cognitive process is triggered by the introduction of aliases for all three characters that head each of the novel’s three parts. Ernst Hechinger is revealed as Martin Ridnour’s former, ‘terrorist’ identity (DeLillo, Falling 86), and performance artist David Janiak (180) as the Falling Man’s everyday name. But the bin Laden/Bill Lawton switch offers an overt juxtaposition of the historical with the fictional or, as Žižek would have it, “the Raw real” with the “virtual” (387), and allows the mutated bin Laden/Bill Lawton figure to shift, in the mind of the reader, between the two worlds, as well as form a new, blended entity.At this point, it is important to notice that two, interconnected, forms of suspicion exist in the novel. The first is invoked in the story-level towards various terrorist-characters such as Bill Lawton, Hammad, and Martin. The second form is activated when various elements within the narrative prompt the reader to treat the text itself as suspicious, triggering in the reader a cognitive reaction that mirrors that of the narrated character. One example is the “halting process” (Leps) that is forced on the reader when attempting to manoeuvre through the narrative’s anachronical arrangement that mirrors Keith’s mental perception of time and memory. Another such narrative device is the use of “unheralded pronouns” (Gerrig 50), when ‘he’ or ‘she’ is used ambiguously, often at the beginning of a chapter or segment. The use of pronouns in narrative must adhere to strict grammatical rules (Fludernik, Introduction) and when these rules are ignored, the reading pattern is affected. First, the reader of Falling Man is immersed within an element in the story, then becomes puzzled about the identity of a character, and finally re-reads the passage to gain clarity. The reader, after a while, distances somewhat from the text, scanning for alternative possibilities and approaching interpretation with a tentative sense of doubt.The conversation between the two mothers, the Bill Lawton/bin Laden split, and the use of unheralded pronouns also destabilises the relationship between person and name, and appears to create a world in which “personality has disintegrated into a mere semiotic mark” (Versluys 21). Keith’s obsession with correcting the spelling of his surname, Neudecker, “because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled” (DeLillo, Falling 31), Lianne’s fondness of the philosopher Kierkegaard, “right down to the spelling of his name. The hard Scandian k’s and lovely doubled a” (118), her consideration of “Marko [...] with a k, whatever that might signify” (119), and Rumsey, who is told that “everything in his life would be different [...] if one letter in his name was different” (149), are a few examples of the text’s semiotic emphasis. But, while Versluys sees this tendency as emblematic of the novel’s portrayal of a decline in humanity, I suggest that the text’s preoccupation with the shape and constitution of words may work to “de-automatise” (Margolin 66) the relationship between sign and perception, rather than to denigrate the signified human. With the renamed terrorist, the reader comes to doubt not only the printed text, but also his or her automatic response to “bin Laden” as a “brand, a sort of logo which identifies and personalises the evil” (Chomsky, September 36). Bill Lawton, according to Justin, speaks in monosyllables (102), a language Justin chooses, for a time, for his own speech (66), and this also contributes to the de-automatisation of the text. The language game, in which a speaker must only use words with one syllable, began as a classroom activity “designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts” (66). The game also gives players, and readers, an embodied understanding of what Genette calls the gap between “being and saying” (93) that is inevitable in the production of language and narrative. Justin, who continues to play the game outside the classroom, because “it helps [him] go slow when [he] thinks” (66), finds comfort in the silent pauses that are afforded by widening the gap between thought and utterance. History in Falling Man is a collection of the private narratives of survivors, families, terrorists, artists, and the host of people that are affected by the attacks of 9/11. Justin’s character, with the linguistic and psychic code of a child, represents the way in which all participants, to some extent, choose their own antagonist, language, plot, and sequence to personalise this mega-public event. He insists that the towers did not collapse (72), but that they will, “this time coming” (102); Bill Lawton, for Justin, “has a long beard [...] speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives [and] has the power to poison what we eat” (74). Despite being confronted with the factual inaccuracies of his narrative, Justin resists editing his version precisely because these inaccuracies form his own, non-mediated, authentic account. They are, in a sense, a work of fiction and, paradoxically, more ‘real’ because of that. “We want to pass beyond the limits of safe understandings”, thinks Lianne, “and what better way to do it than through make-believe” (63). I have so far shown how narrative elements create a suspicion in the way characters operate within their surrounding universe, in the reader’s attitude towards the text, and, more implicitly, in the power of language to accurately represent a personal reality. Within the context of the novel’s historical setting—the period following the 9/11 attacks—the narration of the terrorist figure, as represented in Bill Lawton, Hammad, Martin, and others, may function as a response to the “binarism” of Bush’s proposal (Butler 2), epitomised in his “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Silberstein 14) approach. Within the novel’s universe, its narration of terrorist-characters works to free discourse from superficial categorisations and to provide “a counterdiscourse to the prevailing nationalistic interpretations” (Versluys 23) of the events of 9/11 by de-automatising a response to “us” and “them.” In his essay published shortly after the attacks, DeLillo notes that “the sense of disarticulation we hear in the term ‘Us and Them’ has never been so striking, at either end” (“Ruins”), and while he draws distinctions, in the same essay, with technology on ‘our’ side and religious fanaticism on ‘their’ side, I believe that the novel is less settled on the subject. The Anglicisation of bin Laden’s name, for example, suggests that Bush’s either-or-ism is, at least partially, an arbitrary linguistic construct. At a time when some social commentators have highlighted the similarity in the definitions of “terror” and “counter terror” (Chomsky, “Commentary” 610), the Bill Lawton ‘error’ works to illustrate how easily language can destabilise our perception of what is familiar/strange, us/them, terror/counter-terror, victim/perpetrator. In the renaming of the notorious terrorist, “the familiar name is transposed on the mass murderer, but in return the attributes of the mass murderer are transposed on one very like us” (Conte 570), and this reciprocal relationship forms an imagined evil that is no longer so easily locatable within the prevailing political discourse. As the novel contextualises 9/11 within a greater historical narrative (Leps), in which characters like Martin represent “our” form of militant activism (Duvall), we are invited to perceive a possibility that the terrorist could be, like Martin, “one of ours […] godless, Western, white” (DeLillo, Falling 195).Further, the idea that the suspect exists, almost literally, within ‘us’, the victims, is reflected in the structure of the narrative itself. This suggests a more fluid relationship between terrorist and victim than is offered by common categorisations that, for some, “mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality” (Said 12). Hammad is visited in three short separate sections; “on Marienstrasse” (77-83), “in Nokomis” (171-178), and “the Hudson corridor” (237-239), at the end of each of the novel’s three parts. Hammad’s narrative is segmented within Keith’s and Lianne’s tale like an invisible yet pervasive reminder that the terrorist is inseparable from the lives of the victims, habituating the same terrains, and crafted by the same omniscient powers that compose the victims’ narrative. The penetration of the terrorist into ‘our’ narrative is also perceptible in the physical osmosis between terrorist and victim, as the body of the injured victim hosts fragments of the dead terrorist’s flesh. The portrayal of the body, in some post 9/11 novels, as “a vulnerable site of trauma” (Bird, 561), is evident in the following passage, where a physician explains to Keith the post-bombing condition termed “organic shrapnel”:The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outwards with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range...A student is sitting in a cafe. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. (16)For Keith, the dead terrorist’s flesh, lodged under living human skin, confirms the malignancy of his emotional and physical injury, and suggests a “consciousness occupied by terror” (Apitzch 95), not unlike Justin’s consciousness, occupied from within by the “secret” (DeLillo, Falling 101) of Bill Lawton.The macabre bond between terrorist and victim is fully realised in the novel’s final pages, when Hammad’s death intersects, temporally, with the beginning of Keith’s story, and the two bodies almost literally collide as Hammad’s jet crashes into Keith’s office building. Unlike Hammad’s earlier and clearly framed narratives, his final interruption dissolves into Keith’s story with such cinematic seamlessness as to make the two narratives almost indistinguishable from one another. Hammad’s perspective concludes on board the jet, as “something fell off the counter in the galley. He fastened his seatbelt” (239), followed immediately by “a bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that” (239). The ambiguous use of the pronoun “he,” once again, and the twin bottles in the galleys create a moment of confusion and force a re-reading to establish that, in fact, there are two different bottles, in two galleys; one on board the plane and the other inside the World Trade Centre. Victim and terrorist, then, share a common fate as acting agents in a single governing narrative that implicates both lives.Finally, Žižek warns that “whenever we encounter such a purely evil on the Outside, [...] we should recognise the distilled version of our own self” (387). DeLillo assimilates this proposition into the fabric of Falling Man by crafting a language that renegotiates the division between ‘out’ and ‘in,’ creating a fictional antagonist in Bill Lawton that continues to lurk outside the symbolic window long after the demise of his historical double. Some have read this novel as offering a more relative perspective on terrorism (Duvall). However, like Leps, I find that DeLillo here tries to “provoke thoughtful stillness rather than secure truths” (185), and this stillness is conveyed in a language that meditates, with the reader, on its own role in constructing precarious concepts such as ‘us’ and ‘them.’ When proposing that terror, in Falling Man, can be found within ‘us,’ linguistically, historically, and even physically, I must also add that DeLillo’s ‘us’ is an imagined sphere that stands in opposition to a ‘them’ world in which “things [are] clearly defined” (DeLillo, Falling 83). Within this sphere, where “total silence” is seen as a form of spiritual progress (101), one is reminded to approach narrative and, by implication, life, with a sense of mindful attention; “to hear”, like Keith, “what is always there” (225), and to look, as Nina does, for “something deeper than things or shapes of things” (111).ReferencesApitzch, Julia. "The Art of Terror – the Terror of Art: Delillo's Still Life of 9/11, Giorgio Morandi, Gerhard Richter, and Performance Art." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. London: Continuum [EBL access record], 2010. 93–110.Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narratology. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.Bird, Benjamin. "History, Emotion, and the Body: Mourning in Post-9/11 Fiction." Literature Compass 4.3 (2007): 561–75.Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.Chomsky, Noam. "Commentary Moral Truisms, Empirical Evidence, and Foreign Policy." Review of International Studies 29.4 (2003): 605–20.---. September 11. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen &amp; Unwin, 2002.Conte, Joseph Mark. "Don Delillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 557–83.DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. London: Picador, 2007.---. "In the Ruins of the Future." The Guardian (22 December, 2001). ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo›.Duvall, John N. &amp; Marzec, Robert P. "Narrating 9/11." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 381–400.Fludernik, Monika. An Introduction to Narratology. Taylor &amp; Francis [EBL access record], 2009.---. Towards a 'Natural' Narratology. Routledge, [EBL access record], 1996.Genette, Gerard. Figures of Literary Discourse. New York: Columbia U P, 1982.Gerrig, Richard J. "Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Reader's Narrative Experiences." Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter [EBL access record], 2011. 37–60.Grossinger, Leif. "Public Image and Self-Representation: Don Delillo's Artists and Terrorists in Postmodern Mass Society." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. London: Continuum [EBL access record], 2010. 81–92.Iser, Wolfgang. "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach." New Literary History 3.2 (1972): 279–99.Kauffman, Linda S. "The Wake of Terror: Don Delillo's in the Ruins of the Future, Baadermeinhof, and Falling Man." Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (2008): 353–77.Leps, Marie-Christine. "Falling Man: Performing Fiction." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. London: Continuum [EBL access record], 2010. 184–203.Margolin, Uri. "(Mis)Perceiving to Good Aesthetic and Cognitive Effect." Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter [EBL access record], 2011. 61–78.Palmer, Alan. "The Construction of Fictional Minds." Narrative 10.1 (2002): 28–46.Said, Edward W. "The Clash of Ignorance." The Nation 273.12 (2001): 11–13.Silberstein, Sandra. War of Words : Language Politics and 9/11. Taylor &amp; Francis e-Library, 2004.Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia U P, 2009.Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody's Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. Oxford U P [EBL Access Record], 1993.Žižek, Slavoj. "Welcome to the Desert of the Real!" The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 385–89.

History is not over and that includes media history. Jay Rosen (Zelizer &amp; Allan 33) The media in their reporting on terrorism tend to be judgmental, inflammatory, and sensationalistic. — Susan D. Moeller (169) In short, we are directed in time, and our relation to the future is different than our relation to the past. All our questions are conditioned by this asymmetry, and all our answers to these questions are equally conditioned by it. Norbert Wiener (44) The Clash of Geopolitical Pundits America’s geo-strategic engagement with the world underwent a dramatic shift in the decade after the Cold War ended. United States military forces undertook a series of humanitarian interventions from northern Iraq (1991) and Somalia (1992) to NATO’s bombing campaign on Kosovo (1999). Wall Street financial speculators embraced market-oriented globalization and technology-based industries (Friedman 1999). Meanwhile the geo-strategic pundits debated several different scenarios at deeper layers of epistemology and macrohistory including the breakdown of nation-states (Kaplan), the ‘clash of civilizations’ along religiopolitical fault-lines (Huntington) and the fashionable ‘end of history’ thesis (Fukuyama). Media theorists expressed this geo-strategic shift in reference to the ‘CNN Effect’: the power of real-time media ‘to provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to both global and national events’ (Robinson 2). This media ecology is often contrasted with ‘Gateholder’ and ‘Manufacturing Consent’ models. The ‘CNN Effect’ privileges humanitarian and non-government organisations whereas the latter models focus upon the conformist mind-sets and shared worldviews of government and policy decision-makers. The September 11 attacks generated an uncertain interdependency between the terrorists, government officials, and favourable media coverage. It provided a test case, as had the humanitarian interventions (Robinson 37) before it, to test the claim by proponents that the ‘CNN Effect’ had policy leverage during critical stress points. The attacks also revived a long-running debate in media circles about the risk factors of global media. McLuhan (1964) and Ballard (1990) had prophesied that the global media would pose a real-time challenge to decision-making processes and that its visual imagery would have unforeseen psychological effects on viewers. Wark (1994) noted that journalists who covered real-time events including the Wall Street crash (1987) and collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989) were traumatised by their ‘virtual’ geographies. The ‘War on Terror’ as 21st Century Myth Three recent books explore how the 1990s humanitarian interventions and the September 11 attacks have remapped this ‘virtual’ territory with all too real consequences. Piers Robinson’s The CNN Effect (2002) critiques the theory and proposes the policy-media interaction model. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan’s anthology Journalism After September 11 (2002) examines how September 11 affected the journalists who covered it and the implications for news values. Sandra Silberstein’s War of Words (2002) uncovers how strategic language framed the U.S. response to September 11. Robinson provides the contextual background; Silberstein contributes the specifics; and Zelizer and Allan surface broader perspectives. These books offer insights into the social construction of the nebulous War on Terror and why certain images and trajectories were chosen at the expense of other possibilities. Silberstein locates this world-historical moment in the three-week transition between September 11’s aftermath and the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. Descriptions like the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘Axis of Evil’ framed the U.S. military response, provided a conceptual justification for the bombings, and also brought into being the geo-strategic context for other nations. The crucial element in this process was when U.S. President George W. Bush adopted a pedagogical style for his public speeches, underpinned by the illusions of communal symbols and shared meanings (Silberstein 6-8). Bush’s initial address to the nation on September 11 invoked the ambiguous pronoun ‘we’ to recreate ‘a unified nation, under God’ (Silberstein 4). The 1990s humanitarian interventions had frequently been debated in Daniel Hallin’s sphere of ‘legitimate controversy’; however the grammar used by Bush and his political advisers located the debate in the sphere of ‘consensus’. This brief period of enforced consensus was reinforced by the structural limitations of North American media outlets. September 11 combined ‘tragedy, public danger and a grave threat to national security’, Michael Schudson observed, and in the aftermath North American journalism shifted ‘toward a prose of solidarity rather than a prose of information’ (Zelizer &amp; Allan 41). Debate about why America was hated did not go much beyond Bush’s explanation that ‘they hated our freedoms’ (Silberstein 14). Robert W. McChesney noted that alternatives to the ‘war’ paradigm were rarely mentioned in the mainstream media (Zelizer &amp; Allan 93). A new myth for the 21st century had been unleashed. The Cycle of Integration Propaganda Journalistic prose masked the propaganda of social integration that atomised the individual within a larger collective (Ellul). The War on Terror was constructed by geopolitical pundits as a Manichean battle between ‘an “evil” them and a national us’ (Silberstein 47). But the national crisis made ‘us’ suddenly problematic. Resurgent patriotism focused on the American flag instead of Constitutional rights. Debates about military tribunals and the USA Patriot Act resurrected the dystopian fears of a surveillance society. New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani suddenly became a leadership icon and Time magazine awarded him Person of the Year (Silberstein 92). Guiliani suggested at the Concert for New York on 20 October 2001 that ‘New Yorkers and Americans have been united as never before’ (Silberstein 104). Even the series of Public Service Announcements created by the Ad Council and U.S. advertising agencies succeeded in blurring the lines between cultural tolerance, social inclusion, and social integration (Silberstein 108-16). In this climate the in-depth discussion of alternate options and informed dissent became thought-crimes. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s report Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America (2002), which singled out “blame America first” academics, ignited a firestorm of debate about educational curriculums, interpreting history, and the limits of academic freedom. Silberstein’s perceptive analysis surfaces how ACTA assumed moral authority and collective misunderstandings as justification for its interrogation of internal enemies. The errors she notes included presumed conclusions, hasty generalisations, bifurcated worldviews, and false analogies (Silberstein 133, 135, 139, 141). Op-ed columnists soon exposed ACTA’s gambit as a pre-packaged witch-hunt. But newscasters then channel-skipped into military metaphors as the Afghanistan campaign began. The weeks after the attacks New York City sidewalk traders moved incense and tourist photos to make way for World Trade Center memorabilia and anti-Osama shirts. Chevy and Ford morphed September 11 catchphrases (notably Todd Beamer’s last words “Let’s Roll” on Flight 93) and imagery into car advertising campaigns (Silberstein 124-5). American self-identity was finally reasserted in the face of a domestic recession through this wave of vulgar commercialism. The ‘Simulated’ Fall of Elite Journalism For Columbia University professor James Carey the ‘failure of journalism on September 11’ signaled the ‘collapse of the elites of American journalism’ (Zelizer &amp; Allan 77). Carey traces the rise-and-fall of adversarial and investigative journalism from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate through the intermediation of the press to the myopic self-interest of the 1988 and 1992 Presidential campaigns. Carey’s framing echoes the earlier criticisms of Carl Bernstein and Hunter S. Thompson. However this critique overlooks several complexities. Piers Robinson cites Alison Preston’s insight that diplomacy, geopolitics and elite reportage defines itself through the sense of distance from its subjects. Robinson distinguished between two reportage types: distance framing ‘creates emotional distance’ between the viewers and victims whilst support framing accepts the ‘official policy’ (28). The upsurge in patriotism, the vulgar commercialism, and the mini-cycle of memorabilia and publishing all combined to enhance the support framing of the U.S. federal government. Empathy generated for September 11’s victims was tied to support of military intervention. However this closeness rapidly became the distance framing of the Afghanistan campaign. News coverage recycled the familiar visuals of in-progress bombings and Taliban barbarians. The alternative press, peace movements, and social activists then retaliated against this coverage by reinstating the support framing that revealed structural violence and gave voice to silenced minorities and victims. What really unfolded after September 11 was not the demise of journalism’s elite but rather the renegotiation of reportage boundaries and shared meanings. Journalists scoured the Internet for eyewitness accounts and to interview survivors (Zelizer &amp; Allan 129). The same medium was used by others to spread conspiracy theories and viral rumors that numerology predicted the date September 11 or that the “face of Satan” could be seen in photographs of the World Trade Center (Zelizer &amp; Allan 133). Karim H. Karim notes that the Jihad frame of an “Islamic Peril” was socially constructed by media outlets but then challenged by individual journalists who had learnt ‘to question the essentialist bases of her own socialization and placing herself in the Other’s shoes’ (Zelizer &amp; Allan 112). Other journalists forgot that Jihad and McWorld were not separate but two intertwined worldviews that fed upon each other. The September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center also had deep symbolic resonances for American sociopolitical ideals that some journalists explored through analysis of myths and metaphors. The Rise of Strategic Geography However these renegotiated boundariesof new media, multiperspectival frames, and ‘layered’ depth approaches to issues analysiswere essentially minority reports. The rationalist mode of journalism was soon reasserted through normative appeals to strategic geography. The U.S. networks framed their documentaries on Islam and the Middle East in bluntly realpolitik terms. The documentary “Minefield: The United States and the Muslim World” (ABC, 11 October 2001) made explicit strategic assumptions of ‘the U.S. as “managing” the region’ and ‘a definite tinge of superiority’ (Silberstein 153). ABC and CNN stressed the similarities between the world’s major monotheistic religions and their scriptural doctrines. Both networks limited their coverage of critiques and dissent to internecine schisms within these traditions (Silberstein 158). CNN also created different coverage for its North American and international audiences. The BBC was more cautious in its September 11 coverage and more global in outlook. Three United Kingdom specials – Panorama (Clash of Cultures, BBC1, 21 October 2001), Question Time (Question Time Special, BBC1, 13 September 2001), and “War Without End” (War on Trial, Channel 4, 27 October 2001) – drew upon the British traditions of parliamentary assembly, expert panels, and legal trials as ways to explore the multiple dimensions of the ‘War on Terror’ (Zelizer &amp; Allan 180). These latter debates weren’t value free: the programs sanctioned ‘a tightly controlled and hierarchical agora’ through different containment strategies (Zelizer &amp; Allan 183). Program formats, selected experts and presenters, and editorial/on-screen graphics were factors that pre-empted the viewer’s experience and conclusions. The traditional emphasis of news values on the expert was renewed. These subtle forms of thought-control enabled policy-makers to inform the public whilst inoculating them against terrorist propaganda. However the ‘CNN Effect’ also had counter-offensive capabilities. Osama bin Laden’s videotaped sermons and the al-Jazeera network’s broadcasts undermined the psychological operations maxim that enemies must not gain access to the mindshare of domestic audiences. Ingrid Volkmer recounts how the Los Angeles based National Iranian Television Network used satellite broadcasts to criticize the Iranian leadership and spark public riots (Zelizer &amp; Allan 242). These incidents hint at why the ‘War on Terror’ myth, now unleashed upon the world, may become far more destabilizing to the world system than previous conflicts. Risk Reportage and Mediated Trauma When media analysts were considering the ‘CNN Effect’ a group of social contract theorists including Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, and Ulrich Beck were debating, simultaneously, the status of modernity and the ‘unbounded contours’ of globalization. Beck termed this new environment of escalating uncertainties and uninsurable dangers the ‘world risk society’ (Beck). Although they drew upon constructivist and realist traditions Beck and Giddens ‘did not place risk perception at the center of their analysis’ (Zelizer &amp; Allan 203). Instead this was the role of journalist as ‘witness’ to Ballard-style ‘institutionalized disaster areas’. The terrorist attacks on September 11 materialized this risk and obliterated the journalistic norms of detachment and objectivity. The trauma ‘destabilizes a sense of self’ within individuals (Zelizer &amp; Allan 205) and disrupts the image-generating capacity of collective societies. Barbie Zelizer found that the press selection of September 11 photos and witnesses re-enacted the ‘Holocaust aesthetic’ created when Allied Forces freed the Nazi internment camps in 1945 (Zelizer &amp; Allan 55-7). The visceral nature of September 11 imagery inverted the trend, from the Gulf War to NATO’s Kosovo bombings, for news outlets to depict war in detached video-game imagery (Zelizer &amp; Allan 253). Coverage of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent Bali bombings (on 12 October 2002) followed a four-part pattern news cycle of assassinations and terrorism (Moeller 164-7). Moeller found that coverage moved from the initial event to a hunt for the perpetrators, public mourning, and finally, a sense of closure ‘when the media reassert the supremacy of the established political and social order’ (167). In both events the shock of the initial devastation was rapidly followed by the arrest of al Qaeda and Jamaah Islamiyah members, the creation and copying of the New York Times ‘Portraits of Grief’ template, and the mediation of trauma by a re-established moral order. News pundits had clearly studied the literature on bereavement and grief cycles (Kubler-Ross). However the neo-noir work culture of some outlets also fueled bitter disputes about how post-traumatic stress affected journalists themselves (Zelizer &amp; Allan 253). Reconfiguring the Future After September 11 the geopolitical pundits, a reactive cycle of integration propaganda, pecking order shifts within journalism elites, strategic language, and mediated trauma all combined to bring a specific future into being. This outcome reflected the ‘media-state relationship’ in which coverage ‘still reflected policy preferences of parts of the U.S. elite foreign-policy-making community’ (Robinson 129). Although Internet media and non-elite analysts embraced Hallin’s ‘sphere of deviance’ there is no clear evidence yet that they have altered the opinions of policy-makers. The geopolitical segue from September 11 into the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq also has disturbing implications for the ‘CNN Effect’. Robinson found that its mythic reputation was overstated and tied to issues of policy certainty that the theory’s proponents often failed to examine. Media coverage molded a ‘domestic constituency ... for policy-makers to take action in Somalia’ (Robinson 62). He found greater support in ‘anecdotal evidence’ that the United Nations Security Council’s ‘safe area’ for Iraqi Kurds was driven by Turkey’s geo-strategic fears of ‘unwanted Kurdish refugees’ (Robinson 71). Media coverage did impact upon policy-makers to create Bosnian ‘safe areas’, however, ‘the Kosovo, Rwanda, and Iraq case studies’ showed that the ‘CNN Effect’ was unlikely as a key factor ‘when policy certainty exists’ (Robinson 118). The clear implication from Robinson’s studies is that empathy framing, humanitarian values, and searing visual imagery won’t be enough to challenge policy-makers. What remains to be done? Fortunately there are some possibilities that straddle the pragmatic, realpolitik and emancipatory approaches. Today’s activists and analysts are also aware of the dangers of ‘unfreedom’ and un-reflective dissent (Fromm). Peter Gabriel’s organisation Witness, which documents human rights abuses, is one benchmark of how to use real-time media and the video camera in an effective way. The domains of anthropology, negotiation studies, neuro-linguistics, and social psychology offer valuable lessons on techniques of non-coercive influence. The emancipatory tradition of futures studies offers a rich tradition of self-awareness exercises, institution rebuilding, and social imaging, offsets the pragmatic lure of normative scenarios. The final lesson from these books is that activists and analysts must co-adapt as the ‘War on Terror’ mutates into new and terrifying forms. Works Cited Amis, Martin. “Fear and Loathing.” The Guardian (18 Sep. 2001). 1 March 2001 &lt;http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4259170,00.php&gt;. Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition (rev. ed.). Los Angeles: V/Search Publications, 1990. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1999. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Friedman, Thomas. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, 1999. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar &amp; Rhinehart, 1941. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 1996. Kaplan, Robert. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. New York: Random House, 2000. Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. London: Tavistock, 1969. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul, 1964. Moeller, Susan D. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death. New York: Routledge, 1999. Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. New York: Routledge, 2002. Silberstein, Sandra. War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington IN: Indiana UP, 1994. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: John Wiley &amp; Sons, 1948. Zelizer, Barbie, and Stuart Allan (eds.). Journalism after September 11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Links http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burns, Alex. "The Worldflash of a Coming Future" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture&lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php&gt;. APA Style Burns, A. (2003, Apr 23). The Worldflash of a Coming Future. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,&lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php&gt;

Fan cultural production, be it in the form of fan fiction, art or videos are often celebrated in fan studies as evidence of fan creativity, fans’ skills in adopting technology and their expert knowledge of the texts. As Jenkins argues, “the pleasure of the form centers on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from their previous contexts and assigned alternative meanings” (227). However, can fan mash-up videos can also offer an alternative view, not of one’s fandom, but of anti-fandom? Fan pleasure is often seen as declaring love for a text through juxtaposing images to sound in a mash-up video, but this paper will argue that it can also demonstrate hate. Specifically, can these videos affirm anti-fandom readings of a particular text, when clips from two (or more) different texts, seemingly of the same genre and targeting the same demographics, are edited together to offer an alternative story? In 2009, a video entitled Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed (hereafter BvE) (See Video 1) was uploaded to YouTube, juxtaposing clips from across the seven series of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the first film of the Twilight series. Twilight is a series of novels written by Stephenie Meyer which was adapted into a successful series of five films between the period of 2008 and 2012. Its vampire-centric romance story has resulted in numerous comparisons to, among others, the cult and popular television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (hereafter Buffy) created by Joss Whedon, which aired from 1997 to 2003. In BvE, which has over three million views to date and reportedly has been translated into thirty different languages, Jonathan McIntosh, the video’s creator, “changes Edward Cullen from a smouldering, sparkly antihero into a self-obsessed stalker who's prone to throwing tantrums. Buffy Summers reacts to him with disdain and dwindling patience, assertively rebuking his every self-indulgence” (Leduc). By editing together clips from two texts seemingly of the same genre and targeting the same demographics, this video affirms an anti-fandom reading of Twilight. Video 1: Buffy vs Edward: Twilight RemixedOn the first viewing of the video, I was struck by how accurately it portrayed my own misgivings about Twilight, and by how I had wished Bella Swan was more like Buffy Summers and been a positive role model for girls and women. The content of the video mash-up—along with fan reactions to it—suggests and perpetuates an anti-fandom reading of Twilight via Buffy, by positioning the latter as a text with higher cultural value, in terms of its influence and representations of female characters. As McIntosh himself clarifies in an interview, “the audience is not supposed to go “Oh, see how TV is stupid?” They’re supposed to go “Oh, see how Buffy was awesome!”” (ikat381). As such, the BvE mash-up can be read, not just as a criticism of popular commercial texts, but also as an anti-fan production. Much work surrounding fan culture extrapolates on fans’ love for a text, but I’d like to propose that mash-ups such as BvE reaffirms anti-fandom readings of derided texts via another that is deemed—and presented—as culturally more valuable. In this essay, BvE will be used as an example of how anti-fandom productions can reinforce the audience’s opinion of a despised text. When BvE first launched, it was circulated widely among Buffy fandom, and the narrative of the mash-up, and its implications were debated rather fiercely on Whedonesque.com [http://whedonesque.com/comments/20883], one of the main sites for Joss Whedon’s fandom. Comparisons between the two texts, despite existing in different mediums (film vs. television), were common among general media—some survey respondents reveal they were persuaded to read the books or watch the first film by its assumed similarities to Buffy— as both feature somewhat similar storylines on the surface: a young, teenaged (human) girl falling in love with a vampire, and were presumably aimed at the same demographics of teenaged and college-aged girls. The similarities seem to end there though, for while Buffy is often hailed as a feminist text, Twilight is dismissed as anti-feminist, down to its apparently rabid and overly-emotional (female) fanbase. As one Buffy fan on Whedonesque clarifies: Buffy was more real than Bella ever thought of being. Buffy was flawed, made mistakes, bad decisions and we never saw her sort out a healthy romantic relationship but she was still a tremendous role model not for just teen girl but teen boys as well. […] Bella's big claim to fame seems to be she didn't sleep with her boyfriend before marriage but that was his choice, not hers. BvE appears to reflect the above comparison, as McIntosh justifies the video as “a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behaviour”—essentially a problem that Buffy, as a vampire slayer and a feminist icon can solve (for the greater good). For the purpose of this paper, I was interested to see if those who are active in fandom in general are aware of the BvE video, and if it informs or reaffirms their anti-fandom views of Twilight. Methodology A short online survey was devised with this in mind and a link to the survey was provided via Twitter (the link was retweeted 27 times), with the explanation that it is on Twilight anti-fandom and the BvE mash-up video. It was further shared on Facebook, by friends and peers. At the same time, I also requested for the link to be posted by the administrators of Whedonesque.com. Despite the posting at Whedonesque, the survey was not particularly aimed at Buffy fans, but rather fans in general who are familiar with both texts. The survey received 419 responses in the span of 24 hours, suggesting that the topic of (Twilight) anti-fandom is one that fans—or anti-fans—are passionately engaged with. Out of the 419 responses, 357 people have seen BvE, and 208 have read the book(s) and/or saw the film(s). The other 211 respondents came into contact with Twilight through paratexts, “semi-textual fragments that surround and position the work” (Gray New 72), such as trailers, word-of-mouth and news outlets. Anti-Fandom, Twilight, and the Buffy vs Edward Mash-Up Fan studies have given us insights into the world of fandom, informing us about the texts that fans love, what fans do with those texts and characters, and how fans interact with one another within the context of fandom. As Henry Jenkins explains: Fan culture finds that utopian dimension within popular culture a site for constructing an alternative culture. Its society is responsive to the needs that draw its members to commercial entertainment, most especially the desire for affiliation, friendship, community (282). Fan studies has obviously progressed from Jenkins’s initial observations as fan scholars subsequently proceed to complicate and augment the field. However, many gaps and silences remain to be filled: Hills (2002) […] argued that fandom is ‘not a thing that can be picked over analytically’ (pp. xi-xii) and separated into neat categories, but is a performative, psychological action that differs according to person, fandom, and generation (Sheffield and Merlo 209). In a 2003 article, Jonathan Gray reflects that in fan scholars’ enthusiasm to present the many interesting facets of fan culture, “reception studies are distorting our understanding of the text, the consumer and the interaction between them” (New Audiences 68). So while there is the friendship, affiliation and sense of community where fans share their mutual affection for their favourite texts and characters, there are also those who engage critically with the texts that they dislike. Gray identifies them as the anti-fans, arguing that these anti-fans are not “against fandom per se, […] but they strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel” (New New Audiences 70). Most anti-fans’ encounter with their hated text will not merely be through the text itself, but also through its surrounding paratexts, such as trailers and press articles. These paratextual pieces inform the anti-fan about the text, as much as the original text itself, and together they add to the formation of the anti-fannish identity: Rather than engaging the text directly, […] anti-fans often respond to a “text” they construct from paratextual fragments such as news coverage or word-of-mouth, reading, watching, and learning all they can about a show, book, or person in order to better understand and criticize the text (and, very often, its fans) (Sheffield and Merlo 209). Media attention directed at the Twilight franchise, as well as the attention Twilight fans receive has made it a popular subject in both fan and anti-fan studies. Dan Haggard, in a 2010 online posting, commented on the fascinating position of Twilight fans in popular culture: The Twilight fan is interesting because of reports (however well substantiated) of a degree of extremism that goes beyond what is acceptable, even when considered from a perspective relative to standard fan obsession. The point here is not so much whether Twilight fans are any more extreme than standard fans, but that there is a perception that they are so. (qtd. in Pinkowitz) Twilight fans are more often than not, described as “rabid” and “frenzied” (Click), particularly by the media. This is, of course, in total opposition to the identity of the fan as effective consumer or productive (free) labourer, which scholars like Baym and Burnett, for example, have observed. The anti-fandom in this case seems to go beyond the original text (both the books and the film franchises), extending to the fans themselves. Pinkowitz explains that the anti-fans she examined resent the success Twilight has amassed as they consider the books to be poorly written and they “strongly dislike the popular belief that the Twilight books are good literature and that they deserve the fanaticism its rabid fans demonstrate”. Some survey respondents share this view, criticising that the “writing is horrible”, the books have “awful prose” and “melodramatic characterisations”. Sheffield and Merlo demonstrate that the “most visible Twilight anti-fan behaviors are those that mock or “snark” about the “rabid” Twilight fans, who they argue, “give other fans a bad name”” (210). However, BvE presents another text with which Twilight can be compared to in the form of Buffy. As one survey respondent explains: Bella is a weak character who lacks agency. She lacks the wit, will-power, and determination that makes Buffy such a fun character. […] She is a huge step back especially compared to Buffy, but also compared to almost any modern heroine. Paul Booth argues that for mash-ups, or remixes, to work, as audiences, we are expected to understand—and identify—the texts that are referenced, even if they may be out of context: “we as audiences must be knowledgeable about both sources, as well as the convergence of them, in order to make sense of the final product”. Survey respondents have commented that the mash-up was “more about pleasing Buffy fans”, and that it was “created with an agenda, by someone who hates Twilight and loves Buffy,” which gives “a biased introduction to Buffy”. On the other hand, others have commented that the mash-up “makes [Twilight] seem better than it actually is”, and that it “reinforced [their] perceptions” of Twilight as a weaker text. Booth also suggests that mash-ups create new understandings of taste, of which I would argue that is reinforced through BvE, which McIntosh describes as a “metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21st century”. In fact, many of the survey respondents share McIntosh’s view, criticising Twilight as an anti-feminist text that, for all its supposed cultural influence, is sending a dangerous message to young girls who are the target demographic of the franchise. As they reflect: It bothers me that so many people (and especially women) love and embrace the story, when at its crux it is about a woman trying to choose between two men. Neither men are particularly good/safe for her, but the book romanticizes the possible violence toward Bella. The idea that Bella is nothing without Edward, that her entire life is defined by this man. She gives up her life—literally—to be with him. It is unhealthy and obsessive. It also implies to women that stalking behaviour like Edward's is romantic rather than illegal. I think what bothers me the most is how Meyers presents an abusive relationship where the old guy (but he's sparkly and pretty, so it's ok) in question stalks the heroine, has her kidnapped, and physically prevents her from seeing whom she wants to see is portrayed as love. In a good way. These testimonials show that fans take a moral stand towards Twilight’s representation of women, specifically Bella Swan. Twilight acts in counterpoint to a text like Buffy, which is critically acclaimed and have been lauded for its feminist representation (the idea that a young, petite girl has the power to fight vampires and other supernatural creatures). The fact that Buffy is a chronological older text makes some fans lament that the girl-power and empowerment that was showcased in the 1990s has now regressed down to the personification of Bella Swan. Gray argues that anti-fandom is also about expectations of quality and value: “of what a text should be like, of what is a waste of media time and space, of what morality or aesthetics texts should adopt, and of what we would like to see others watch or read” (New 73). This notion of taste, and cultural value comes through again as respondents who are fans of Buffy testify: It's not very well-written. I strongly dislike the weak parallels one could draw between the two. Yes Angel and Spike went through a creepy stalking phase with Buffy, and yes for a while there was some romantic triangle action but there was so much more going on. […] My biggest issue is with Bella's characterization. She has flaws and desires but she is basically a whiney, mopey blob. She is a huge step back especially compared to Buffy, but also compared to almost any modern heroine. There is tremendous richness in Buffy—themes are more literate, historically allusive and psychologically deeper than boy-meets-girl, girl submits, boy is tamed. Edward Cullen is white-faced and blank; Spike and Angel are white-faced and shadowed, hollowed, sculpted—occasionally tortured. Twilight invites teen girls to project their desires; Spike and Angel have qualities which are discovered. Buffy the character grows and evolves. Her environment changes as she experiences the world around her. Decisions that she made in high school were re-visited years later, and based on her past experiences, she makes different choices. Bella, however, loses nothing. There's no consequence to her being turned. There's no growth to her character. The final act in the mash-up video, of Buffy slaying Edward can be seen as a re-empowerment for those who do not share the same love for Twilight as its fans do. In the follow-up to his 2003 article that launched the concept of anti-fandom, Gray argues that: Hate or dislike of a text can be just as powerful as can a strong and admiring, affective relationship with a text, and they can produce just as much activity, identification, meaning, and “effects” or serve just as powerfully to unite and sustain a community or subculture (Antifandom 841). Conclusion The video mash-up, in this case, can be read as an anti-fandom reading of Twilight via Buffy, in which the superiority of Buffy as a text is repeatedly reinforced. When asked if the mash-up video would encourage the survey respondents to consider watching Twilight (if they have not before), the respondents’ answers range from a repeated mantra of “No”, to “It makes me want to burn every copy”, to “Not unless it is to mock, or for the purpose of a drinking game”. Not merely resorting to mocking, what McIntosh’s mash-up video has given Twilight anti-fans is yet another paratextual fragment with which to read the text (as in, Edward Cullen is creepy and controlling, therefore he deserves to be slayed, as should have happened if he was in the Buffy universe instead of Twilight). In other words, what I am suggesting here is that anti-fandom can be enforced through the careful framing of a mash-up video, such as that of the Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed mash-up, where the text considered more culturally valuable is used to read and comment on the one considered less valuable. References Baym, Nancy, and Robert Burnett. Amateur Experts: International Fan Labour in Swedish Independent Music. Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008. Booth, Paul. “Mashup as Temporal Amalgam: Time, Taste, and Textuality.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012): n. pag. 3 Apr. 2013 &lt; http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/297/285 &gt;. Click, Melissa. “‘Rabid’, ‘Obsessed’, and ‘Frenzied’: Understanding Twilight Fangirls and the Gendered Politics of Fandom.” Flow 11.4 (2009): n. pag. 18 June 2013 &lt; http://flowtv.org/2009/12/rabid-obsessed-and-frenzied-understanding-twilight-fangirls-and-the-gendered-politics-of-fandom-melissa-click-university-of-missouri/ &gt;. Gray, Jonathan. “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television without Pity and Textual Dislike.” American Behavioral Scientist 48 (2005): 840–858. ———. “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.1 (2003): 64–81. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. ikat381. “Total Recut Interviews Jonathan McIntosh about Buffy vs. Edward.” Total Recut 24 Dec. 2009. 20 July 2013 &lt; http://www.totalrecut.com/permalink.php?perma_id=265 &gt;. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans &amp; Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Leduc, Martin. “The Two-Source Illusion: How Vidding Practices Changed Jonathan McIntosh’s Political Remix Videos.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012): n. pag. 19 July 2013 &lt; http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/379/274 &gt;. McIntosh, Jonathan. “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed.” Rebelliouspixels 20 June 2009. 2 Apr. 2013 &lt; http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/2009/buffy-vs-edward-twilight-remixed &gt;. Pinkowitz, Jacqueline. “‘The Rabid Fans That Take [Twilight] Much Too Seriously’: The Construction and Rejection of Excess in Twilight Antifandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 7 (2011): n. pag. 21 June 2013 &lt; http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/247/253 &gt;. Sheffield, Jessica, and Elyse Merlo. “Biting Back: Twilight Anti-Fandom and the Rhetoric of Superiority.” Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Eds. Melissa Click, Jessica Stevens Aubrey, &amp; Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2010. 207–224.

Introduction&#x0D; «I have never worked in the technocratic exaltation, solving a constructive problem and that’s it. I’ve always tried to interpret the space of human life» (Vittorio Garatti).&#x0D; Vittorio Garatti (Milan, April 6, 1927) is certainly one of the last witnesses of one “heroic” season of Italian architecture. In 1957 he graduated in architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan with a thesis proposing the redesign of a portion of the historic centre of Milan: the area between “piazza della Scala”, “via Broletto”, “via Filodrammatici” and the gardens of the former Olivetti building in via Clerici. These are the years in which Ernesto Nathan Rogers established himself as one of the main personalities of Milanese culture. Garatti endorses the criticism expressed by Rogers to the approval of the Rationalist “language” in favour of an architecture that recovers the implications of the place and of material culture. The social responsibility of architecture and connections between architecture and other forms of artistic expression are the invariants of all the activity of the architect, artist and graphic designer of Garatti. It will be Ernesto Nathan Rogers who will offer him the possibility of experiencing these “contaminations” early: in 1954, together with Giuliano Cesari, Raffaella Crespi, Giampiero Pallavicini and Ferruccio Rezzonico, he designs the preparation of the exhibition on musical instruments at the 10th Milan Triennale. The temporary installations will be a privileged area in which Garatti will continue to experiment and integrate the qualities of artist, graphic designer and architect with each other. Significant examples of this approach are the Art Schools in Cuba 1961-63, the residential complex of Cusano Milanino in 1973, the Attico Cosimo del Fante in 1980, the fittings for the Bubasty shops in 1984, the Camogli residence in 1986, his house atelier in Brera in 1988 and the interiors of the Hotel Gallia in 1989. &#x0D; True architecture generates itself1: an approach that was consolidated over the years of collaboration with Raúl Villanueva in Venezuela and is fulfilled in Cuba in the project of the Art Schools, where Garatti makes use of a plurality of tools that cannot be rigidly confined to the world of architecture. &#x0D; In 1957, in Caracas, he came into contact with Ricardo Porro and Roberto Gottardi. Ricardo Porro, who returned to Cuba in 1960, will be the one to involve Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi in the Escuelas Nacional de Arte project.&#x0D; The three young architects will be the protagonists of a happy season of the architecture of the Revolution, they will be crossed by that “revolutionary” energy that Ricardo Porro has defined as “magical realism”. &#x0D; As Garatti recalls: it was a special moment. We designed the Schools using a method developed in Venezuela. We started from an analysis of the context, understood not only as physical reality. We studied Cuban poets and painters. Wifredo Lam was a great reference. For example, Lezama Lima’s work is clearly recalled in the plan of the School of Ballet. We were pervaded by the spirit of the revolution. &#x0D; The contamination between knowledge and disciplines, the belief that architecture is a “parasitic” discipline are some of the themes at the centre of the conversation that follows, from which a working method that recognizes architecture as a “social transformation” task emerges, more precisely an art with a social purpose. Garatti often cites Porro’s definition of architecture: architecture is the poetic frame within which human life takes place. To Garatti architecture is a self-generating process, and as such it cannot find fulfilment within its disciplinary specificity: the disciplinary autonomy is a contradiction in terms. Architecture cannot be self-referencing, it generates itself precisely because it finds the sense of its social responsibility outside of itself. No concession to trends, to self-referencing, to the “objectification of architecture”, to its spectacularization. Garatti as Eupalino Valery shuns “mute architectures” and instead prefers singing architectures.&#x0D; &#x0D; A Dialogue of Luigi Alini with Vittorio Garatti&#x0D; Luigi Alini. Let’s start with some personal data. &#x0D; Vittorio Garatti. I was born in Milan on April 6, 1927.&#x0D; My friend Emilio Vedova told me that life could be considered as a sequence of encounters with people, places and facts. My sculptor grandfather played an important role in my life. I inherited the ability to perceive the dimensional quality of space, its plasticity, spatial vision from him.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. Your youth training took place in a dramatic phase of history of our country. Living in Milan during the war years must not have been easy. &#x0D; V.G. In October 1942 in Milan there was one of the most tragic bombings that the city has suffered. A bomb exploded in front of the Brera Academy, where the Dalmine offices were located. With a group of boys we went to the rooftops. We saw the city from above, with the roofs partially destroyed. I still carry this image inside me, it is part of that museum of memory that Luciano Semerani often talks about. This image probably resurfaced when I designed the ballet school. The idea of a promenade on the roofs to observe the landscape came from this. &#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. You joined the Faculty of Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic in May 1946-47.&#x0D; V.G. Milan and Italy were like in those years. The impact with the University was not positive, I was disappointed with the quality of the studies.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. You have had an intense relationship with the artists who gravitate around Brera, which you have always considered very important for your training.&#x0D; V.G. In 1948 I met Ilio Negri, a graphic designer. Also at Brera there was a group of artists (Morlotti, Chighine, Dova, Crippa) who frequented the Caffè Brera, known as “Bar della Titta”. Thanks to these visits I had the opportunity to broaden my knowledge.&#x0D; As you know, I maintain that there are life’s appointments and lightning strikes. The release of Dada magazine provided real enlightenment for me: I discovered the work of Kurt Schwitters, Theo Van Doesburg, the value of the image and three-dimensionality. &#x0D; L.A. You collaborated on several projects with Ilio Negri.&#x0D; V.G. In 1955 we created the graphics of the Lagostina brand, which was then also used for the preparation of the exhibition at the “Fiera Campionaria” in Milan.&#x0D; We also worked together for the Lerici steel industry. There was an extraordinary interaction with Ilio.&#x0D; L.A. The cultural influence of Ernesto Nathan Rogers was strong in the years you studied at the Milan Polytechnic. He influenced the cultural debate by establishing himself as one of the main personalities of the Milanese architectural scene through the activity of the BBPR studio but even more so through the direction of Domus (from ‘46 to ‘47) and Casabella Continuità (from ‘53 to ‘65).&#x0D; V.G. When I enrolled at the university he was not yet a full professor and he was very opposed. As you know, he coined the phrase: God created the architect, the devil created the colleague. In some ways it is a phrase that makes me rethink the words of Ernesto Che Guevara: beware of bureaucrats, because they can delay a revolution for 50 years.&#x0D; Rogers was the man of culture and the old “bureaucratic” apparatus feared that his entry into the University would sanction the end of their “domain”.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. In 1954, together with Giuliano Cesari, Raffella Crespi, Giampiero Pallavicini and Ferruccio Rezzonico, all graduating students of the Milan Polytechnic, you designed the staging of the exhibition on musical instruments at the 10th Milan Triennale. &#x0D; V.G. The project for the Exhibition of Musical Instruments at the Milan Triennale was commissioned by Rogers, with whom I subsequently collaborated for the preparation of the graphic part of the Castello Sforzesco Museum, together with Ilio Negri. We were given a very small budget for this project. We decided to prepare a sequence of horizontal planes hanging in a void. These tops also acted as spacers, preventing people from touching the tools. Among those exhibited there were some very valuable ones. We designed slender structures to be covered with rice paper. The solution pleased Rogers very much, who underlined the dialogue that was generated between the exhibited object and the display system.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. You graduated on March 14, 1957.&#x0D; V.G. The project theme that I developed for the thesis was the reconstruction of Piazza della Scala. While all the other classmates were doing “lecorbusierani” projects without paying much attention to the context, for my part I worked trying to have a vision of the city. I tried to bring out the specificities of that place with a vision that Ernesto Nathan Rogers had brought me to. &#x0D; I then found this vision of the city in the work of Giuseppe De Finetti. I tried to re-propose a vision of space and its “atmospheres”, a theme that Alberto Savinio also refers to in Listen to your heart city, from 1944.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. How was your work received by the thesis commission? &#x0D; V.G. It was judged too “formal” by Emiliano Gandolfi, but Piero Portaluppi did not express himself positively either. The project did not please. Also consider the cultural climate of the University of those years, everyone followed the international style of the CIAM. &#x0D; I was not very satisfied with the evaluation expressed by the commissioners, they said that the project was “Piranesian”, too baroque. The critique of culture rationalist was not appreciated. Only at IUAV was there any great cultural ferment thanks to Bruno Zevi. &#x0D; L.A. After graduation, you left for Venezuela.&#x0D; V.G. With my wife Wanda, in 1957 I joined my parents in Caracas. In Venezuela I got in touch with Paolo Gasparini, an extraordinary Italian photographer, Ricardo Porro and Roberto Gottardi, who came from Venice and had worked in Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ studio in Milan. Ricardo Porro worked in the office of Carlos Raúl Villanueva. The Cuban writer and literary critic Alejo Carpentier also lived in Caracas at that time.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. Carlos Raul Villanueva was one of the protagonists of Venezuelan architecture. His critical position in relation to the Modern Movement and the belief that it was necessary to find an “adaptation” to the specificities of local traditions, the characteristics of the places and the Venezuelan environment, I believe, marked your subsequent Cuban experience with the creative recovery of some elements of traditional architecture such as the portico, the patio, but also the use of traditional materials and technologies that you have masterfully reinterpreted. I think we can also add to these “themes” the connections between architecture and plastic arts. You also become a professor of Architectural Design at the Escuela de Arquitectura of the Central University of Caracas.&#x0D; V.G. On this academic experience I will tell you a statement by Porro that struck me very much: The important thing was not what I knew, I did not have sufficient knowledge and experience. What I could pass on to the students was above all a passion. In two years of teaching I was able to deepen, understand things better and understand how to pass them on to students. The Faculty of Architecture had recently been established and this I believe contributed to fuel the great enthusiasm that emerges from the words by Porro. Porro favoured mine and Gottardi’s entry as teachers. Keep in mind that in those years Villanueva was one of the most influential Venezuelan intellectuals and had played a leading role in the transformation of the University. Villanueva was very attentive to the involvement of art in architecture, just think of the magnificent project for the Universidad Central in Caracas, where he worked together with artists such as the sculptor Calder. &#x0D; I had recently graduated and found myself catapulted into academic activity. It was a strange feeling for a young architect who graduated with a minimum grade. At the University I was entrusted with the Architectural Design course. The relationships with the context, the recovery of some elements of tradition were at the centre of the interests developed with the students. Among these students I got to know the one who in the future became my chosen “brother”: Sergio Baroni. Together we designed all the services for the 23rd district that Carlos Raúl Villanueva had planned to solve the favelas problem. In these years of Venezuelan frequentation, Porro also opened the doors of Cuba to me. Through Porro I got to know the work of Josè Martì, who claimed: cult para eser libre. I also approached the work of Josè Lezama Lima, in my opinion one of the most interesting Cuban intellectuals, and the painting of Wilfredo Lam.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. In December 1959 the Revolution triumphed in Cuba. Ricardo Porro returned to Cuba in August 1960. You and Gottardi would join him in December and begin teaching at the Facultad de Arcuitectura.&#x0D; Your contribution to the training of young students took place in a moment of radical cultural change within which the task of designing the Schools was also inserted: the “new” architecture had to give concrete answers but also give “shape” to a new model of society.&#x0D; V.G. After the triumph of the Revolution, acts of terrorism began. At that time in the morning, I checked that they hadn’t placed a bomb under my car.&#x0D; Eisenhower was preparing the invasion. Life published an article on preparing for the invasion of the counterrevolutionary brigades. &#x0D; With Eisenhower dead, Kennedy activated the programme by imposing one condition: in conjunction with the invasion, the Cuban people would have to rise up. Shortly before the attempted invasion, the emigration, deemed temporary, of doctors, architects, university teachers etc. began. They were all convinced they would return to “liberated Cuba” a few weeks later. Their motto was: it is impossible for Americans to accept the triumph of the rebel army. As is well known, the Cuban people did not rise up. The revolutionary process continued and had no more obstacles.&#x0D; The fact that the bourgeois class and almost all the professionals had left Cuba put the country in a state of extreme weakness.&#x0D; The sensation was of great transformation taking place, it was evident. In that “revolutionary” push there was nothing celebratory. All available energies were invested in the culture. There were extraordinary initiatives, from the literacy campaign to the founding of international schools of medicine and of cinema. In Cuba it was decided to close schools for a year and to entrust elementary school children with the task of travelling around the country and teaching illiterate adults. In the morning they worked in the fields and in the evening they taught the peasants to read and write. In order to try to block this project, the counter-revolutionaries killed two children in an attempt to scare the population and the families of the literate children. There was a wave of popular indignation and the programme continued.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. Ricardo Porro was commissioned to design the Art Schools. Roberto Gottardi recalls that: «the wife of the Minister of Public Works, Selma Diaz, asked Porro to build the national art schools. The architecture had to be completely new and the schools, in Fidel’s words, the most beautiful in the world. All accomplished in six months. Take it or leave it! [...] it was days of rage and enthusiasm in which all areas of public life was run by an agile and imaginative spirit of warfare»2. You too remembered several times that: that architecture was born from a life experience, it incorporated enthusiasm for life and optimism for the future.&#x0D; V.G. The idea that generated them was to foster the cultural encounter between Africa, Asia and Latin America. A “place” for meeting and exchanging. A place where artists from all over the third world could interact freely. The realisation of the Schools was like receiving a “war assignment”. Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara selected the Country Club as the place to build a large training centre for all of Latin America. They understood that it was important to foster the Latin American union, a theme that Simón Bolivar had previously wanted to pursue. Il Ché and Fidel, returning from the Country Club, along the road leading to the centre of Havana, met Selma Diaz, architect and wife of Osmany Cienfuegos, the Cuban Construction Minister.&#x0D; Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara entrusted Selma Diaz with the task of designing this centre. She replied: I had just graduated, how could I deal with it? Then she adds: Riccardo Porro returned to Cuba with two Italian architects. Just think, three young architects without much experience catapulted into an assignment of this size. The choice of the place where to build the schools was a happy intuition of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. How did the confrontation develop?&#x0D; V.G. We had total freedom, but we had to respond to a functional programme defined with the heads of the schools. Five directors were appointed, one for each school. We initially thought of a citadel. A proposal that did not find acceptance among the Directors, who suggest thinking of five autonomous schools. We therefore decide to place the schools on the edge of the large park and to reuse all the pre-existing buildings. We imagined schools as “stations” to cross. The aim was to promote integration with the environment in which they were “immersed”. Schools are not closed spaces. We established, for example, that there would be no doors: when “everything was ours” there could not be a public and a private space, only the living space existed.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. Ricardo Porro recalled: I organised our study in the chapel of the former residence of the Serrà family in Vadado. It was a wonderful place [...]. A series of young people from the school of architecture came to help us […]. Working in that atmosphere, all night and all day was a poetic experience (Loomis , 1999).&#x0D; V.G. We felt like Renaissance architects. We walked around the park and discussed where to locate the schools. Imagine three young people discussing with total, unthinkable freedom.&#x0D; We decided that each of us would deal with one or more schools, within a global vision that was born from the comparison. I chose the Ballet School. Ivan Espin had to design the music school but in the end I did it because Ivan had health problems. Porro decided to take care of the School of Plastic Arts to support his nature as a sculptor. Gottardi had problems with the actors and directors, who could not produce a shared functional programme, which with the dancers was quite simple to produce. The reasons that led us to choose the different project themes were very simple and uncomplicated, as were those for identifying the areas. I liked hidden lands, I was interested in developing a building “embedded” in the ground. Ricardo, on the other hand, chose a hill on which arrange the school of Modern Art. Each of us chose the site almost instinctively. For the Classical Dance School, the functional programme that was provided to me was very meagre: a library, a deanery, an infirmary, three ballet classrooms, theoretical classrooms and one of choreography.&#x0D; We went to see the dancers while they were training and dancing with Porro. The perception was immediate that we had to think of concave and convex spaces that would welcome their movements in space. For a more organic integration with the landscape and to accommodate the orography of the area, we also decided to place the buildings in a “peripheral” position with respect to the park, a choice that allowed us not to alter the nature of the park too much but also to limit the distances to be covered from schools to homes. Selma Diaz added others to the first indications: remember that we have no iron, we have little of everything, but we have many bricks. These were the indications that came to us from the Ministry of Construction. We were also asked to design some large spaces, such as gyms. Consequently, we found ourselves faced with the need to cover large spans without being able to resort to an extensive use of reinforced concrete or wood.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. How was the comparison between you designers?&#x0D; V.G. The exchange of ideas was constant, the experiences flowed naturally from one work group to another, but each operated in total autonomy. Each design group had 5-6 students in it. In my case I was lucky enough to have Josè Mosquera among my collaborators, a brilliant modest student, a true revolutionary. &#x0D; The offices where we worked on the project were organised in the Club, which became our “headquarters”. We worked all night and in the morning we went to the construction site. &#x0D; For the solution of logistical problems and the management of the building site of the Ballet School, I was entrusted with an extraordinary bricklayer, a Maestro de Obra named Bacallao. During one of the meetings that took place daily at the construction site, Bacallao told me that in Batista’s time the architects arrived in the morning at the workplace all dressed in white and, keeping away from the construction site to avoid getting dusty, they transferred orders on what to do. In this description by we marvelled at the fact that we were in the construction site together with him to face and discuss how to solve the different problems.&#x0D; In this construction site the carpenters did an extraordinary job, they had considerable experience. Bacallao was fantastic, he could read the drawings and he managed the construction site in an impeccable way. We faced and solved problems and needs that the yard inevitably posed on a daily basis. One morning, for example, arriving at the construction site, I realised the impact that the building would have as a result of its total mono-materiality. I was “scared” by this effect. My eye fell on an old bathtub, inside which there were pieces of 10x10 tiles, then I said to Bacallao: we will cover the wedges between the ribs of the bovedas covering the Ballet and Choreography Theatre classrooms with the tiles. The yard also lived on decisions made directly on site. &#x0D; Also keep in mind that the mason teams assigned to each construction site were independent. However the experience between the groups of masons engaged in the different activities circulated, flowed. There was a constant confrontation. For the workers the involvement was total, they were building for their children. A worker who told me: I’m building the school where my son will come to study. Ricardo Porro was responsible for the whole project, he was a very cultured man. &#x0D; In the start-up phase of the project he took us to Trinidad, the old Spanish capital. He wanted to show us the roots of Cuban architectural culture. On this journey I was struck by the solution of fan windows, by the use of verandas, all passive devices which were entrusted with the control and optimisation of the comfort of the rooms. &#x0D; Porro accompanied us to those places precisely because he wanted to put the value of tradition at the centre of the discussion, he immersed us in colonial culture.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. It is to that “mechanism” of self-generation of the project that you have referred to on several occasions?&#x0D; V.G. Yes, just that. When I design, I certainly draw from that stratified “grammar of memory”, to quote Luciano Semerani, which lives within me. The project generates itself, is born and then begins to live a life of its own. A writer traces the profile and character of his characters, who gradually come to life with a life of their own. In the same way the creative process in architecture is self-generated. &#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. Some problems were solved directly on site, dialoguing with the workers.&#x0D; V.G. He went just like that. Many decisions were made on site as construction progressed. Design and construction proceeded contextually. The dialogue with the workers was fundamental.&#x0D; The creative act was self-generated and lived a life of its own, we did nothing but “accompany” a process. The construction site had a speed of execution that required the same planning speed. In the evening we worked to solve problems that the construction site posed. The drawings “aged” rapidly with respect to the speed of decisions and the progress of the work. The incredible thing about this experience is that three architects with different backgrounds come to a “unitary” project. All this was possible because we used the same materials, the same construction technique, but even more so because there was a similar interpretation of the place and its possibilities.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. The project of the Music School also included the construction of 96 cubicles, individual study rooms, a theatre for symphonic music and one for chamber music and Italian opera. You “articulated” the 96 cubicles along a 360-metre-long path that unfolds in the landscape providing a “dynamic” view to those who cross it. A choice consistent with the vision of the School as an open place integrated with the environment.&#x0D; V.G. The “Gusano” is a volume that follows the orography of the terrain. It was a common sense choice. By following the level lines I avoided digging and of course I quickly realized what was needed by distributing the volumes horizontally.&#x0D; Disarticulation allows the changing vision of the landscape, which changes continuously according to the movement of the user. The movements do not take place along an axis, they follow a sinuous route, a connecting path between trees and nature. The cubicles lined up along the Gusano are individual study rooms above which there are the collective test rooms. On the back of the Gusano, in the highest part of the land, I placed the theatre for symphonic music, the one for chamber music, the library, the conference rooms, the choir and administration.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. In 1962 the construction site stopped.&#x0D; V.G. In 1962 Cuba fell into a serious political and economic crisis, which is what caused the slowdown and then the abandonment of the school site. Cuba was at “war” and the country’s resources were directed towards other needs. In this affair, the architect Quintana, one of the most powerful officials in Cuba, who had always expressed his opposition to the project, contributed to the decision to suspend the construction of the schools. &#x0D; Here is an extract from a writing by Sergio Baroni, which I consider clarifying: «The denial of the Art Schools represented the consolidation of the new Cuban technocratic regime. The designers were accused of aristocracy and individualism and the rest of the technicians who collaborated on the project were transferred to other positions by the Ministry of Construction [...]. It was a serious mistake which one realises now, when it became evident that, with the Schools, a process of renewal of Cuban architecture was interrupted, which, with difficulty, had advanced from the years preceding the revolution and which they had extraordinarily accelerated and anchored to the new social project. On the other hand, and understandably, the adoption of easy pseudo-rationalist procedures prevailed to deal with the enormous demand for projects and constructions with the minimum of resources» (Baroni 1992).&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. You also experienced dramatic moments in Cuba. I’m referring in particular to the insane accusation of being a CIA spy and your arrest.&#x0D; V.G. I wasn’t the only one arrested. The first was Jean Pierre Garnier, who remained in prison for seven days on charges of espionage. This was not a crazy accusation but one of the CIA’s plans to scare foreign technicians into leaving Cuba. Six months after Garnier, it was Heberto Padilla’s turn, an intellectual, who remained in prison for 15 days. After 6 months, it was my turn. I was arrested while leaving the Ministry of Construction, inside the bag I had the plans of the port. I told Corrieri, Baroni and Wanda not to notify the Italian Embassy, everything would be cleared up.&#x0D; &#x0D; L.A. Dear Vittorio, I thank you for the willingness and generosity with which you shared your human and professional experience.&#x0D; I am sure that many young students will find your “story” of great interest.&#x0D; V.G. At the end of our dialogue, I would like to remember my teacher: Ernesto Nathan Rogers. I’ll tell you an anecdote: in 1956 I was working on the graphics for the Castello Sforzesco Museum set up by the BBPR. Leaving the museum with Rogers, in the Rocchetta courtyard the master stopped and gives me a questioning look. Looking at the Filarete tower, he told me: we have the task of designing a skyscraper in the centre. Usually skyscrapers going up they shrink. Instead this tower has a protruding crown, maybe we too could finish our skyscraper so what do you think? I replied: beautiful! Later I thought that what Rogers evoked was a distinctive feature of our city. The characters of the cities and the masters who have consolidated them are to be respected. If there is no awareness of dialectical continuity, the city loses and gets lost. It is necessary to reconstruct the figure of the architect artist who has full awareness of his role in society.&#x0D; The work of architecture cannot be the result of a pure stylistic and functional choice, it must be the result of a method that takes various and multiple factors into analysis. In Cuba, for example, the musical tradition, the painting of Wilfredo Lam, whose pictorial lines are recognisable in the floor plan of the Ballet School, the literature of Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier and above all the Cuban Revolution were fundamental. We theorised this “total” method together with Ricardo Porro, remembering the lecture by Ernesto Nathan Rogers.

Parity between the sexes, harmony between the religions, balance between the cultural differences: these principles all hinge upon the idealistic concept of all things in our human society being equal. In this issue of M/C Journal the notion of ‘equal’ is reviewed and discussed in terms of both its discourse and its application in real life. Beyond the concept of equal itself, uniting each author’s contribution is acknowledgement of the competing objectives which can promote bias and prejudice. Indeed, it is that prejudice, concomitant to the absence of equal treatment by and for all peoples, which is always of concern for the pursuit of social justice. Although it has been reduced to a brand-name of low calorie sugar substitute in the Australian supermarket and cafe set, the philosophical values and objectives behind the concept of equal underpin some of the most highly prized and esteemed ideals of western liberal democracy and its ideas on justice. To be equal in the modern sense means to be empowered, to enjoy the same entitlements as others and to have the same rights. At the same time, the privileges associated with being equal also come with responsibilities and it these that we continue to struggle with in our supposed enlightened age. The ideals we associate with equal are far from new, since they have informed ideas about citizenship and justice at least from the times of Ancient Greece and perhaps more problematically, the Principate period of the Roman Empire. It was out of the Principate that the notion primus inter pares (‘first among equals’) was implemented under Augustus in an effort to reconcile his role as Emperor within the Republic of Rome. This oxymoron highlights how very early in the history of Western thought inevitable compromises arose between the pursuit of equal treatment and its realisation. After all, Rome is as renowned for its Empire and Senate as it is for the way lions were fed Christians for entertainment. In the modern and postmodern world, the values around the concept of equal have become synonymous with the issue of equality, equal being a kind of applied action that has mobilised and enacted its ideals. With equality we are able to see more clearly the dialectic challenging the thesis of equal, the antitheses of unequal, and inequality. What these antitheses of equal accentuate is that anything to do with equality entails struggle and hard won gains. In culture, as in nature, things are rarely equal from the outset. As Richard Dawkins outlined in The Selfish Gene, “sperms and eggs … contribute equal number of genes, but eggs contribute far more in the way of food reserves … . Female exploitation begins here” (153). Disparities that promote certain advantages and disadvantages seem hard-wired into our chemistry, biology and subsequent natural and cultural environments. So to strive for the values around an ideal of equal means overcoming some major biological and social determinants. In other words, equality is not a pursuit for the uncommitted. Disparity, injustice, disempowerment, subjugations, winners and losers, victors and victims, oppressors and oppressed: these are the polarities that have been the hallmarks of human civilization. Traditionally, societies are slow to recognise contemporary contradictions and discriminations that deny the ideals and values that would otherwise promote a basis of equality. Given the right institutional apparatus, appropriate cultural logic and individual rationales, that which is unequal and unjust is easily absorbed and subscribed to by the most ardent defender of liberty and equality. Yet we do not have to search far afield in either time or geography to find evidence of institutionalised cultural barbarity that was predicated on logics of inequality. In the post-renaissance West, slavery is the most prominent example of a system that was highly rationalised, institutionalised, adhered to, and supported and exploited by none other than the children of the Enlightenment. The man who happened to be the principle author of one of the most renowned and influential documents ever written, the Declaration of Independence (1776), which proclaimed, “all men are created equal”, was Thomas Jefferson. He also owned 200 slaves. In the accompanying Constitution of the United States, twelve other amendments managed to take precedence over the abolition of slavery, meaning America was far from the ‘Land of the Free’ until 1865. Equal treatment of people in the modern world still requires lengthy and arduous battle. Equal rights and equal status continues to only come about after enormous sacrifices followed by relentless and incremental processes of jurisprudence. One of the most protracted struggles for equal standing throughout history and which has accompanied industrial modernity is, of course, that of class struggle. As a mass movement it represents one of the most sustained challenges to the many barriers preventing the distribution of basic universal human rights amongst the global population. Representing an epic movement of colossal proportions, the struggle for class equality, begun in the fiery cauldron of the 19th century and the industrial revolution, continued to define much of the twentieth century and has left a legacy of emancipation perhaps unrivalled on scale by any other movement at any other time in history. Overcoming capitalism’s inherent powers of oppression, the multitude of rights delivered by class struggle to once voiceless and downtrodden masses, including humane working conditions, fair wages and the distribution of wealth based on ideals of equal shares, represent the core of some of its many gains. But if anyone thought the central issues around class struggle and workers rights has been reconciled, particularly in Australia, one need only look back at the 2007 Federal election. The backlash against the Howard Government’s industrial relations legislation, branded ‘Work Choices’, should serve as a potent reminder of what the community deems fair and equitable when it comes to labor relations even amidst new economy rhetoric. Despite the epic scale and the enormous depth and breadth of class struggle across the twentieth century, in the West, the fight began to be overtaken both in profile and energy by the urgencies in equality addressed through the civil rights movement regarding race and feminism. In the 1960s the civil rights and women’s liberation movements pitted their numbers against the great bulwarks of white, male, institutional power that had up until then normalised and naturalised discrimination. Unlike class struggle, these movements rarely pursued outright revolution with its attendant social and political upheavals, and subsequent disappointments and failures. Like class struggle, however, the civil rights and feminist movements come out of a long history of slow and methodical resistance in the face of explicit suppression and willful neglect. These activists have been chipping away patiently at the monolithic racial and sexist hegemony ever since. The enormous achievements and progress made by both movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s represent a series of climaxes that came from a steady progression of resolute determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. As the class, feminist and civil rights movements infiltrated the inner workings of Western democracies in the latter half of the twentieth century they promoted equal rights through advocacy and legislative and legal frameworks resulting in a transformation of the system from within. The emancipations delivered through these struggles for equal treatment have now gone on to be the near-universal model upon which contemporary equality is both based and sought in the developed and developing world. As the quest for equal status and treatment continues to advance, feminism and civil rights have since been supplanted as radical social movements by the rise of a new identity politics. Gathering momentum in the 1980s, the demand for equal treatment across all racial, sexual and other lines of identity shifted out of a mass movement mode and into one that reflects the demands coming from a more liberalised yet ultimately atomised society. Today, the legal frameworks that support equal treatment and prevents discrimination based on racial and sexual lines are sought by groups and individuals marginalised by the State and often corporate sector through their identification with specific sexual, religious, physical or intellectual attributes. At the same time that equality and rights are being pursued on these individual levels, there is the growing urgency of displaced peoples. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimate globally there are presently 8.4 million refugees and 23.7 million uprooted domestic civilians (5). Fleeing from war, persecution or natural disasters, refugee numbers are sure to grow in a future de-stabilised by Climate Change, natural resource scarcity and food price inflation. The rights and protections of refugees entitled under international frameworks and United Nations guidelines must be respected and even championed by the foreign States they journey to. Future challenges need to address the present imbalance that promotes unjust and unequal treatment of refugees stemming from recent western initiatives like Fortress Europe, offshore holding sites like Naru and Christmas Island and the entire detention centre framework. The dissemination and continued fight for equal rights amongst individuals across so many boundaries has no real precedent in human history and represents one of the greatest challenges and potential benefits of the new millennium. At the same time Globalisation and Climate Change have rewritten the rule book in terms of what is at stake across human society and now, probably for the first time in humanity’s history, the Earth’s biosphere at large. In an age where equal measures and equal shares comes in the form of an environmental carbon footprint, more than ever we need solutions that address global inequities and can deliver just and sustainable equal outcomes. The choice is a stark one; a universal, sustainable and green future, where less equals more; or an unsustainable one where more is more but where Earth ends up equaling desolate Mars. While we seek a pathway to a sustainable future, developed nations will have to reconcile a period where things are asymmetrical and positively unequal. The developed world has to carry the heavy and expensive burden required to reduce CO2 emissions while making the necessary sacrifices to stop the equation where one Westerner equals five Indians when it comes to the consumption of natural resources. In an effort to assist and maintain the momentum that has been gained in the quest for equal rights and equal treatment for all, this issue of M/C Journal puts the ideal of ‘equal’ up for scrutiny and discussion. Although there are unquestioned basic principles that have gone beyond debate with regards to ideas around equal, problematic currents within the discourses surrounding concepts based on equality, equivalence and the principles that come out of things being equal remain. Critiquing the notion of equal also means identifying areas where seeking certain equivalences are not necessarily in the public interest. Our feature article examines the challenge of finding an equal footing for Australians of different faiths. Following their paper on the right to free speech published recently in the ‘citizen’ issue of M/C Journal, Anne Aly and Lelia Green discuss the equal treatment of religious belief in secular Australia by identifying the disparities that undermine ideals of religious pluralism. In their essay entitled “Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege”, they identify one of the central problems facing Islamic belief systems is Western secularism’s categorisation of religious belief as private practice. While Christian based faiths have been able to negotiate the bifurcation between public life and private faith, compartmentalising religious beliefs in this manner can run contrary to Islamic practice. The authors discuss how the separation of Church and State aspires to see all religions ignored equally, but support for a moderate Islam that sees it divorced from the public sphere is secularism’s way of constructing a less than equal Islam. Debra Mayrhofer analyses the unequal treatment received by young males in mainstream media representations in her paper entitled “Mad about the Boy”. By examining TV, radio and newspaper coverage of an ‘out-of-control teenage party’ in suburban Melbourne, Mayrhofer discusses the media’s treatment of the 16-year-old boy deemed to be at the centre of it all. Not only do the many reports evidence non-compliance with the media industry’s own code of ethics but Mayrhofer argues they represent examples of blatant exploitation of the boy. As this issue of M/C Journal goes online, news is now circulating about the boy’s forthcoming appearance in the Big Brother house and the release of a cover of the Beastie Boys’ 1986 hit “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” (see News.com.au). Media reportage of this calibre, noticeable for occurring beyond the confines of tabloid outlets, is seen to perpetuate myths associated with teenage males and inciting moral panics around the behaviour and attitudes expressed by adolescent male youth.Ligia Toutant charts the contentious borders between high, low and popular culture in her paper “Can Stage Directors Make Opera and Popular Culture ‘Equal’?” Referring to recent developments in the staging of opera, Toutant discusses the impacts of phenomena like broadcasts and simulcasts of opera and contemporary settings over period settings, as well as the role played by ticket prices and the introduction of stage directors who have been drawn from film and television. Issues of equal access to high and popular culture are explored by Toutant through the paradox that sees directors of popular feature films that can cost around US$72M with ticket prices under US$10 given the task of directing a US$2M opera with ticket prices that can range upward of US$200. Much has been written about newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australians whereas Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson’s Apology has been somewhat overlooked. Brooke Collins-Gearing redresses this imbalance with her paper entitled “Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal: Some Are More Equal than ‘Others.’” Collins-Gearing responds to Nelson’s speech from the stance of an Indigenous woman and criticises Nelson for ignoring Aboriginal concepts of time and perpetuating the attitudes and discourses that led to the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families in the first place. Less media related and more science oriented is John Paull’s discussion on the implications behind the concept of ‘Substantial Equivalence’ being applied to genetically modified organisms (GMO) in “Beyond Equal: From Same But Different to the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence”. Embraced by manufacturers of genetically modified foods, the principle of substantial equivalence is argued by Paull to provide the bioengineering industry with a best of both worlds scenario. On the one hand, being treated the ‘same’ as elements from unmodified foods GMO products escape the rigours of safety testing and labelling that differentiates them from unmodified foods. On the other hand, by also being defined as ‘different’ they enjoy patent protection laws and are free to pursue monopoly rights on specific foods and technologies. It is easy to envisage an environment arising in which the consumer runs the risk of eating untested foodstuffs while the corporations that have ‘invented’ these new life forms effectively prevent competition in the marketplace. This issue of M/C Journal has been a pleasure to compile. We believe the contributions are remarkable for the broad range of issues they cover and for their great timeliness, dealing as they do with recent events that are still fresh, we hope, in the reader’s mind. We also hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as we enjoyed working with their authors and encourage you to click on the ‘Respond to this Article’ function next to each paper’s heading, aware that there is the possibility for your opinions to gain equal footing with those of the contributors if your response is published. References Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976.News.com.au. “Oh, Brother, So It’s Confirmed – Corey Set for House.” 1 May 2008. 3 May 2008 &lt; http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,26278,23627561-10229,00.html &gt;.UNHCR – The UN Refugee Agency. The World’s Stateless People. 2006. 2 May 2008 &lt; http://www.unhcr.org/basics/BASICS/452611862.pdf &gt;.

The technical apparatus is, then, being made at home with the rest of our world. And that's a thing that's routinely being done, and it's the source of the failure of technocratic dreams that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine, the world will be transformed. Where what happens is that the object is made at home in the world that has whatever organisation it already has. -- Harvey Sacks (Lectures on Conversation Vol. 2., 548-9) Chatting, or having a conversation, has long been a favourite activity for people. It seemed so ordinary, if not to say trivial, that it has for almost equally long not been studied in any dedicated way. It was only when Harvey Sacks and his early collaborators started using the tape recorder to study telephone conversations that 'conversation' as a topic has become established (cf. Sacks, Lectures Vol. 1). Inspired by Harold Garfinkel, the perspective chosen was a procedural one: they wanted to analyse how conversations are organised on the spot. As Sacks once said: The gross aim of the work I am doing is to see how finely the details of actual, naturally occurring conversation can be subjected to analysis that will yield the technology of conversation. (Sacks, "On Doing 'Being Ordinary'" 411) Later, Sacks also started using data from audio-recorded face-to-face encounters. Most of the phenomena that the research on telephone conversation unearthed could also be found in face-to-face data. Whether something was lost by relying on just audio materials was not clear at the beginning. But with video-based research, as initiated by Charles Goodwin in the 1970s, one was later able to demonstrate that visual exchanges did play an essential role the actual organisation of face-to-face conduct. When using telephone technology, people seemed to rely on a restricted set of the interactional procedures used in face-to-face settings. But new ways to deal with both general and setting-specific problems, such as mutual identification, were also developed. Now that an increasing number of people spend various amounts of their time 'online', chatting with friends or whoever is available, it is time to study Computer-Mediated Conversation (CMC), as we previously studied face-to-face conversation and Telephone (Mediated) Conversation, using the same procedural perspective. We may expect that we will encounter many phenomena that have become familiar to us, and that we will be able to use many of the same concepts. But we will probably also see that people have developed new technical variations of familiar themes as they adapt the technology of conversation to the possibilities and limitations of this new technology of communicative mediation. In so doing, they will make the new technology 'at home in the world that has whatever organisation it already has.' Space does not allow a full discussion of the properties of text-based CMC as instantiated in 'chat' environments, but comparing CMC with face-to-face communication and telephone conversations, it is obvious that the means to convey meanings are severely restricted. In face-to-face encounters, many of the more subtle aspects of the conversation rely on visual and vocal productions and perceptions, which are more or less distinguishable from the 'text' that has been uttered. Following the early work of Gregory Bateson, these aspects are mostly conceived of as a kind of commentary on the core communication available in the 'text', that is as 'meta-communication'. While the 'separation' between 'levels' of communication, that these conceptualisations imply may distort what actually goes on in face-to-face encounters, there is no doubt that telephone conversations, in which the visual 'channel' is not available, and text-based CMC, which in addition lacks access to voice qualities, do confront participants with important communicative restrictions. An important aspect of text-based computer-mediated chatting is that it offers users an unprecedented anonymity, and therefore an unprecedented licence for unaccountable action, ranging from bland banality to criminal threat, while passing through all imaginable sexual 'perversities'. One upshot of this is that they can present themselves as belonging to any plausible category they may choose, but they will -- in the chat context -- never be sure whether the other participants 'really' are legitimate members of the categories they claim for themselves. In various other formats for CMC, like MUDs and MOOs, the looseness of the connections between the people who type messages and the identities they project in the chat environment seems often to be accepted as an inescapable fact, which adds to the fascination of participation1. The typists can then be called 'players' and the projected identities 'characters', while the interaction can be seen as a game of role-playing. In general chat environments, as the one I will discuss later, such a game-like quality seems not to be openly admitted, although quite often hinted at. Rather, the participants stick to playing who they claim they are. In my own text, however, I will use 'player' and 'character' to indicate the two faces of participation in computer-mediated, text-based chats. In the following sections, I will discuss the organised ways in which one particular problem that chat-players have is dealt with. That problem can be glossed as: how do people wanting to 'chat' on the Internet find suitable partners for that activity? The solution to that problem lies in the explicit naming or implicit suggestion of various kinds of social categories, like 'age', 'sex' and 'location'. Chat players very often initiate a chat with a question like: "hi, a/s/l please?", which asks the other party to self-identify in those terms, as, for instance "frits/m/amsterdam", if that fits the character the player wants to project. But, as I will explain, categorisation plays its role both earlier and later in the chat process. 'Membership Categorisation' in Finding Chat Partners The following exploration is, then, an exercise in Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA; Hester &amp; Eglin) as based on the ideas developed by Harvey Sacks in the 1960s (Sacks, "An Initial Investigation", "On the Analyzability of Stories", Lectures on Conversation Vol. 1). An immense part of the mundane knowledge that people use in living their everyday lives is organised in terms of categories that label members of some population as being of certain types. These categories are organised in sets, called Membership Categorisation Devices (MCDs). The MCD 'sex' (or 'gender'), for instance, consists of the two categories of 'male' and 'female'. Labelling a person as being male or female carries with it an enormous amount of implied properties, so called 'category-predicates', such as expectable or required behaviours, capacities, values, etc. My overall thesis is that people who want to chat rely mostly on categorical predications to find suitable chat partners. Finding a chat partner or chat partners is an interactive process between at least two parties. Their job involves a combination of presenting themselves and reading others' self presentations. For each, the job has a structure like 'find an X who wants a Y as a partner', where X is the desired chat character and Y is the character you yourself want to play. The set of XY-combinations varies in scope, of course, from very wide, say any male/female combination, to rather narrow, as we will see. The partner finding process for chats can be loosely compared with partly similar processes in other environments, such as cocktail parties, poster sessions at conferences, and telephone calls. The openings of telephone calls have been researched extensively by conversation analysts, especially Schegloff ("Sequencing", "Identification", "Routine"; also Hopper). An interesting idea from this work is that a call opening tends to follow a loosely defined pattern, called the canonical model for telephone openings. This involves making contact, mutual identification/recognition, greetings and 'how-are-you?'s, before the actual business of the call is tackled. When logging on to a chat environment, one enters a market of sorts, where the participants are both buyers and sellers: a general sociability-market like a cocktail party. And indeed some writers have characterised chat rooms as 'virtual cocktail parties'. Some participants in a cocktail party may, of course, have quite specific purposes in mind, like wanting to meet a particular kind of person, or a particular individual, or even being open to starting a relationship which may endure for some time after the event. The same is true for CMC chats. The trajectory that the partner-finding process will take is partly pre-structured by the technology used. I have limited my explorations to one particular chat environment (Microsoft Chat). In that program, the actual partner-finding starts even before logging on, as one is required to fill in certain information slots when setting up the program, such as Real Name and Nickname and optional slots like Email Address and Profile. When you click on the Chat Room List icon, you are presented with a list of over a thousand rooms, alphabetically arranged, with the number of participants. You can select a Room and click a button to enter it. When you do, you get a new screen, which has three windows, one that represents the ongoing general conversation, one with a list of the participants' nicks, and a window to type your contributions in. When you right-click on a name in the participant list, you get a number of options, including Get Profile. Get Profile allows you to get more information on that person, if he/she has filled in that part of the form, but often you get "This person is too lazy to create a profile entry." Categorisation in Room Names When you log in to the chat server, you can search either the Chat Room List or the Users List. Let us take the Chat Room List first. Some room names seem to be designed to come early in the alphabetically ordered list, by starting with one or more A's, as in A!!!!!!!!!FriendlyChat, while others rely on certain key words. Scanning over a thousand names for those words by scrolling the list might take a lot of time, but the Chat Room List has a search facility. You can type a string and the list will be shortened to only those with that string in their name. Many room names seem to be designed for being found this way, by containing a number of more or less redundant strings that people might use in a search. Some examples of room names are: A!!!!!!!!!FriendlyChat, Animal&amp;Girls, Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, christian evening post, desert_and_cactus_only, engineer, francais_saloppes, francais_soumise_sub_slave, german_deutsch_rollenspiele, hayatherseyeragmensürüyor, holland_babbel, italia_14_19anni, italia_padania_e_basta, L@Ros@deiVenti, nederlandse_chat, sex_tr, subslavespankbondage, Sweet_Girl_From_Alabama, #BI_LES_FEM_ONLY, #Chinese_Chat, #France, #LesbiansBiTeenGirls_Cam_NetMeeting, #polska_do_flirtowania, #russian_Virtual_Bar?, #tr_%izmir, #ukphonefantasy. A first look at this collection of room names suggests two broad classes of categorisation: first a local/national/cultural/ethnic class, and second one oriented to topics, with a large dose of sexual ones. For the first class, different kinds of indicators are available, such as naming as in Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, and the use of a local language as in hayatherseyeragmensürüyor, or in combination: german_deutsch_rollenspiele. When you enter this type of room, a first function of such categorisations becomes apparent in that non-English categorisations suggest a different language practice. While English is the default language, quite a few people prefer using their own local language. Some rooms even suggest a more restricted area, as in Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, for those who are interested in chatting with people not too far off. This seems a bit paradoxical, as chatting in a world-wide network allows contacts between people who are physically distant, as is often mentioned in chats. Rooms with such local restrictions may be designed, however, to facilitate possible subsequent face-to-face meetings or telephone contacts, as is suggested by names like Fr@nce_P@ris_Rencontre and #ukphonefantasy. The collection of sexually suggestive names is not only large, but also indicative of a large variety of interests, including just (probably heterosexual) sex, male gay sex, female lesbian or bi-sexuality. Some names invoke some more specialized practices like BDSM, and a collection of other 'perversities', as in names like 'francais_soumcateise_sub_slave', 'subslavespankbondage', 'golden_shower' or 'family_secrets'. But quite often sexual interest are only revealed in subsequent stages of contact. Non-sexual interests are, of course, also apparent, including religious, professional, political or commercial ones, as in 'christian evening post', or 'culturecrossing', 'holland_paranormaal', 'jesussaves', 'Pokemon_Chat', 'francais_informatique', and '#Russian_Philosophy_2918'. Categorisation through Nicknames Having selected a room, your next step is to see who is there. As chatting ultimately concerns exchanges between (virtual) persons, it is no surprise that nicknames are used as concise 'labels' to announce who is available on the chat network or in a particular room. Consider some examples: ^P0371G , amanda14, anneke, banana81, Dream_Girl, emma69, ericdraven, latex_bi_tch1 , Leeroy, LuCho1, Mary15, Miguelo, SomeFun, Steffi, teaser. Some of these are rather opaque, at least at first, while others seem quite ordinary. Anneke, for instance, is an ordinary Dutch name for girls. So, by using this nick name, a person at the same time categorises herself in two Membership Categorisation Devices: gender: 'female' and language: 'Dutch'. When using this type of nick, you will quite often be addressed in Dutch, for instance with the typically Dutch chat-greeting "hoi" and/or by a question like "ben jij Nederlandse?" ("are you Dutch?" -- female form). This question asks you to categorise yourself, using the nationality device 'Dutch/Belgian', within the language category 'speaker of Dutch'. Many other first names like 'amanda' and 'emma', do not have such a language specificity and so do not 'project' a specific European language/nationality as 'anneke' does. Some French names, like 'nathalie' are a bit ambiguous in that respect, as they are used in quite a number of other language communities, so you may get a more open question like "bonjour, tu parle francais?" ("hi, do you speak French?"). A name like 'Miguelo' suggests a roman language, of course, while 'LuCho1' or 'Konusmaz' indicate non-European languages (here Chinese and Turkish, respectively). Quite often, a first name nick also carries an attached number, as in 'Mary15'. One reason for such attachments is that a nick has to be unique, so if you join the channel with a nick like 'Mary', there will mostly be another who has already claimed that particular name. An error message will appear suggesting that you take another nick. The easiest solution, then, is to add an 'identifying detail', like a number. Technically, any number, letter or other character will do, so you can take Mary1, or Mary~, or Mary_m. Quite often, numbers are used in accord with the nick's age, as is probably the case in our examples 'Mary15' and 'amanda14', but not in 'emma69', which suggests an 'activity preference' rather than an age category. Some of the other nicks in our examples suggest other aspects, claims or interests, as in Dream_Girl, latex_bi_tch1, SomeFun, or teaser. Other examples are: 'machomadness', 'daddyishere', 'LadySusan28', 'maleslave', 'curieuse33', 'patrickcam', or 'YOUNG_GAY_BOY'. More elaborate information about a character can sometimes be collected from his or her profile, but for reasons of space, I will not discuss its use here. This paper's interest is not only in finding out which categories and MCDs are actually used, but also how they are used, what kind of function they can be seen to have. How do chat participants organise their way to 'the anchor point' (Schegloff, "Routine"), at which they start their actual chat 'business'? For the chatting environment that I have observed, there seems to be two major purposes, one may be called social, i.e. 'just chatting', as under the rubric 'friendly chat', and the other is sexual. These purposes may be mixed, of course, in that the first may lead to the second, or the second accompanied by the first. Apart from those two major purposes, a number of others can be inferred from the room titles, including the discussion of political, religious, and technical topics. Sexual chats can take various forms, most prominently 'pic trading' and 'cybersex'. As becomes clear from research by Don Slater, an enormous 'market' for 'pic trading' has emerged, with a quite explicit normative structure of 'fair trading', i.e. if one receives something, one should reciprocate in kind. When one is in an appropriate room, and especially if one plays a female character, other participants quite often try to initiate pic trading. This can have the form of sending a pic, without any verbal exchange, possibly followed by a request like 'send also'. But you may also get a verbal request first, like "do you have a (self) pic?" If you reply in a negative way, you often do not get any further reaction, or just "ok." A 'pic request' can also be preceded by some verbal exchanges; social, sexual or both. That question -- "have a pic?" or "wanna trade" -- can then be considered the real starting point for that particular encounter, or it can be part of a process of getting to know each other: "can i c u?" The second form of sexual chats involves cyber sex. This may be characterised as interactionally improvised pornography, the exchange of sexually explicit messages enacting a sexual fantasy or a shared masturbation session. There is a repertoire of opening moves for these kinds of games, including "wanna cyber?", "are you alone?" and "what are you wearing now?" Functions of Categorisations Categorisations in room names, nicks and profiles has two major functions: guiding the selection of suitable chat partners and suggesting topics. Location information has quite diverse implications in different contexts, e.g. linguistic, cultural, national and geographical. Language is a primordial parameter in any text-based activity, and chatting offers numerous illustrations for this. Cultural implications seem to be more diffuse, but probably important for some (classes of?) participants. Nationality is important in various ways, for instance as an 'identity anchor'. So when you use a typically Dutch nick, like 'frits' or 'anneke', you may get first questions asking whether you are from the Netherlands or from Belgium and subsequently from which region or town. This may be important for indicating reachability, either in person or over the phone. Location information can also be used as topic opener. So when you mention that you live in Amsterdam, you often get positive remarks about the city, like "I visited Amsterdam last June and I liked it very much", or "I would die to live there" (sic) from a pot-smoking U.S. student. After language, age and gender seem to be the most important points in exploring mutual suitability. When possible partners differ in age or gender category, this quite often leads to questions like "Am I not too old/young for you?" Of course, age and gender are basic parameters for sexual selection, as people differ in their range of sexual preferences along the lines of these categories, i.e. same sex or opposite sex, and roughly the same age or older/younger age. Such preferences intersect with straight or kinky ones, of which a large variety can be found. Many rooms are organised around one or another combination, as announced in names like '#LesbiansBiTeenGirls_Cam_NetMeeting', 'Hollandlolita' or '#Lesbian_Domination'. In some of these, the host makes efforts to keep to a more or less strict 'regime', for instance by banning obvious males from a room like '#BI_LES_FEM_ONLY'. In others, an automated welcome message is used to lay out the participation rules. Conclusion To sum up, categorisation plays an essential role in a sorting-out process leading, ideally, to small-group or dyadic suitability. A/S/L, age, sex and location, are obvious starting points, but other differentiations, as in sexual preferences which are themselves partly rooted in age/gender combinations, also play a role. In this process, suitability explorations and topic initiations are intimately related. Chatting, then, is text-based categorisation. New communication technologies are invented with rather limited purposes in mind, but they are quite often adopted by masses of users in unexpected ways. In this process, pre-existing communicational purposes and procedures are adapted to the new environment, but basically there does not seem to be any radical change. Comparing mutual categorisation in face-to-face encounters, telephone calls, and text-based CMC as in online chatting, one can see that similar procedures are being used, although in a more and more explicit manner, as in the question: "a/s/l please?" Footnote These ideas have been inspired by Schaap; for an ethnography focussing on the connection between 'life online' and 'real life', see Markham, 1998. References Hopper, Robert. Telephone Conversation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Hester, Stephen, and Peter Eglin, eds. Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorisation Analysis. Washington, D.C.: UP of America, 1997. Markham, Annette H. Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space. Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: Altamira P, 1998. Sacks, Harvey. "An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology." Studies in Social Interaction. Ed. D. Sudnow. New York: Free P, 1972. 31-74. ---. Lectures on Conversation. Vol. 1. Ed. Gail Jefferson, with an introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. ---. Lectures on Conversation. Vol. 2. Ed. Gail Jefferson, with an introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. ---. "On Doing 'Being Ordinary'." Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Ed. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 413-29. ---. "On the Analyzability of Stories by Children." Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Ed. John. J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes. New York: Rinehart &amp; Winston, 1972. 325-45. Schaap, Frank. "The Words That Took Us There: Not an Ethnography." M.A. Thesis in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, 2000. &lt;http://fragment.nl/thesis/&gt;. Schegloff, Emanuel A. "Identification and Recognition in Telephone Conversation Openings." Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Ed. George Psathas. New York: Irvington, 1979. 23-78. ---. "The Routine as Achievement." Human Studies 9 (1986): 111-52. ---. "Sequencing in Conversational Openings." American Anthropologist 70 (1968): 1075-95. Slater, Don R. "Trading Sexpics on IRC: Embodiment and Authenticity on the Internet." Body and Society 4.4 (1998): 91-117. Ten Have, Paul. Doing Conversation Analysis: A Practical Guide. Introducing Qualitative Methods. London: Sage, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul ten Have. "Computer-Mediated Chat: Ways of Finding Chat Partners." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] &lt;http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php&gt;. Chicago style: Paul ten Have, "Computer-Mediated Chat: Ways of Finding Chat Partners," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), &lt;http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php&gt; ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul ten Have. (2000) Computer-mediated chat: ways of finding chat partners. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). &lt;http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php&gt; ([your date of access]).

Introduction Greater resilience is associated with the ability to self-organise, and with social learning as part of a process of adaptation and transformation (Goldstein 341). This article deals with responses to a crisis in a Norwegian community in the late 1880s, and with some of the many internal conflicts it caused. The crisis and the subsequent conflicts in this particular community, Volda, were caused by a number of processes, driven mostly by external forces and closely linked to the expansion of the capitalist mode of production in rural Norway. But the crisis also reflects a growing nationalism in Norway. In the late 1880s, all these causes seemed to come together in Volda, a small community consisting mostly of independent small farmers and of fishers. The article employs the concept of ‘resilience’ and the theory of resilience in order better to understand how individuals and the community reacted to crisis and conflict in Volda in late 1880, experiences which will cast light on the history of the late 1880s in Volda, and on individuals and communities elsewhere which have also experienced such crises. Theoretical Perspectives Some understandings of social resilience inspired by systems theory and ecology focus on a society’s ability to maintain existing structures. Reducing conflict to promote greater collaboration and resilience, however, may become a reactionary strategy, perpetuating inequalities (Arthur, Friend and Marschke). Instead, the understanding of resilience could be enriched by drawing on ecological perspectives that see conflict as an integral aspect of a diverse ecology in continuous development. In the same vein, Grove has argued that some approaches to anticipatory politics fashion subjects to withstand ‘shocks and responding to adversity through modern institutions such as human rights and the social contract, rather than mobilising against the sources of insecurity’. As an alternative, radical politics of resilience ought to explore political alternatives to the existing order of things. Methodology According to Hall and Lamont, understanding “how individuals, communities, and societies secured their well-being” in the face of the challenges imposed by neoliberalism is a “problem of understanding the bases for social resilience”. This article takes a similarly broad approach to understanding resilience, focusing on a small group of people within a relatively small community to understand how they attempted to secure their well-being in the face of the challenges posed by capitalism and growing nationalism. The main interest, however, is not resilience understood as something that exists or is being produced within this small group, but, rather, how this group produced social imaginaries of the past and the future in cooperation and conflict with other groups in the same community. The research proceeds to analyse the contributions mainly of six members of this small group. It draws on existing literature on the history of the community in the late 1800s and, in particular, biographies of Synnøve Riste (Øyehaug) and Rasmus Steinsvik (Gausemel). In addition, the research builds on original empirical research of approximately 500 articles written by the members of the group in the period from 1887 to 1895 and published in the newspapers Vestmannen, Fedraheimen and 17de Mai; and will try to re-tell a history of key events, referring to a selection of these articles. A Story about Being a Woman in Volda in the Late 1880s This history begins with a letter from Synnøve Riste, a young peasant woman and daughter of a local member of parliament, to Anders Hovden, a friend and theology student. In the letter, Synnøve Riste told her friend about something she just had experienced and had found disturbing (more details in Øyehaug). She first sets her story in the context of an evangelical awakening that was gaining momentum in the community. There was one preacher in particular who seemed to have become very popular among the young women. He had few problems when it comes to women, she wrote, ironically. Curious about the whole thing, Synnøve decided to attend a meeting to see for herself what was going on. The preacher noticed her among the group of young women. He turned his attention towards her and scolded her for her apparent lack of religious fervour. In the letter she explained the feeling of shame that came over her when the preacher singled her out for public criticism. But the feeling of shame soon gave way to anger, she wrote, before adding that the worst part of it was ‘not being able to speak back’; as a woman at a religious meeting she had to hold her tongue. Synnøve Riste was worried about the consequences of the religious awakening. She asked her friend to do something. Could he perhaps write a poem for the weekly newspaper the group had begun to publish only a few months earlier? Anders Hovden duly complied. The poem was published, anonymously, on Wednesday 17 March 1888. Previously, the poem says, women enjoyed the freedom to roam the mountains and valleys. Now, however, a dark mood had come over the young women. ‘Use your mind! Let the madness end! Throw off the blood sucker! And let the world see that you are a woman!’ The puritans appreciated neither the poem nor the newspaper. The newspaper was published by the same group of young men and women who had already organised a private language school for those who wanted to learn to read and write New Norwegian, a ‘new’ language based on the old dialects stemming from the time before Norway lost its independence and became a part of Denmark and then, after 1814, Sweden. At the language school the students read and discussed translations of Karl Marx and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The newspaper quickly grew radical. It reported on the riots following the hanging of the Haymarket Anarchists in Chicago in 1886. It advocated women’s suffrage, agitated against capitalism, argued that peasants and small farmers must learn solidarity from the industrial workers defended a young woman in Oslo who was convicted of killing her newborn baby and published articles from international socialist and anarchist newspapers and magazines. Social Causes for Individual Resilience and Collaborative Resilience Recent literature on developmental psychology link resilience to ‘the availability of close attachments or a supportive and disciplined environment’ (Hall and Lamont 13). Some psychologists have studied how individuals feel empowered or constrained by their environment. Synnøve Riste clearly felt constrained by developments in her social world, but was also resourceful enough to find ways to resist and engage in transformational social action on many levels. According to contemporary testimonies, Synnøve Riste must have been an extraordinary woman (Steinsvik "Synnøve Riste"). She was born Synnøve Aarflot, but later married Per Riste and took his family name. The Aarflot family was relatively well-off and locally influential, although the farms were quite small by European standards. Both her father and her uncle served as members of parliament for the (‘left’) Liberal Party. From a young age she took responsibility for her younger siblings and for the family farm, as her father spent much time in the capital. Her grandfather had been granted the privilege of printing books and newspapers, which meant that she grew up with easy access to current news and debates. She married a man of her own choosing; a man substantially older than herself, but with a reputation for liberal ideas on language, education and social issues. Psychological approaches to resilience consider the influence of cognitive ability, self-perception and emotional regulation, in addition to social networks and community support, as important sources of resilience (Lamont, Welburn and Fleming). Synnøve Riste’s friend and lover, Rasmus Steinsvik, later described her as ‘a mainspring’ of social activity. She did not only rely on family, social networks and community support to resist stigmatisation from the puritans, but she was herself a driving force behind social activities that produced new knowledge and generated communities of support for others. Lamont, Welburn and Fleming underline the importance for social resilience of cultural repertoires and the availability of ‘alternative ways of understanding social reality’ (Lamont, Welburn and Fleming). Many of the social activities Synnøve Riste instigated served as arenas for debate and collaborative activity to develop alternative understandings of the social reality of the community. In 1887, Synnøve Riste had relied on support from her extended family to found the newspaper Vestmannen, but as the group around the language school and newspaper gradually produced more radical alternative understandings of the social reality they came increasingly into conflict with less radical members of the Liberal Party. Her uncle owned the printing press where Vestmannen was printed. He was also a member of parliament seeking re-election. And he was certainly not amused when Rasmus Steinsvik, editor of Vestmannen, published an article reprimanding him for his lacklustre performance in general and his unprincipled voting in support of a budget allocating the Swedish king a substantial amount of money. Steinsvik advised the readers to vote instead for Per Riste, Synnøve Riste’s liberal husband and director of the language school. The uncle stopped printing the newspaper. Social Resilience in Volda The growing social conflicts in Volda might be taken to indicate a lack of resilience. This, however, would be a mistake. Social connectedness is an important source of social resilience (Barnes and Hall 226). Strong ties to family and friends matter, as does membership in associations. Dense networks of social connectedness are related to well-being and social resilience. Inversely, high levels of inequality seem to be linked to low levels of resilience. Participation in democratic processes has also been found to be an important source of resilience (Barnes and Hall 229). Volda was a small community with relatively low levels of inequality and local cultural traditions underlining the importance of cooperation and the obligations of everyone to participate in various forms of communal work. Similarly, even though a couple of families dominated local politics, there was no significant socioeconomic division between the average and the more prosperous farmers. Traditionally, women on the small, independent farms participated actively in most aspects of social life. Volda would thus score high on most indicators predicting social resilience. Reading the local newspapers confirms this impression of high levels of social resilience. In fact, this small community of only a few hundred families produced two competing newspapers at the time. Vestmannen dedicated ample space to issues related to education and schools, including adult education, reflecting the fact that Volda was emerging as a local educational centre; local youths attending schools outside the community regularly wrote articles in the newspaper to share the new knowledge they had attained with other members of the community. The topics were in large part related to farming, earth sciences, meteorology and fisheries. Vestmannen also reported on other local associations and activities. The local newspapers reported on numerous political meetings and public debates. The Liberal Party was traditionally the strongest political party in Volda and pushed for greater independence from Sweden, but was divided between moderates and radicals. The radicals joined workers and socialists in demanding universal suffrage, including, as we have seen, women’s right to vote. The left libertarians in Volda organised a ‘radical left’ faction of the Liberal Party and in the run-up to the elections in 1888 numerous rallies were arranged. In some parts of the municipality the youth set up independent and often quite radical youth organisations, while others established a ‘book discussion’. The language issue developed into a particularly powerful source for social resilience. All members of the community shared the experience of having to write and speak a foreign language when communicating with authorities or during higher education. It was a shared experience of discrimination that contributed to producing a common identity. Hing has shown that those who value their in-group ‘can draw on this positive identity to provide a sense of self-worth that offers resilience’. The struggle for recognition stimulated locals to arrange independent activities, and it was in fact through the burgeoning movement for a New Norwegian language that the local radicals in Volda first encountered radical literature that helped them reframe the problems and issues of their social world. In his biography of Ivar Mortensson Egnund, editor of the newspaper Fedraheimen and a lifelong collaborator of Rasmus Steinsvik, Klaus Langen has argued that Mortensson Egnund saw the ideal type of community imagined by the anarchist Leo Tolstoy in the small Norwegian communities of independent small farmers, a potential model for cooperation, participation and freedom. It was not an uncritical perspective, however. The left libertarians were constantly involved in clashes with what they saw as repressive forces within the communities. It is probably more correct to say that they believed that the potential existed, within these communities, for freedom to flourish. Most importantly, however, reading Fedraheimen, and particularly the journalist, editor and novelist Arne Garborg, infused this group of local radicals with anti-capitalist perspectives to be used to make sense of the processes of change that affected the community. One of Garborg’s biographers, claims that no Norwegian has ever been more fundamentally anti-capitalist than Garborg (Thesen). This anti-capitalism helped the radicals in Volda to understand the local conflicts and the evangelical awakening as symptoms of a deeper and more fundamental development driven by capitalism. A series of article in Vestmannen called for solidarity and unity between small farmers and the growing urban class of industrial workers. Science and Modernity The left libertarians put their hope in science and modernity to improve the lives of people. They believed that education was the key to move forward and get rid of the old and bad ways of doing things. The newspaper was reporting the latest advances in natural sciences and life sciences. It reported enthusiastically about the marvels of electricity, and speculated about a future in which Norway could exploit the waterfalls to generate it on a large scale. Vestmannen printed articles in defence of Darwinism (Egnund), new insights from astronomy (Steinsvik "Kva Den Nye Astronomien"), health sciences, agronomy, new methods of fishing and farming – and much more. This was a time when such matters mattered. Reports on new advances in meteorology in the newspaper appeared next to harrowing reports about the devastating effects of a storm that surprised local fishermen at sea where many men regularly paid with their lives. Hunger was still a constant threat in the harsh winter months, so new knowledge that could improve the harvest was most welcome. Leprosy and other diseases continued to be serious problems in this region of Norway. Health could not be taken lightly, and the left libertarians believed that science and knowledge was the only way forward. ‘Knowledge is a sweet fruit,’ Vestmannen wrote. Reporting on Darwinism and astronomy again pitted Vestmannen against the puritans. On several occasions the newspaper reported on confrontations between those who promoted science and those who defended a fundamentalist view of the Bible. In November 1888 the signature ‘-t’ published an article on a meeting that had taken place a few days earlier in a small village not far from Volda (Unknown). The article described how local teachers and other participants were scolded for holding liberal views on science and religion. Anyone who expressed the view that the Bible should not be interpreted literally risked being stigmatised and ostracised. It is tempting to label the group of left libertarians ‘positivists’ or ‘modernists’, but that would be unfair. Arne Garborg, the group’s most important source of inspiration, was indeed inspired by Émile Zola and the French naturalists. Garborg had argued that nothing less than the uncompromising search for truth was acceptable. Nevertheless, he did not believe in objectivity; Garborg and his followers agreed that it was not possible or even desirable to be anything else than subjective. Adaptation or Transformation? PM Giærder, a friend of Rasmus Steinsvik’s, built a new printing press with the help of local blacksmiths, so the newspaper could keep afloat for a few more months. Finally, however, in 1888, the editor and the printer took the printing press with them and moved to Tynset, another small community to the east. There they joined forces with another dwindling left libertarian publication, Fedraheimen. Generations later, more details emerged about the hurried exit from Volda. Synnøve Riste had become pregnant, but not by her husband Per. She was pregnant by Rasmus Steinsvik, the editor of Vestmannen and co-founder of the language school. And then, after giving birth to a baby daughter she fell ill and died. The former friends Per and Rasmus were now enemies and the group of left libertarians in Volda fell apart. It would be too easy to conclude that the left libertarians failed to transform the community and a closer look would reveal a more nuanced picture. Key members of the radical group went on to play important roles on the local and national political scene. Locally, the remaining members of the group formed new alliances with former opponents to continue the language struggle. The local church gradually began to sympathise with those who agitated for a new language based on the Norwegian dialects. The radical faction of the Liberal Party grew in importance as the conflict with Sweden over the hated union intensified. The anarchists Garborg and Steinsvik became successful editors of a radical national newspaper, 17de Mai, while two other members of the small group of radicals went on to become mayors of Volda. One was later elected member of parliament for the Liberal Party. Many of the more radical anarchist and communist ideas failed to make an impact on society. However, on issues such as women’s rights, voting and science, the left libertarians left a lasting impression on the community. It is fair to say that they contributed to transforming their society in many and lasting ways. Conclusion This study of crisis and conflict in Volda indicate that conflict can play an important role in social learning and collective creativity in resilient communities. There is a tendency, in parts of resilience literature, to view resilient communities as harmonious wholes without rifts or clashes of interests (see for instance Goldstein; Arthur, Friend and Marschke). Instead, conflicts should rather be understood as a natural aspect of any society adapting and transforming itself to respond to crisis. Future research on social resilience could benefit from an ecological understanding of nature that accepts polarisation and conflict as a natural part of ecology and which helps us to reach deeper understandings of the social world, also fostering learning, creativity and the production of alternative political solutions. This research has indicated the importance of social imaginaries of the past. Collective memories of ‘what everybody knows that everybody else knows’ about ‘what has worked in the past’ form the basis for producing ideas about how to create collective action (Swidler 338, 39). Historical institutions are pivotal in producing schemas which are default options for collective action. In Volda, the left libertarians imagined a potential for freedom in the past of the community; this formed the basis for producing an alternative social imaginary of the future of the community. The social imaginary was not, however, based only on local experience and collective memory of the past. Theories played an important role in the process of trying to understand the past and the present in order to imagine future alternatives. The conflicts themselves stimulated the radicals to search more widely and probe more deeply for alternative explanations to the problems they experienced. This search led them to new insights which were sometimes adopted by the local community and, in some cases, helped to transform social life in the long-run. References Arthur, Robert, Richard Friend, and Melissa Marschke. "Fostering Collaborative Resilience through Adaptive Comanagement: Reconciling Theory and Practice in the Management of Fisheries in the Mekong Region." Collaborative Resilience: Moving through Crisis to Opportunity. Ed. Bruce Evan Goldstein. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2012. 255-282. Barnes, Lucy, and Peter A. Hall. "Neoliberalism and Social Resilience in the Developed Democracies." Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 209-238. Egnund, Ivar Mortensson. "Motsetningar." Vestmannen 13.6 (1889): 3. Gausemel, Steffen. Rasmus Steinsvik. Oslo: Noregs boklag, 1937. Goldstein, Bruce Evan. "Collaborating for Transformative Resilience." Collaborative Resilience: Moving through Crisis to Opportunity. Ed. Bruce Evan Goldstein. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2012. 339-358. Hall, Peter A., and Michèle Lamont. "Introduction." Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Lamont, Michèle, Jessica S Welburn, and Crystal M Fleming. "Responses to Discrimination and Social Resilience under Neoliberalism: The United States Compared." Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 129-57. Steinsvik, Rasmus. "Kva Den Nye Astronomien Kan Lære Oss." Vestmannen 8.2 (1889): 1. ———. "Synnøve Riste." Obituary. Vestmannen 9.11 (1889): 1. Swidler, Ann. "Cultural Sources of Institutional Resilience: Lessons from Chieftaincy in Rural Malawi." Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Introduction Artist: June 2 at 11.26pm:‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’ - Raymond Williams. (Singaporean Artists’ public Facebook Post) Can the critical arts exist without ‘place’?There is an ongoing debate on ‘place’ and where it begins and ends; on the ways that cities exist in both material and immaterial forms, and thereby, how to locate and understand place as an anchoring point amidst global flows (Massey; Merrifield). This debate extends to the global art- scape, as traditional conceptions of art and art-making attached to place require re-thinking in a paradigm where digital and immaterial networks, symbols and forums both complement and complicate the role that place has traditionally played (Luger, “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?”). The digital art-scape has allowed for art-led provocations, transformations and disturbances to traditional institutions and gatekeepers (see Hartley’s “ Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies” concept of ‘gatekeeper’) of the art world, which often served as elite checkpoints and way-stations to artistic prominence. Still, contradictory and paradoxical questions emerge, since art cannot be divorced of place entirely, and ‘place’ often features as a topic, subject, or site of critical expression for art regardless of material or immaterial form. Critical art is at once place-bound and place-less; anchored to sites even as it transcends them completely.This paper will explore the dualistic tension – and somewhat contradictory relationship – between physical and digital artistic space through the case study of authoritarian Singapore, by focusing on a few examples of art-activists and the way that they have used and manipulated both physical and digital spaces for art-making. These examples draw upon research which took place in Singapore from 2012-2014 and which involved interviews with, and observation of, a selected sample (30) of art-activists (or “artivists”, to use Krischer’s definition). Findings point to a highly co-dependent relationship between physical and digital art places where both offer unique spaces of possibility and limitations. Therefore, place remains essential in art-making, even as digital avenues expand and amplify what critical art-practice can accomplish.Singapore’s Place-Bound and Place-Less Critical Art-Scape The arts in Singapore have a complicated, and often tense relationship with places such as the theatre, the gallery, and the public square. Though there has been a recent push (in the form of funding to arts groups and physical arts infrastructure) to make Singapore more of an arts and cultural destination (see Luger “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City”), the Singaporean arts-scape remains bound by restrictions and limitations, and varying degrees of de facto (and de jure) censorship and self-policing. This has opened up spaces for critical art, albeit in sometimes creative and surprising forms. As explained to me by a Singaporean playwright,So they’re [the state] making venues, as well as festival organizers, as well as theatre companies, to …self-police, or self-censor. But for us on the ground, we use that as a way to focus on what we still want to say, and be creative about it, so that we circumvent the [state], with the intention of doing what we want to do. (Research interview, Singaporean playwright)Use of cyber-spaces is one way that artists circumvent repressive state structures. Restrictions on the use of place enliven cyberspace with an emancipatory and potentially transformative potential for the critical arts. Cyber-Singapore has a vocal art-activist network and has allowed some artists (such as the “Sticker Lady”) to gain wide national and even international followings. However, digital space cannot exist without physical place; indeed, the two exist, simultaneously, forming and re-forming each other. The arts cannot ‘happen’ online without a corresponding physical space for incubation, for practice, for human networking.It is important to note that in Singapore, art-led activism (or ‘artivism’) and traditional activism are closely related, and research indicated that activist networks often overlap with the art world. While this may be the case in many places, Singapore’s small geography and the relatively wide-berth given to the arts (as opposed to political activism) make these relationships especially strong. Therefore, many arts-spaces (theatres, galleries, studios) function as activist spaces; and non-art spaces such as public squares and university campuses often host art events and displays. Likewise, many of the artists that I interviewed are either directly, or indirectly, involved in more traditional activism as well.Singapore is an island-nation-city-state with a carefully planned urban fabric, the vast majority of which is state-owned (at least 80 % - resulting from large-scale land transfers from the British in the years surrounding Singapore’s independence in 1965). Though it has a Westminster-style parliamentary system (another colonial vestige), a single ruling party has commanded power for 50 years (the People’s Action Party, or PAP). Despite free elections and a liberal approach toward business, foreign investment and multiculturalism, Singapore retains a labyrinthine geography of government control over free expression, dictated through agencies such as the Censorship Review Committee (CRC); the Media Development Authority (MDA), and the National Arts Council (NAC) which work together in a confusing grid of checks and balances. This has presented a paradoxical and often contradictory approach to the arts and culture in which gradual liberalisations of everything from gay nightlife to university discourse have come hand-in-hand with continued restrictions on political activism and ‘taboo’ artistic / cultural themes. These ‘out of bounds’ themes (see Yue) include perceived threats to Singapore’s racial, religious, or political harmony – a grey area that is often at the discretion of particular government bureaucrats and administrators.Still, the Singaporean arts place (take the theatre, for example) has assumed a special role as a focal point for not only various types of visual and performance art, but also unrelated (or tangentially-related) activist causes as well. I asked a theatre director of a prominent alternative theatre where, in Singapore’s authoritarian urban fabric, there were opportunities for provocation? He stressed the theatres’ essential role in providing a physical platform for visual tensions and disturbance:You know, and on any given evening, you’ll see some punks or skinheads hanging outside there, and they kind of – create this disturbance in this neighbourhood, where, you know a passer-by is walking to his posh building, and then suddenly you know, there’s this bunch of boys with mohawks, you know, just standing there – and they are friendly! There’s nothing antagonistic or threatening, whatever. So, you know, that’s the kind of tension that we actually love to kind of generate!… That kind of surprise, that kind of, ‘oh, oh yes!’ we see this nice, expensive restaurant, this nice white building, and then these rough edges. And – that is where uh, those points where – where factions, where the rough edges meet –are where dialogue occurs. (Theatre Director, Singapore)That is not to say that the theatre comes without limits and caveats. It is financially precarious, as the Anglo-American model of corporate funding for the arts is not yet well-established in Singapore; interviews revealed that even much of the philanthropic donating to arts organizations comes from Singapore’s prominent political families and therefore the task of disentangling state interests from non-ideological arts patronage becomes difficult. With state - funding come problems with “taboo” subjects, as exemplified by the occasional banned-play or the constant threat of budget cuts or closure altogether: a carrot and stick approach by the state that allows arts organizations room to operate as long as the art produced does not disturb or provoke (too) much.Liew and Pang suggest that in Singapore, cyberspace has allowed a scale, a type of debate and a particularly cross-cutting conversation to take place: in a context where there are peculiar restrictions on the use and occupation of the built environment. They [ibid] found an emerging vocal, digital artistic grassroots that increasingly challenges the City-State’s dominant narratives: my empirical research therefore expands upon, and explores further, the possibility that Singapore’s cyber-spaces are both complementary to, and in some ways, more important than its material places in terms of providing spaces for political encounters.I conducted ‘netnography’ (see Kozinets) across Singapore’s web-scape and found that the online realm may be the ‘… primary site for discursive public activity in general and politics in particular’ (Mitchell, 122); a place where ‘everybody is coming together’ (Merrifield, 18). Without fear of state censorship, artists, activists and art-activists are not bound by the (same) set of restrictions that they might be if operating in a theatre, or certainly in a public place such as a park or square. Planetary cyber-Singapore exists inside and outside the City-State; it can be accessed remotely, and can connect with a far wider audience than a play performed in a small black box theatre.A number of blogs and satirical sites – including TheOnlineCitizen.sg, TheYawningBread.sg, and Demon-Cratic Singapore, openly criticize government policy in ways rarely heard in-situ or in even casual conversation on the street. Additionally, most activist causes and coalitions have digital versions where information is spread and support is gathered, spanning a range of issues. As is the case in material sites of activism in Singapore, artists frequently emerge as the loudest, most vocal, and most inter-disciplinary digital activists, helping to spearhead and cobble together cultural-activist coalitions and alliances. One example of this is the contrast between the place bound “Pink Dot” LGBTQ event (limited to the amount of people that can fit in Hong Lim Park, a central square) and its Facebook equivalent, We are Pink Dot public ‘group’. Pink Dot occurs each June in Singapore and involves around 10,000 people. The Internet’s representations of Pink Dot, however, have reached millions: Pink Dot has been featured in digital (and print) editions of major global newspapers including The Guardian and The New York Times. While not explicitly an art event, Pink Dot is artistic in nature as it uses pink ‘dots’ to side-step the official designation of being an LGBTQ pride event – which would not be sanctioned by the authorities (Gay Pride has not been allowed to take place in Singapore).The street artist Samantha Lo – also known as “Sticker Lady” – was jailed for her satirical stickers that she placed in various locations around Singapore. Unable to freely practice her art on city streets, she has become a sort of local artist - Internet celebrity, with her own Facebook Group called Free Sticker Lady (with over 1,000 members as of April, 2016). Through her Facebook group, Lo has been able to voice opinions that would be difficult – or even prohibited – with a loudspeaker on the street, or expressed through street art. As an open lesbian, she has also been active (and vocal) in the “Pink Dot” events. Her speech at “Pink Dot” was heard by the few-thousand in attendance at the time; her Facebook post (public without privacy settings) is available to the entire world:I'll be speaking during a small segment at Pink Dot tomorrow. Though only two minutes long, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my speech and finding myself at a position where there's just so much to say. All my life, I've had to work twice as hard to prove myself, to be taken seriously. At 18, I made a conscious decision to cave in to societal pressures to conform after countless warnings of how I wouldn't be able to get a job, get married, etc. I grew my hair out, dressed differently, but was never truly comfortable with the person I became. That change was a choice, but I wasn't happy.Since then, I learnt that happiness wasn't a given, I had to work for it, for the ability to be comfortable in my own skin, to do what I love and to make something out of myself. (Artists’ Facebook Post)Yet, without the city street, Lo would not have gained her notoriety; without use of the park, Pink Dot would not have a Facebook presence or the ability to gather international press. The fact that Singaporean theatre exists at all as an important instigator of visual and performative tension demonstrates the significance of its physical address. Physical art places provide a crucial period of incubation – practice and becoming – that cannot really be replicated online. This includes schools and performance space but also in Singapore’s context, the ‘arts-housing’ that is provided by the government to small-scale, up-and-coming artists through a competitive grant process. Artists can receive gallery, performance or rehearsal space for a set amount of time on a rotating basis. Even with authoritarian restrictions, these spaces have been crucial for arts development:There’s a short-term [subsidised] residency studio …for up to 12 months. And so that –allows for a rotating group of artists to come with an idea in mind, use it for whatever- we’ve had artists who were preparing for a major show, and say ‘my studio space, my existing studio space is a bit too tiny, because I’m prepping for this show, I need a larger studio for 3 months. (Arts Administrator, Singapore)Critical and provocative art, limited and restricted by place, is thus still intrinsically bound to it. Indeed, the restrictions on artistic place allow cyber-art to flourish; cyber-art can only flourish with a strong place- based anchor. Far from supplanting place-based art, the digital art-scape forms a complement; digital and place-based art forms combine to form new hybridities in which local context and global forces write and re-write each other in a series of place and ‘placeless’ negotiations. Conclusion The examples that have been presented in this paper paint a picture of a complex landscape where specific urban sites are crucial anchoring nodes in a critical art ecosystem, but much artistic disturbance actually occurs online and in immaterial forms. This may hint at the possibility that globally, urban sites themselves are no longer sufficient for critical art to flourish and reach its full potential, especially as such sites have increasingly fallen prey to austerity policies, increasingly corporate and / or philanthropic programming and curation, and the comparatively wider reach and ease of access that digital spaces offer.Electronic or digital space – ranging from e-mail to social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook and many others) has opened a new frontier in which, “… material public spaces in the city are superseded by the fora of television, radio talk shows and computer bulletin boards” (Mitchell. 122). The possibility now emerges whether digital space may be even more crucial than material public spaces in terms of emancipatory or critical potential– especially in authoritarian contexts where public space / place comes with particular limits and restrictions on assembling, performance, and critical expression. These contexts range from Taksim Square, Istanbul to Tiananmen Square, Beijing – but indeed, traditional public place has been increasingly privatized and securitized across the Western-liberal world as well. Where art occurs in place it is often stripped of its critical potential or political messages, sanctioned or sponsored by corporate groups or sanitized by public sector authorities (Schuilenburg, 277).The Singapore case may be especially stark due to Singapore’s small size (and corresponding lack of visible public ‘places’); authoritarian restrictions and correspondingly (relatively) un-policed and un-censored cyberspace. But it is fair to say that at a time when Youtube creates instant celebrities and Facebook likes or Instagram followers indicate fame and (potential) fortune – it is time to re-think and re-conceptualise the relationship between place, art, and the place-based institutions (such as grant-funding bodies or philanthropic organizations, galleries, critics or dealers) that have often served as “gatekeepers” to the art-scape. This invites challenges to the way these agents operate and the decision making process of policy-makers in the arts and cultural realm.Mitchell (124) reminded that there has “never been a revolution conducted exclusively in electronic space; at least not yet.” But that was 20 years ago. Singapore may offer a glimpse, however, of what such a revolution might look like. This revolution is neither completely place bound nor completely digital; it is one in which the material and immaterial interplay and overlap in post-modern complexity. Each platform plays a role, and understanding the way that art operates both in place and in “placeless” forms is crucial in understanding where key transformations take place in both the production of critical art and the production of urban space.What Hartley (“The Politics of Pictures”) called the “space of citizenry” is not necessarily confined to a building, the city street or a public square (or even private spaces such as the home, the car, the office). Sharon Zukin likewise suggested that ultimately, a negotiation of a city’s digital sphere is crucial for current-day urban research, arguing that:Though I do not think that online communities have replaced face to face interaction, I do think it is important to understand the way web-based media contribute to our urban imaginary. The interactive nature of the dialogue, how each post feeds on the preceding ones and elicits more, these are expressions of both difference and consensus, and they represent partial steps toward an open public sphere. (27)Traditional gatekeepers such as the theatre director, the museum curator and the state or philanthropic arts funding body have not disappeared, though they must adapt to the new cyber-reality as artists have new avenues around these traditional checkpoints. Accordingly – “old” problems such as de-jure and de-facto censorship reappear in the cyber art-scape as well: take the example of the Singaporean satirical bloggers that have been sued by the government in 2013-2016 (such as the socio-political bloggers and satirists Roy Ngerng and Alex Au). No web-space is truly open.A further complication may be the corporate nature of sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or Twitter: far from truly democratic platforms or “agoras” in the traditional sense, these are for-profit (massive) corporations – which a small theatre is not. Singapore’s place based authoritarianism may be multiplied in the corporate authoritarianism or “CEO activism” of tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, who allow for diverse use of digital platforms and encourage open expression and unfettered communication – as long as it is on their terms, within company policies that are not always transparent.Perhaps the questions then really are not where ‘art’ begins and ends, or where a place starts or stops – but rather where authoritarianism, state and corporate power begin and end in the hyper-connected global cyber-scape? And, if these power structures are now stretched across space and time as Marxist theorists such as Massey or Merrifield claimed, then what is the future for critical art and its relationship to ‘place’?Despite these unanswered questions and invitations for further exploration, the Singapore case may hint at what this emerging geography of place and ‘placeless’ art resembles and how such a new world may evolve moving forward. ReferencesHartley, John. The Politics of Pictures: the Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media. Perth: Psychology Press, 1992.———. Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Kozinets, Robert. Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. New York: Sage, 2010. Krischer, Oliver. “Lateral Thinking: Artivist Networks in East Asia.” ArtAsia Pacific 77 (2012): 96-110. Liew, Kai Khiun. and Natalie Pang. “Neoliberal Visions, Post Capitalist Memories: Heritage Politics and the Counter-Mapping of Singapore’s City-Scape.” Ethnography 16.3 (2015): 331-351.Luger, Jason. “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City: Spaces of Contestation in Singapore.” In T. Oakes and J. Wang, eds., Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism. London: Routledge, 2015: 204-218. ———. “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?' Activist Geographies in the City-State.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 20.2 (2016): 186-203. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Merrifield, Andy. The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Mitchell, Don. “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85.1 (1996): 108-133. Schuilenburg, Marc. The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk and Social Order. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. Yue, Audrey. “Hawking in the Creative City: Rice Rhapsody, Sexuality and the Cultural Politics of New Asia in Singapore. Feminist Media Studies 7.4 (2007): 365-380. Zukin, Sharon. The Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

“...children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents...” — Stephen Kline, The Making of Children’s Culture We live in a world saturated by design and through design artefacts, one can glean unique insights into a culture's values and norms. In fact, some academics, such as British media and film theorist Ben Highmore, see the two areas so inextricably intertwined as to suggest a wholesale “re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies” (14). Too often, however, everyday objects are marginalised or overlooked as objects of scholarly attention. The field of material culture studies seeks to change that by focussing on the quotidian object and its ability to reveal much about the time, place, and culture in which it was designed and used. This article takes on one such object, a mid-century children's toy tea set, whose humble journey from 1968 Sears catalogue to 2014 thrift shop—and subsequently this author’s basement—reveals complex rhetorical messages communicated both visually and verbally. As material culture studies theorist Jules Prown notes, the field’s foundation is laid upon the understanding “that objects made ... by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (1-2). In this case, the objects’ material and aesthetic characteristics can be shown to reflect some of the pervasive stereotypes and gender roles of the mid-century and trace some of the prevailing tastes of the American middle class of that era, or perhaps more accurately the type of design that came to represent good taste and a modern aesthetic for that audience. A wealth of research exists on the function of toys and play in learning about the world and even the role of toy selection in early sex-typing, socialisation, and personal identity of children (Teglasi). This particular research area isn’t the focus of this article; however, one aspect that is directly relevant and will be addressed is the notion of adult role-playing among children and the role of toys in communicating certain adult practices or values to the child—what sociologist David Oswell calls “the dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood” (200). Neither is the focus of this article the practice nor indeed the ethicality of marketing to children. Relevant to this particular example I suggest, is as a product utilising messaging aimed not at children but at adults, appealing to certain parents’ interest in nurturing within their child a perceived era and class-appropriate sense of taste. This was fuelled in large part by the curatorial pursuits of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, coupled with an interest and investment in raising their children in a design-forward household and a desire for toys that reflected that priority; in essence, parents wishing to raise modern children. Following Prown’s model of material culture analysis, the tea set is examined in three stages, through description, deduction and speculation with each stage building on the previous one. Figure 1: Porcelain Toy Tea Set. Description The tea set consists of twenty-six pieces that allows service for six. Six cups, saucers, and plates; a tall carafe with spout, handle and lid; a smaller vessel with a spout and handle; a small round bowl with a lid; a larger oval bowl with a lid, and a coordinated oval platter. The cups are just under two inches tall and two inches in diameter. The largest piece, the platter is roughly six inches by four inches. The pieces are made of a ceramic material white in colour and glossy in texture and are very lightweight. The rim or edge of each piece is decorated with a motif of three straight lines in two different shades of blue and in different thicknesses, interspersed with a set of three black wiggly lines. Figure 2: Porcelain Toy Tea Set Box. The set is packaged for retail purposes and the original box appears to be fully intact. The packaging of an object carries artefactual evidence just as important as what it contains that falls into the category of a “‘para-artefact’ … paraphernalia that accompanies the product (labels, packaging, instructions etc.), all of which contribute to a product’s discourse” (Folkmann and Jensen 83). The graphics on the box are colourful, featuring similar shades of teal blue as found on the objects, with the addition of orange and a silver sticker featuring the logo of the American retailer Sears. The cover features an illustration of the objects on an orange tabletop. The most prominent text that confirms that the toy is a “Porcelain Toy Tea Set” is in an organic, almost psychedelic style that mimics both popular graphics of this era—especially album art and concert posters—as well as the organic curves of steam that emanate from the illustrated teapot’s spout. Additional messages appear on the box, in particular “Contemporary DESIGN” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. Along the edges of the box lid, a detail of the decorative motif is reproduced somewhat abstracted from what actually appears on the ceramic objects. Figure 3: Sears’s Christmas Wishbook Catalogue, page 574 (1968). Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears) is well-known for its over one-hundred-year history of producing printed merchandise catalogues. The catalogue is another important para-artefact to consider in analysing the objects. The tea set first appeared in the 1968 Sears Christmas Wishbook. There is no date or copyright on the box, so only its inclusion in the catalogue allows the set to be accurately dated. It also allows us to understand how the set was originally marketed. Deduction In the deduction phase, we focus on the sensory aesthetic and functional interactive qualities of the various components of the set. In terms of its function, it is critical that we situate the objects in their original use context, play. The light weight of the objects and thinness of the ceramic material lends the objects a delicate, if not fragile, feeling which indicates that this set is not for rough use. Toy historian Lorraine May Punchard differentiates between toy tea sets “meant to be used by little girls, having parties for their friends and practising the social graces of the times” and smaller sets or doll dishes “made for little girls to have parties with their dolls, or for their dolls to have parties among themselves” (7). Similar sets sold by Sears feature images of girls using the sets with both human playmates and dolls. The quantity allowing service for six invites multiple users to join the party. The packaging makes clear that these toy tea sets were intended for imaginary play only, rendering them non-functional through an all-capitals caution declaiming “IMPORTANT: Do not use near heat”. The walls and handles of the cups are so thin one can imagine that they would quickly become dangerous if filled with a hot liquid. Nevertheless, the lid of the oval bowl has a tan stain or watermark which suggests actual use. The box is broken up by pink cardboard partitions dividing it into segments sized for each item in the set. Interestingly even the small squares of unfinished corrugated cardboard used as cushioning between each stacked plate have survived. The evidence of careful re-packing indicates that great care was taken in keeping the objects safe. It may suggest that even though the set was used, the children or perhaps the parents, considered the set as something to care for and conserve for the future. Flaws in the glaze and applique of the design motif can be found on several pieces in the set and offer some insight as to the technique used in producing these items. Errors such as the design being perfectly evenly spaced but crooked in its alignment to the rim, or pieces of the design becoming detached or accidentally folded over and overlapping itself could only be the result of a print transfer technique popularised with decorative china of the Victorian era, a technique which lends itself to mass production and lower cost when compared to hand decoration. Speculation In the speculation stage, we can consider the external evidence and begin a more rigorous investigation of the messaging, iconography, and possible meanings of the material artefact. Aspects of the set allow a number of useful observations about the role of such an object in its own time and context. Sociologists observe the role of toys as embodiments of particular types of parental messages and values (Cross 292) and note how particularly in the twentieth century “children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents” (Kline 96). Throughout history children’s toys often reflected a miniaturised version of the adult world allowing children to role-play as imagined adult-selves. Kristina Ranalli explored parallels between the practice of drinking tea and the play-acting of the child’s tea party, particularly in the nineteenth century, as a gendered ritual of gentility; a method of socialisation and education, and an opportunity for exploratory and even transgressive play by “spontaneously creating mini-societies with rules of their own” (20). Such toys and objects were available through the Sears mail-order catalogue from the very beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (McGuire). Propelled by the post-war boom of suburban development and homeownership—that generation’s manifestation of the American Dream—concern with home décor and design was elevated among the American mainstream to a degree never before seen. There was a hunger for new, streamlined, efficient, modernist living. In his essay titled “Domesticating Modernity”, historian Jeffrey L. Meikle notes that many early modernist designers found that perhaps the most potent way to “‘domesticate’ modernism and make it more familiar was to miniaturise it; for example, to shrink the skyscraper and put it into the home as furniture or tableware” (143). Dr Timothy Blade, curator of the 1985 exhibition of girls’ toys at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery—now the Goldstein Museum of Design—described in his introduction “a miniaturised world with little props which duplicate, however rudely, the larger world of adults” (5). Noting the power of such toys to reflect adult values of their time, Blade continues: “the microcosm of the child’s world, remarkably furnished by the miniaturised props of their parents’ world, holds many direct and implied messages about the society which brought it into being” (9). In large part, the mid-century Sears catalogues capture the spirit of an era when, as collector Thomas Holland observes, “little girls were still primarily being offered only the options of glamour, beauty and parenthood as the stuff of their fantasies” (175). Holland notes that “the Wishbooks of the fifties [and, I would add, the sixties] assumed most girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps to become full-time housewives and mommies” (1). Blade grouped toys into three categories: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. A tea set could arguably be considered part of the cooking category, but closer examination of the language used in marketing this object—“little hostesses”, et cetera—suggests an emphasis not on cooking but on serving or entertaining. This particular category was not prevalent in the era examined by Blade, but the cultural shifts of the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rapid popularisation of a suburban lifestyle, may have led to the use of entertaining as an additional distinct category of role play in the process of learning to become a “proper” homemaker. Sears and other retailers offered a wide variety of styles of toy tea sets during this era. Blade and numerous other sources observe that children’s toy furniture and appliances tended to reflect the style and aesthetic qualities of their contemporary parallels in the adult world, the better to associate the child’s objects to its adult equivalent. The toy tea set’s packaging trumpets messages intended to appeal to modernist values and identity including “Contemporary Design” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. The use of this coded marketing language, aimed particularly at parents, can be traced back several decades. In 1928 a group of American industrial and textile designers established the American Designers' Gallery in New York, in part to encourage American designers to innovate and adopt new styles such as those seen in the L’ Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris, the exposition that sparked international interest in the Art Deco or Art Moderne aesthetic. One of the gallery founders, Ilonka Karasz, a Hungarian-American industrial and textile designer who had studied in Austria and was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, publicised her new style of nursery furnishings as “designed for the very modern American child” (Brown 80). Sears itself was no stranger to the appeal of such language. The term “contemporary design” was ubiquitous in catalogue copy of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, used to describe everything from draperies (1959) and bedspreads (1961) to spice racks (1964) and the Lady Kenmore portable dishwasher (1961). An emphasis on the role of design in one’s life and surroundings can be traced back to efforts by MoMA. The museum’s interest in modern design hearkens back almost to the institution’s inception, particularly in relation to industrial design and the aestheticisation of everyday objects (Marshall). Through exhibitions and in partnership with mass-market magazines, department stores and manufacturer showrooms, MoMA curators evangelised the importance of “good design” a term that can be found in use as early as 1942. What Is Good Design? followed the pattern of prior exhibitions such as What Is Modern Painting? and situated modern design at the centre of exhibitions that toured the United States in the first half of the nineteen-fifties. To MoMA and its partners, “good design” signified the narrow identification of proper taste in furniture, home decor and accessories; effectively, the establishment of a design canon. The viewpoints enshrined in these exhibitions and partnerships were highly influential on the nation’s perception of taste for decades to come, as the trickle-down effect reached a much broader segment of consumers than those that directly experienced the museum or its exhibitions (Lawrence.) This was evident not only at high-end shops such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Even mass-market retailers sought out well-known figures of modernist design to contribute to their offerings. Sears, for example, commissioned noted modernist designer and ceramicist Russel Wright to produce a variety of serving ware and decor items exclusively for the company. Notably for this study, he was also commissioned to create a toy tea set for children. The 1957 Wishbook touts the set as “especially created to delight modern little misses”. Within its Good Design series, MoMA exhibitions celebrated numerous prominent Nordic designers who were exploring simplified forms and new material technologies. In the 1968 Wishbook, the retailer describes the Porcelain Toy Tea Set as “Danish-inspired china for young moderns”. The reference to Danish design is certainly compatible with the modernist appeal; after the explosion in popularity of Danish furniture design, the term “Danish Modern” was commonly used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties as shorthand for pan-Scandinavian or Nordic design, or more broadly for any modern furniture design regardless of origin that exhibited similar characteristics. In subsequent decades the notion of a monolithic Scandinavian-Nordic design aesthetic or movement has been debunked as primarily an economically motivated marketing ploy (Olivarez et al.; Fallan). In the United States, the term “Danish Modern” became so commonly misused that the Danish Society for Arts and Crafts called upon the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to legally restrict the use of the labels “Danish” and “Danish Modern” to companies genuinely originating in Denmark. Coincidentally the FTC ruled on this in 1968, noting “that ‘Danish Modern’ carries certain meanings, and... that consumers might prefer goods that are identified with a foreign culture” (Hansen 451). In the case of the Porcelain Toy Tea Set examined here, Sears was not claiming that the design was “Danish” but rather “Danish-inspired”. One must wonder, was this another coded marketing ploy to communicate a sense of “Good Design” to potential customers? An examination of the formal qualities of the set’s components, particularly the simplified geometric forms and the handle style of the cups, confirms that it is unlike a traditional—say, Victorian-style—tea set. Punchard observes that during this era some American tea sets were actually being modelled on coffee services rather than traditional tea services (148). A visual comparison of other sets sold by Sears in the same year reveals a variety of cup and pot shapes—with some similar to the set in question—while others exhibit more traditional teapot and cup shapes. Coffee culture was historically prominent in Nordic cultures so there is at least a passing reference to that aspect of Nordic—if not specifically Danish—influence in the design. But what of the decorative motif? Simple curved lines were certainly prominent in Danish furniture and architecture of this era, and occasionally found in combination with straight lines, but no connection back to any specific Danish motif could be found even after consultation with experts in the field from the Museum of Danish America and the Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum (personal correspondence). However, knowing that the average American consumer of this era—even the design-savvy among them—consumed Scandinavian design without distinguishing between the various nations, a possible explanation could be contained in the promotion of Finnish textiles at the time. In the decade prior to the manufacture of the tea set a major design tendency began to emerge in the United States, triggered by the geometric design motifs of the Finnish textile and apparel company Marimekko. Marimekko products were introduced to the American market in 1959 via the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based retailer Design Research (DR) and quickly exploded in popularity particularly after would-be First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in national media wearing Marimekko dresses during the 1960 presidential campaign and on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. (Thompson and Lange). The company’s styling soon came to epitomise a new youth aesthetic of the early nineteen sixties in the United States, a softer and more casual predecessor to the London “mod” influence. During this time multiple patterns were released that brought a sense of whimsy and a more human touch to classic mechanical patterns and stripes. The patterns Piccolo (1953), Helmipitsi (1959), and Varvunraita (1959), all designed by Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi offered varying motifs of parallel straight lines. Maija Isola's Silkkikuikka (1961) pattern—said to be inspired by the plumage of the Great Crested Grebe—combined parallel serpentine lines with straight and angled lines, available in a variety of colours. These and other geometrically inspired patterns quickly inundated apparel and decor markets. DR built a vastly expanded Cambridge flagship store and opened new locations in New York in 1961 and 1964, and in San Francisco in 1965 fuelled in no small part by the fact that they remained the exclusive outlet for Marimekko in the United States. It is clear that Marimekko’s approach to pattern influenced designers and manufacturers across industries. Design historian Lesley Jackson demonstrates that Marimekko designs influenced or were emulated by numerous other companies across Scandinavia and beyond (72-78). The company’s influence grew to such an extent that some described it as a “conquest of the international market” (Hedqvist and Tarschys 150). Subsequent design-forward retailers such as IKEA and Crate and Barrel continue to look to Marimekko even today for modern design inspiration. In 2016 the mass-market retailer Target formed a design partnership with Marimekko to offer an expansive limited-edition line in their stores, numbering over two hundred items. So, despite the “Danish” misnomer, it is quite conceivable that designers working for or commissioned by Sears in 1968 may have taken their aesthetic cues from Marimekko’s booming work, demonstrating a clear understanding of the contemporary high design aesthetic of the time and coding the marketing rhetoric accordingly even if incorrectly. Conclusion The Sears catalogue plays a unique role in capturing cross-sections of American culture not only as a sales tool but also in Holland’s words as “a beautifully illustrated diary of America, it’s [sic] people and the way we thought about things” (1). Applying a rhetorical and material culture analysis to the catalogue and the objects within it provides a unique glimpse into the roles these objects played in mediating relationships, transmitting values and embodying social practices, tastes and beliefs of mid-century American consumers. Adult consumers familiar with the characteristics of the culture of “Good Design” potentially could have made a connection between the simplified geometric forms of the components of the toy tea set and say the work of modernist tableware designers such as Kaj Franck, or between the set’s graphic pattern and the modernist motifs of Marimekko and its imitators. But for a much broader segment of the population with a less direct understanding of modernist aesthetics, those connections may not have been immediately apparent. The rhetorical messaging behind the objects’ packaging and marketing used class and taste signifiers such as modern, contemporary and “Danish” to reinforce this connection to effect an emotional and aspirational appeal. These messages were coded to position the set as an effective transmitter of modernist values and to target parents with the ambition to create “appropriately modern” environments for their children. 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