Journal articles on the topic 'National Urban League – Biography'

The Crimean War brought destruction to Russia’s Black Sea peninsula but, like Napoleon’s invasion fifty years earlier, the war also became a central event in Russia’s national history. In his The Origins of the Crimean War (1994), David Goldfrank introduced readers to the complex diplomatic wrangling that led to the Crimean War. This article seeks to explain how and why the Crimean War (or “first great defense”) rivals only World War II (the “second great defense”) in Sevastopol’s urban biography. Because of the work of writers, filmmakers, sculptors, and architects – who during and after World War II began to link the first great defense with the second and used images similar to Leo Tolstoy’s a century earlier – Sevastopol retains its close connection to its pre-Revolutionary military history. Even in the Soviet period, Sevastopol’s urban biography relied less on the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War than it did on the Crimean War because of the narrative reframing during the 1940s.

This article explores the response of the moderate wing of the civil rights movement to the war in Vietnam. The moderates, made up of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and leaders such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, were initially opposed to the civil rights movement taking a stand against the war. This reluctance was the result of a number of factors, including anti-communism and their own closeness with the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Crucially, it also resulted from their own experiences of the black freedom struggle itself. The article also documents and analyses the growing anti-war dissent amongst the moderates, culminating in the decision of both the NAACP and the Urban League to adopt an anti-war stance at the end of the 1960s. Despite this, they remained unenthusiastic about participating in peace movement activities, and the reasons for this are explained. Finally, the article suggests that the war was important in exposing existing divisions within the civil rights movement, as well as in generating new ones.

Between 1879 and 1882 a mass agrarian movement, led by the Irish National Land League, became a strong, all-encompassing force in Irish life for a brief but crucial period. This movement, one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in nineteenth-century Europe, has been treated as a nationalist movement, with emphasis of study placed on the role, contributions and aims of the league’s national leaders. These men, seeking their own varieties of self-government, saw the land movement as means to a political end. To them the land agitation provided a stepping-stone to national independence. It was the Irish peasantry, however, motivated primarily by economic considerations, that provided the driving force behind the movement, and at this level Irish peasant women made major contributions to the agrarian revolt. In this study the Land League movement is viewed as an agrarian protest movement; its purpose is to examine in particular the roles played by the Irish peasant women during the Land League period.These contributions have not been adequately recognised in historical literature. Recently the role of the Irish peasant has been duly acknowledged, but in these discussions a male image usually appears. When the Irish women’s role in the land movement is examined, it is done so in the context of the organisation known as the Ladies’ Land League. These studies concentrate on the activities of the upper- and middle-class urban leaders, particularly the Parnell sisters. But to dwell only on the Ladies’ Land League as the focus of women’s participation in the Land League movement is far too narrow, for it obscures the fact that hundreds of peasant women were fighting the Land War on a daily basis long before the formation of the women’s organisation. The papers of some of the local branches of the Land League provide evidence which shows that Irish rural women participated in the Land War from its beginning. Although the archival sources of the Land League period are biased towards men, enough material regarding the peasant women’s activities, admittedly limited and somewhat sparse, does exist to allow a strong argument to be put forward that peasant women performed effectively in the Land War.

In political economy, research on growth coalitions and regime theory concludes that progressive coalitions representing lower-income residents and effectively working for policy change at the local level involving development are unlikely since they lack the resources necessary to build and maintain strong coalitions with long-term influence with elected officials. In Los Angeles, a coalition representing the homeless filed a lawsuit in 2012, which involved one of the most powerful developers in the region, and reached a favorable settlement. Given the strength of growth interests and factors working against redistributive policies, I ask the question, how did the coalition muster the political influence and resources necessary to compel the developer to settle the lawsuit? I contend that the settlement is evidence of a progressive coalition in the region that is working to establish a growth with equity framework and that the coalition has established political influence with local officials.

AbstractOtter hunting was a minor field sport in Britain but in the early years of the twentieth century a lively campaign to ban it was orchestrated by several individuals and anti-hunting societies. The sport became increasingly popular in the late nineteenth century and the Edwardian period. This paper examines the arguments and methods used in different anti-otter hunting campaigns 1900–1939 by organisations such as the Humanitarian League, the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports and the National Association for the Abolition of Cruel Sports.

AbstractThis article examines the role of male youth in the political history of Dar es Salaam. ‘Youth’, as a category of opposition to elders, became important during the inter-war period as it was inhabited by educated African bureaucrats aspiring to representation in urban politics over the traditional claims of authority by local ethnic Zaramo and Shomvi elders. This group of bureaucrats grew in power through the popularization of racial-nationalist politics, and in the 1950s formed the Tanganyika African Nationalist Party (TANU), which instituted its own category of ‘youth’ with the creation of the TANU Youth League (TYL). Consisting mainly of young, under-employed men who failed to obtain sufficient educational qualifications, the Youth League challenged the late colonial state's theoretical monopoly over violence through voluntary and aggressive policing activities. After the work of independence was complete, there was practical way to demobilize this enormous, semi-autonomous police and intelligence-gathering force. The repeated reassertion of party control over its Youth League took many forms in the decade after independence – through the creation of a National Service and the militarization of development; frequent nationalist events and rituals where Youth League members controlled public space; and a war on urban morality led by Youth League shock troops. Control over youth also offered a potentially autonomous patrimony for ambitious TANU party members. The 1970s witnessed the beginning of the general failure of both state and party to generate sufficient resources to serve as a patron to patron-seeking youth, which has effectively decentralized youth violence and vigilantism ever since. A political history of ‘youth’, both as a social category and political institution, can shed further light on contemporary dilemmas of youth violence, meanings of citizenship, and hidden motors of party politics.

Susie Saavedra was recently promoted to Vice President for Policy and Legislative Affairs at the National Urban League Washington Bureau. Prior to this role, she served as Senior Director for the same department. Specifically, Ms. Saavedra is the League’s chief education and health policy officer, a responsibility she has held since 2013. She offers over 15 years of federal legislative, policy, and political experience along with a passion for advancing social and economic justice. Before joining the National Urban League, Ms. Saavedra spent a decade working in both the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate for four Members of Congress, as a Legislative Aide to former Senator Hillary Clinton, and as a Legislative Director for Representatives Karen Bass, Al Green and Joe Baca. She also promoted diversity in the halls of Congress as former President of the Congressional Hispanic Staff Association (CHSA) and has advocated for expanding opportunities for Hispanics in higher education as a governing board member of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). Ms. Saavedra is also the Vice President of the Hispanic Lobbyists Association which is dedicated to building diversity in the government relations profession. She holds a Master of Public Administration degree from George Washington University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Denver.

ABSTRACTIn Senegal, neighbourhood football teams are more popular than teams in the national football league. The so-called navétanes teams were first created in the 1950s. Since the early 1970s, they have competed in local, regional and national neighbourhood championships. This article considers the history of these clubs and their championships by focusing on the city of Dakar and its fast-growing suburbs, Pikine and Guédiawaye. Research on the navétanes allows an exploration of the social and cultural history of the neighbourhoods from the actor-centred perspective of urban youth. The history of the navétanes reflects the complex interrelations between young people, the city and the state. The performative act of football – on and beyond the pitch, by players, fans and organizers – constitutes the neighbourhood as a social space in a context where the state fails to provide sufficient infrastructure and is often contested. The navétanes clubs and championships demonstrate how young people have experienced and imagined their neighbourhoods in different local-level ways, while at the same time interconnecting them with other social spaces, such as the ‘city’, the ‘nation’ and ‘the world’.

This special edition of Central European History is concerned with how America viewed Germany, and my contribution focuses on how, beginning with Hitler's rise to power, Germany became a point of reference for the emerging American civil-rights movement. By looking at Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League, as well as African-American newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, Afro-American, Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet, I will show how the black community discussed developments in Germany, America's struggle against Nazi racism, and the black soldiers' experience in postwar Germany.

This essay assesses the legacy of urban ethnography's (UE) early engagement with the “saloon problem.” Early sociologists (1880–1915) intervened in the national debate on alcohol on the basis of their long–term, in–depth understanding of the urban poor. Ethnographers highlighted the role of the saloon as a haven for maintaining social ties while socializing immigrants to American norms. Instead of prohibition or temperance, sociologists advocated replacing the saloon's positive functions with more democratic institutions, especially an egalitarian domestic sphere. This position was shared by both academic and settlement house sociologists whose saloon investigations offer a coherent sociological research paradigm that antedates the Chicago School. The activism of early sociologists exemplifies the characteristics of Michael Burawoy's recent call for public sociology. Yet the early sociologists failed to redeem the saloon amongst Progressives, who increasingly rallied around the National Anti–Saloon League and constitutional Prohibition. By only investigating alcohol in its public manifestations, sociologists failed to challenge the way the social problem was framed and may even have contributed to the stigmatization of the saloon. This voyeuristic opportunism has plagued the American tradition of urban ethnography, the ineffective legacy of which poses a challenge to a contemporary revival of public sociology.

This paper comparatively examines how the League of Women Voters and Lake Erie sportsmen emerged to awaken the public to the pollution crisis affecting the Lake Erie watershed in the mid-twentieth century. Recognizing the degradation of the smallest of the Great Lakes due to the explosion of wartime industrial development and population growth, the League and the sportsmen commenced a decades-long struggle to clean up the lake and its tributaries through direct action in urban areas throughout the Lake Erie watershed. Disgusted by a fall in the number of fish, caused by cyanide poisoning, and the effect of oil on waterfowl, the sportsmen pressed for pollution control. The League members’ approach to water resources, on the other hand, was based on a broad and academic perspective regarding water quality and quantity in response to a series of regionally severe droughts that plagued the United States in the late 1940s and mid-1950s, and led to a national debate on water shortages and supplies. Ultimately, this paper examines two distinctly different approaches to an environmental emergency in the immediate postwar era.

By any measure, major-league baseball in North America surely qualifies as big business. The national pastime is a vital component of today's urban political economy, and baseball teams resemble other high-prestige businesses in that cities must compete for the privilege of hosting them—whatever their true worth. This article analyzes the transfer of the Milwaukee Braves baseball franchise to Atlanta in 1965 as the outcome of “competitive boosterism,” or the active participation of local elites in luring trade, industry, and investment from other cities for the purpose of economic development.

This study examines how changes in the growth model of the US sports business since World War II—namely, changes in stadium design and ticket sales strategies—have transformed the accessibility of major league stadiums and the class composition of the fans inside. While survey data show an overrepresentation of wealthy fans in stadiums at the end of the twentieth century, they reveal little about whether or not this was a new phenomenon. I use ticket sales data to demonstrate that the displacement of working-class fans by the relatively affluent began in earnest at least as early as the 1950s. Before “premium-seating” options like luxury boxes became the norm, the expanded sale of season-ticket packages requiring large up-front payments made it more difficult for wage earners to attend games. While this crowding out of working-class fans has a longer history than very recent outcries over “stadium gentrification” suggest, it has intensified significantly over the last quarter century. Using an original data set containing information on seating arrangements at both the current and previous facilities of 73 of 91 active Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and National Football League franchises, this article offers the first systematic evidence in support of claims that the proliferation of luxury suites and other exclusive seating options has resulted in the subtraction of large numbers of relatively affordable seats. This research not only deepens our understanding of the history of urban gentrification and postwar consumption, but also has important implications for the ongoing debate over public stadium subsidies.

Set within the framework of the birthplace effect literature and the seminal work of Curtis and Birch, this paper draws information from the publicly available database www.hockeydb.com and from the Census to examine the hometowns of Canadian National Hockey League (NHL) players from 1970 to 2015. It found that from a regional perspective, the distribution of players’ hometowns remained fairly stable over the 46-year period with Ontario and the three Prairie provinces being prominent. Players from small centres have been well represented in the NHL. While larger urban areas have historically produced the most players, there has been a marked increase in ‘big city’ players while the odds of making it are low. However, when the analysis is adjusted according to the population aged 10-19, boys growing up in small and mid-sized centres were at advantage in reaching the NHL until 2009. Finally, we discuss whether the growing presence of big city players in the NHL will affect the image of hockey as a national sport, as for many, small-town hockey remains at the heart of Canadian sporting culture.

This article examines how Väestöliitto, the Finnish Population and Family Welfare League, developed into a housing policy expert during the 1940s and 1950s. Through frame analysis, I outline how Väestöliitto constructed urbanisation and ‘barrack cities’, i.e. an urban, tenement-based environment, as a social problem and how, respectively, it framed ‘garden cities’ as a solution. In the 1940s, Väestöliitto promoted a national body for centralised housing policy and national planning. When the ARAVA laws (1949) turned out to be a mere financing system, Väestöliitto harnessed its expertise into more concrete action. In 1951, together with five other NGOs, Väestöliitto founded the Housing Foundation and embarked on a project for constructing a model city. This garden city became the residential suburb Tapiola. This marked a paradigm shift in Finnish town planning and housing policy, which had until then lacked a holistic and systematic approach. Along the 1940s–1950s, Väestöliitto thus constructed and developed its expertise from an influential interest organisation to a concrete housing policy actor.

This article looks at the Hollywood “blockbuster” movie The Blind Side (2009) to explore intersections of race, class, and gender in a significant neoliberal, cultural commodity. Animating the production and, apparently, the consumption of the film is the “inspiring” story of Michael Oher, an impoverished young African American man who was adopted by a wealthy white family and rose to success in the National Football League in the United States. The film mobilizes postracial and postfeminist discourses to tell a story of redemption and how private charity can overcome social problems that the state cannot. Ultimately, charity operates as a signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of domination that not only make charity possible but also creates an urban underclass in need of charity.

In Myanmar, one of the longest ruling military regimes in the world (1962—2011) exerting unrestrained coercion and relying on a pervasive security apparatus, has accepted a constitution and competitive elections. The military directed concatenation of developments but especially the Constitution that legalizes a unique power-sharing arrangement between the military and the elected government, contribute to the exceptionalism but also continuing coercion of Myanmar’s military, even under the democratically elected popular government of former democracy icons Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. Holding that a key step in a democratic transition must involve the scaling down of state coercive apparatus, the article demonstrates how this has not been the case in Myanmar. The size, expenditure and revenues of the armed forces have been maintained, the surveillance for political and social control continues, while the spread of mobile communication devices, and particularly social media, has opened up more extensive and easier opportunities for monitoring. Subjugating the practices of surveillance to laws is not prioritized in the complex political context of multiple pressing issues.

An 1894 biography of St. Francis of Assisi was a milestone in the lives of two young urban missionaries. They were “Sisters of the People” at the dynamic and progressive Wesleyan Methodist West London Mission in Soho, a poor and overcrowded central London district. Sister Mary Neal and Sister Emmeline Pethick would eventually distinguish themselves nationally, Emmeline as a militant suffragist in tandem with her husband Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, and later as a feminist and peace activist; Mary as a music educator and folklorist. French protestant clergyman Paul Sabatier's scholarly but lyrical biography of Francis enthralled the mission's leaders, including the superintendent, Hugh Price Hughes. Francis's rejection of his family's wealth, his insistence on absolute poverty for himself and his followers, and his devotion to the poor presented a compelling model of Christian service, one that the two young Sisters found especially exciting. They resigned the Sisterhood in 1895 to live cheaply in workers' housing just north of their old turf. This decision launched them into a national community of Franciscan-inspired settlers, philanthropists, “simple livers,” and collective farmers—offering us a new perspective on fin de siècle social activism.

The 2017 partnership between the National Football League (NFL) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) promises novel forms of cutting-edge real-time statistical analysis through the use of both radio frequency identification (RFID) chips and Amazon’s cloud-based machine learning and data-analytics tools. This use of RFID is heralded for its possibilities: for broadcasters, who are now capable of providing more thorough analysis; for fans, who can experience the game on a deeper analytical level using the NFL’s Next Gen Stats; and for coaches, who can capitalize on data-driven pattern recognition to gain a statistical edge over their competitors in real-time. In this paper, we respond to calls for further examination of the discursive positionings of RFID and big data technologies (Frith 2015; Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Specifically, this synthesis of RFID and cloud computing infrastructure via corporate partnership provides an alternative discursive positioning of two technologies that are often part of asymmetrical relations of power (Andrejevic 2014). Consequently, it is critical to examine the efforts of Amazon and the NFL to normalize pervasive spatial data collection and analytics to a mass audience by presenting these surveillance technologies as helpful tools for accessing new forms of data-driven knowing and analysis.

ABSTRACTWhile recent work has shown that interwar Asian civic associational culture was becoming more plural than previously understood, scholars focus mostly on transnational networks and neglect local associations co-existing in the colonial urban space. We also know little about how internationalist and liberal ideals interacted with notions of racial and national exclusion prevalent in the wider society. To overcome this, this article examines local organizations alongside transnational networks in interwar Hong Kong to understand fully how global trends in the interwar period affected colonial civic culture. Drawing on Freemasonry, Rotary, the League of Fellowship, and the Kowloon Residents’ Association, I discuss the aspirations of multi-racial urbanites in interwar Hong Kong and their limits. I argue that, while internationalism and colonial hierarchies allowed solidarity to be forged amongst multi-racial urbanites and encouraged their civic engagements, racism embedded in the society, rising nationalism, and constitutional constraints put limitations on their aspirations.

The paper is dedicated to the famous Lithuanian interwar architect, painter, set designer, teacher Vladimir Dubenecky (1888–1932). Russian-born artist who lived and worked in Kaunas (in 1919–1932), has left for Lithuania significant heritage of creative work. One of the unique features of V. Dubenecky‘s creative biography was that, being not a Lithuanian, he became the first seeker for the Lithuanian national style in architecture and interior design. The part of V. Dubenecky‘s projects, which reflects search for the national style in the interior design, is discussed in the paper. Three public interiors designed by V. Dubenecky are selected for a review (Karmėlava Church (1919), Frumkinai Store (1922) and “Lietuva” hotel (also named “Metropolis” hotel) (1925) as well as their interaction with the national style which was expressed in the Lithuanian interwar architecture. Representativeness, as one of the most characteristic conceptual aspirations in public interior, is also discussed. Santrauka Straipsnis skirtas žinomam tarpukario Lietuvos architektui, dailininkui, scenografui ir pedagogui Vladimirui Dubeneckiui (1888–1932). Rusų kilmės menininkas, gyvenęs ir dirbęs Kaune 1919–1932 m., paliko Lietuvai nemažą kūrybinį palikimą. Vienas iš išskirtinių V. Dubeneckio kūrybinės biografijos bruožų tas, kad, būdamas ne lietuvis, jis tapo pirmuoju tautinio stiliaus ieškotoju Lietuvoje. Straipsnyje aptariama V. Dubeneckio kūrybos dalis, kurioje atsispindėjo tautinio stiliaus paieškos visuomeniniuose interjeruose. Straipsnio apžvalgai atrinkti trys ryškiausi V. Dubeneckio projektuoti interjerai (Karmėlavos bažnyčia – 1919 m., Frumkinų parduotuvė – 1922 m. ir „Lietuvos“ viešbutis – 1925 m.) bei jų sąveikos su tarpukario laikotarpiu architektūroje besireiškusiu tautiniu stiliumi, kartu aptariamas visuomeninio interjero reprezentatyvumo aspektas kaip vienas būdingiausių konceptualių interjero siekių.

ObjectiveTo examine differences in clinical and patient-reported outcomes, including work, in individuals with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) living in rural and urban settings.MethodsUsing a sequential, explanatory mixed-method design, data from the British Society for Rheumatology Biologics Register for Ankylosing Spondylitis were used to (1) characterise participants with axSpA living in rural and urban areas and (b) assess any differences in outcome after commencement of biologic therapy (phase 1). Semistructured interviews (phase 2) further explored the results from phase 1.ResultsPatients with axSpA living in rural areas were older and more likely to work in a physical job. Among patients prescribed biologics, there were no differences in response to biologics, but after adjustment for age, sex and local area deprivation rural dwellers reported more presenteeism and overall work impairment. Work effects could be explained by accounting for individual differences in disease activity, fatigue, physical function and job type. Interviews highlighted the complex relationship between clinical factors, contextual factors (work environment, job demands) and work disability. The ability to work and flexibility in terms of what, when and how tasks are undertaken were important. Support from employers was variable and healthcare professionals were often perceived as unsupportive.ConclusionsPatients with axSpA living in rural areas report a greater impact of their disease on work productivity. New measures are needed to capture important contextual factors and comprehensively determine the impact of long-term conditions on work. Future European League Against Rheumatism axSpA recommendations should include support to work as a target to optimise quality of life in patients with axSpA.

This paper pays tribute to life and work of professor Dr. Slavko Stojković, a diplomat and state agent of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It is divided into five parts - introduction, short biography and three fields of his work - representation in international arbitral and judicial proceedings, where he made his principal achievements, diplomacy, and finally, legal writing, in which he also left a mark. The part on representation briefly mentions the cases Losinger (1935) and Pajzs, Csaky, Esterhazy (1935) before the Permanent Court of International Justice in which he acted as the state agent of Yugoslavia, the pathological arbitration S.E.E.E. v. Yugoslavia in which he was involved in various ways, and his role as the state agent of Yugoslavia before the German-Yugoslav and Hungaro-Yugoslav Mixed Arbitral Tribunals. Reference is made to sources that cover these cases in more detail. His diplomatic activity includes participation in the sessions of the League of Nations, and in particular his role in advocating the adoption of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism (1937), as well as his participation in negotiating with the Halyard Mission (1944) and with the French Government (1950). Among his legal writings, the most remarkable are his doctoral thesis De l'autorité de la sentence arbitrale en droit international public obtained at the Sorbonne in 1924 under the presidency of Antoine Pillet, and often cited even in modern times, his article on Mixed Arbitral Tribunals (1931) published in French, and his article on the "Possibility of Existence of International Arbitration Independent of National Laws" (1966) anticipating the appearance of investment arbitration. The authors conclude that Dr. Slavko Stojković was one of the most eminent lawyers of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the forefather of arbitration law in Yugoslavia and Serbia.

In the article, L.I. Borodin’s novel The Third Truth is considered against the background of disputes about the historical fate, culture and literature of Siberia in the second half of the twentieth century. The author attempts a holistic reading of The Third Truth using current methods of mythopoetic analysis. Attention is focused on the meaning of the name, on the key artistic concepts and the character series Ryabinin – Selivanov – the Obolenskiye. The poetics of the names of key characters and the artistic space that belongs to them are studied in detail. The basic concept is called the taiga, which is ontologically important for Siberian writers, and allows them to convey a characteristic attitude to nature. In the associative field of the concept, words with axiological semantics are identified. The author comes to the following conclusions: L. Borodin managed to fix the approaching end of the heroic stage of national history in the relationships of key characters; he managed to show in Selivanov’s fate the reflection of the tragedy of the new “urban” reality, which suppresses national and historical instincts and deforms the axiological foundations of existence; the place of this story in the literary biography of L. Borodin is determined by the uniqueness of the created aesthetic reality that corresponds to the idea of traditional artistic systems, but most importantly – the scale and nature of generalizations that characterize the modern civilizational choice.

This article follows the personal trajectory of Mikhail Lavrentiev from his early integration into the European mathematical community to his role in the construction of the Siberian science-city, Akademgorodok. Using biography as a privileged vantage point, it offers a revision of the conception of Akademgorodok as a remote utopia ultimately corrupted by political interference. It argues that, although built on a site geographically distant from the center, the project reflects Moscow’s aspirations and testifies to a close and evolving relationship between scientists and the party-state. Lavrentiev nurtured a community rooted in his personal networks and supervised the construction of an urban environment emblematic of the Khrushchev era. The success and the future of the new science-city were predicated on its visibility. Akademgorodok was a model and a showcase of post-Stalinist science, of a Soviet way of living and a universal way of knowing. Focusing on the city’s role as a showcase opens possibilities to take the investigation of late socialist science and society in new directions: from the unavoidable conflict between experts and the party state to the analysis of local, national, and transnational interactions shaping socialist knowledge-making. Ultimately, Lavrentiev’s ability to make Akademgorodok into the scene of major international encounters highlights the important role of Soviet science in the Cold War circulation of knowledge.

The article describes the character of Mykola Hankevich in the context of the early parliamentary elections of 1908 in Galicia. The author sets out his task, by shifting the usual historiographical accents, to consider the general election culture in the provincial capital in the early twentieth century, the theory and practice of the international socialist movement in a multinational urban environment. The well-established point of view of K. Jobst and other researchers, who believe that the conflict over Hankevich's face in the 1907 elections, when the executive leadership of the PPSD did not support his candidacy, is the beginning of the path that ultimately led the Polish and Ukrainian Social Democrats parties in the bosom of "their" national camps, and the ephemeral international socialist movement in Galicia disintegrated. The author believes that such a narrative simplifies the processes that took place in the environment of the Galician socialist parties. Cooperation between Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish socialists did not stop until the outbreak of the First World War. In the USDP, M. Hankevich himself did not cease to cooperate closely with Polish and Jewish socialists. During the snap election of 1908, the PPSD leader agreed with the candidacy of Mykola Hankevich, who, however, lost this election by winning 734 votes against 1011. However, in the anti-Ukrainian hysteria that had not yet subsided after the assassination of Andrzej Potocki, more than 40% of the vote, loyal to the Ukrainian and socialist candidates in the bourgeois Lviv district, looked like a tremendous success for Hankevich. Having identified the main reasons for this success, namely: his impeccable personal reputation, eloquence, popularity among the Lviv workers and intellectuals, genuine internationalism and willingness to represent different ethnic groups and different social strata, the author, referring to the memories of the Polish socialist Yevhen Morachevsky, calls another circumstance that explains the results of the vote quite differently. It is about 450 votes that Morachevsky bought in favour of Gankevich. The author notes that Morachevsky considers his dubious act as a peculiar feat - to pollute his hands to achieve a noble political goal, in which, in his opinion, he manifests the instinct and ability of a politician, thereby opposing himself to "dreamers" and idealists who did not compromise own principles.

Background: World Cancer Day (WCD) provides a platform to raise awareness. This year Uganda's commemoration was held at the Parliamentary grounds. Aim: To bring together Uganda's stakeholders through an inclusion approach to advocate for, share information and raise awareness on cancer while recognizing efforts made and appreciating challenges faced in the fight against the epidemic. Strategy: Partnership building was key. Partners involved were; Uganda Cancer Society (UCS), Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI), Ministry of Health, World Health Organization, media, Uganda Corporate League, interreligious council, Kampala Capital City Authority, Parliament of Uganda, Uganda Police and UCS member organizations. Program process: A committee was set up and a concept developed adopting the tri-process approach; “Before - During - After” for implementation of activities. Outcomes: The digital campaign was launched using the signs for change and the #WeCanICanUg. There was high media coverage; 3 major national stations Urban TV, NBS TV and NTV UG, one regional station-CGTN Africa, as well as online platforms such as; WHO Africa Web site, UICC World Cancer Day impact report, the Grape Vine, Chimp reports, and more than 5 YouTube media uploads as per our monitoring and surveillance efforts on reach and impact. The lighting of the Queen's way clock tower attracted many passersby and media coverage. In addition there was awareness creation in select churches (6) and mosques (2) on 4th and 2nd February respectively. The WCD ceremony was attended by over 400 guests and officiated by the Speaker of Parliament who doubled as chief walker. The 7.3 km match past attracted involvement of the community along the way. The Speaker called upon the government through Ministry of Health to inject more money into training of more cancer specialists to work on cancer patients. She also stated the need to have cancer services moved closer than just the regional centers but to every district referral hospital for cancer screening and cancer treatment. She pledged Parliament's unconditional support to work with civil society in the cancer fight. The Minister of Health committed to the full operationalization of regional cancer centers by 2019. She applauded the role of civil society through Uganda Cancer Society on the advocacy efforts stating that they had already started yielding good results . The event ended with the corporate league football competitions which were aimed at promoting healthy lifestyles through physical exercise. Notably was the match between the Parliamentary team and the UCI team. The winner was given a trophy marked WCD 2018. What was learned: The role of civil society through umbrella bodies like UCS plays a crucial role in cancer control as seen during through planning, mobilization, partnership building and execution of WCD activities. Creativity and innovation is key in generating stakeholder and public interest in cancer control activities like WCD.

Background: Cervical cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers in Honduran women. Lacking national or population-based registries, we rely on hospital registries to establish incidence: San Felipe General Hospital in 2012 diagnosed 38% of 998 women and The League against Cancer Hospital (LCC) in 2016 diagnosed 54.4% of 695 women with cervical cancer CC. According to PAHO's Honduras Profile 2013, screening coverage with Pap was 48.1%. Bruni in 2010 reported a prevalence of high risk HPV (hrHPV) infection for Central America of 13%, identifying genotypes 16, 18, 52, 31 and 58 as most frequent. Information about pathogenesis of hrHPV to induce cervical lesions is based on models of genotypes 16 and 18 only. Aim: Inform evidence of hrHPV genotypes collected in Honduras from an urban and a rural population, generate discussion and subsequent improvement of cervical cancer control strategies in our country. Methods: In 2016, 2 clinical studies funded by Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth College and the LCC accrued 913 women: 401 in Locomapa Valley (rural), 111 in La Mosquitia (remote rural), and 401 in a textile factory in San Pedro Sula (urban). Women were consented, to obtain 3 cervical samples, during a cervical cancer screening brigade. One sample for conventional cytology, and 2 for hrHPV by PCR genotyping. One local with our customized PCR device and the second at Dartmouth. An educational component and survey were included. Positive patients identified with hrHPV, pre or invasive cancer were referred to LCC for treatment and follow-up. Results: In Locomapa and the factory (rural and urban sites) 13% of participants were positive for hrHPV. Only 15% had HPV 16. The following common genotypes varied by location: urban factory HPV 59, 12% in rural location HPV 58, 10%; HPV 31, 9%; HPV 39 8%; HPV 35 and 66, 7%; HPV 45 and 51, 6%; HPV 18 and 56, 3%; HPV 33 and 52, 1%. 17% of women had multiple hrHPV coinfection. 7.7% had abnormal Pap tests. In La Mosquitia (remote rural), 24% of women were positive for hrHPV: HPV 52, 29%; HPV 16, 23%; HPV 39, 10%; HPV 68, 6%; HPV 58, 6%; HPV 45, 6%; HPV 51 and HPV 31, 18, 66, 59 and 35, 3% each. 1.8% had abnormal Pap tests; all participants identified with hrHPV were referred for follow-up. The average age was 40.3 years, parity, 3 children, education 6.0 years; and 15% were first-time users of a cervical screening program. Conclusion: Associate the burden of disease, with risk factors, will help us to generate models of prevention and care that are reproducible and effective to reduce morbi-mortality. Brigade-type screening models, with trained providers working at a community location over a single day, can offer improved access for women at risk and facilitate educational activities for health promotion. Introducing tests as hrHPV DNA detection, effectively reduces the volume of women to follow. Strengthening the capacity of primary care with novel screening techniques and ensure diligent follow-up is essential.

Publix Super Market is relentlessly committed to creating employment opportunities for the communities it serves, especially in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Amid ever increasing exogenous pressure, Publix has anchored itself in its world-class Human Resource Management, e.g., staffing protocols, performance management, and employee-management relations. Based on research as well as the personal work experiences of the authors with this organization, this paper and case study offers an in-depth view of how Publix has positioned itself—and remains positioned as—one of the top companies to work for in the United States. Rather than view HR as a cog in its operational engine, Publix holds its HR department as a strategic partner. This has been instrumental in maintaining a finger on the pulse of staff’s needs and creating a nurturing culture that champions every professional. Publix is not only a place where ‘shopping is a pleasure,’ but where working is a pleasure also.More than 150 years ago, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 affirmed that U.S. citizens are entitled to equal protection under the law. Over 50 years ago, the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination. However, despite over a century of legislation and activism, discrimination remains a pressing issue plaguing America today. Despite racial turmoil that afflicts our society, Publix has announced they will not stand for injustice by emphasizing, “Let’s end the injustice. Let’s stand together.” Publix has made a $1 million contribution to the National Urban League affiliates across the Southeast, as they continue to support their civil rights efforts.Publix offers its associates career growth, and the necessary training for equitable promotional opportunities for all their diverse employees. Furthermore, it invests in its associates' health, with a benefits package that encourages wellness, smoking cessation, and provides primary care, vision, and dental plans. Using a qualitative process based on personal experiences and documented literature, this case study will guide you through some of Publix’s hallmark human resource policies, how the company has embraced them, and how it works daily to encourage and incentivize its associates' career growth.

ABSTRACT Introduction and objectives Injuries and noncommunicable diseases account for greater than 73% deaths and 76% disability adjusted life years (DALYs) in Latin America, where trauma care is challenging especially when resources are scarce. Education and training is a basic step in trauma systems development, which was shown to improve survival. Except for urban areas, trauma courses are unavailable and unaffordable in the Latin region. The aim of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of implementation of a basic trauma education course (BTC) for resource-limited areas adopted and promulgated by the Panamerican Trauma Society (PTS) since 2011. Materials and methods Basic trauma education course was administered in Paraguay, Medellin, Chile, and Panama during the PTS congresses (2011-2013). The two-day course was based on the patient's pathway system, addressing the management of the patient through various echelon of care from rural health centers to local provincial hospital and tertiary treatment facilities. It contained 20 hours of didactic lectures and hands on skill labs on basic trauma resuscitation, stabilization, and transport, as well as trauma system-oriented teaching (triage, EMS, kinematics, trauma registries). Panamerican Trauma Society international and national instructors administered the courses. Course logistics and coordination were carried out by international and local coordinators and by trauma league medical students. Pre and post (30 multiple-choice questions) tests were used to assess participants. Paired t-test was used to compare scores. Results Fifty-four students (rural physicians, EMS providers, students, nurses, and administrators) participated. Pre and posttest score comparison showed significant improvement 74% vs 85% respectively, p-value < 0.0001. Conclusion A tailored trauma course and evaluation can be feasible in educating local providers. The PTS can promulgate the application of BTCs that may serve as a model for continuing trauma care education in developing countries. Course follow-up evaluation is pending. How to cite this article Mata LV, Mora FE, Quiodettis M, Fischer J, Machain GM, Salamea JC, Rodas EB, Aboutanos MB. Panamerican Trauma Society Basic Trauma Education Course Administration in Resource-limited Areas. Panam J Trauma Crit Care Emerg Surg 2016;5(2):83-87.

The myth that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was triggered by orders from the Arab leaders——a cornerstone of the official Israeli version of the 1948 war and intended to absolve it of responsibility for the refugee problem——dies hard. Thus, it continues to be deployed by apologists for Israel as a means of blaming the Palestinians for their own fate. Even Benny Morris, one of whose major conclusions in his 1986 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem was to discredit the Israeli claim, cannot seem to let go of it completely. Thus, the conclusion of the substantially revised update of the book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), states that although the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) and the local National Committees made efforts to block the exodus of army-aged males, ““at the same time, they actively promoted the depopulation of villages and towns. Many thousands of Arabs——women, children, and old people……left, well before battle was joined, as a result of advice and orders from local Arab commanders and officials……. Indeed, already months before the war the Arab states and the AHC had endorsed the removal of dependents from active and potential combat zones……. There can be no exaggerating the importance of these early, Arab-initiated evacuations in the demoralization, and eventual exodus, of the remaining rural and urban populations”” (pp. 589––90). Given the endurance of this central plank of the Israeli doctrine of 1948, JPS has decided to reprint for the first time a difficult-to-obtain article published in July 1959 by Walid Khalidi in a long-defunct periodical of the American University of Beirut (AUB), Middle East Forum. Entitled ““Why Did the Palestinians Leave? An Examination of the Zionist Version of the Exodus of '48,”” the article was based on a talk Professor Khalidi gave at AUB earlier that year. After tracing the origins and first appearance of the Zionist claim, the article, using AHC and Arab League archival material, Arab and Palestinian press releases and reports, Arab and Haganah radio broadcasts, and other Arab and Israeli sources exhaustively rebuts the claim through showing both what the broadcasts did not say and what they did say. JPS is reprinting the article as is. While the July 1959 article debunks the myth using documents at the national or Arab level, a second article by Professor Khalidi published in December 1959, ““The Fall of Haifa,”” touches on the Arab orders at the local level, an issue equally emphasized by Morris. The article, also published in the Middle East Forum, puts the exodus from the city after the Haganah offensive that led to its capture in April 1948 within the overall military context: Anglo-Zionist collusion, the balance of power, and so on. The article also deals directly with the orders and reproduces the texts of the eleven communiquéés issued by the Haifa National Committee between the UN General Assembly partition decision (November 1947) and the fall of Haifa in April, all of which have bearing on the subject. JPS is reproducing these pages as an appendix but intends to publish ““The Fall of Haifa”” in its entirety at a later date.

Research HighlightsIn the quest to develop cities for the long run, the debate is whether to retain elements of culture or to reinvent such spaces for new uses. Cultural heritage preservation thus becomes an issue in urban planning, particularly in developing countries including Malaysia (Mohd Shakir Tamjes et al, 2017). Scholars mention that Kuala Lumpur needs to create a distinctive city identity and image if it is to achieve its bigger goal of becoming a World-Class City by 2020 (Mohamad Asri Ibrahim et al, 2017). A question raised by researchers is whether the policies to safeguard heritage buildings in Kuala Lumpur is comparable to the practices in UNESCO heritage sites such as Malacca and Georgetown (Mohd Shakir Tamjes et al, 2017). Through participant observation, combining focus group discussions, content analysis, photography, and videography, I outline how the preservation of one particular historical building, a Chinese clan association, increases the cultural value of the city’s surroundings in Kuala Lumpur, as well as being a major tourist attraction. This makes the case for the continued retention of historical buildings and practices, despite overarching social changes such as super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007). Research Objectives This paper makes the case for preserving a particular heritage building, namely the Chan See Shu Yuen Clan Association Kuala Lumpur & Selangor (CSSYKL), a clan association, pre-war historical site, and tourist attraction. Methodology How does the preservation of CSSYKL increase the cultural value of the city’s surroundings in Kuala Lumpur? This research question is answered through fieldwork by the project leader through participant observation which included photography, videography, content analysis of secondary documents, and focus group discussions with clan leaders and members. Photographic evidence is provided to argue for the case of enriching place attachment through the retention of meaning for inhabitants of Kuala Lumpur, due to the special nature it possesses. For example, Monnet (2014) conducted a photoethnography of urban space in the form of a multimedia essay, referring to the “production of data” rather than the “collection of data”. Monnet (2014) explained that images and sounds allow for attentive observation of the smallest details of daily life, and that the ethnographer experientially chooses to interpret and define what should be recorded in their photography - hence the “production of data”. This renders photographic evidence the best form of data for the case of cultural heritage preservation within the urban. Photographs were also harvested from stills captured in Google Maps under the Street View, where the journey was screen captured using Game DVR, a software which comes enclosed with Microsoft Windows 10. Results The photographic evidence shows how the preservation of cultural heritage buildings add character to the presence of Kuala Lumpur Chinatown, or Petaling Street. In the case of CSSYKL, it provides the historical elements as well as familiarity given its longstanding association with Kuala Lumpur’s history, and thus evokes the symbolic aesthetic. It provides symbolic aesthetic meaning to the future of Kuala Lumpur’s development and enriches the local cultural expression in league with the Malaysian National Cultural Policy. Ultimately, it guarantees that no matter how developed or industrialised Kuala Lumpur is, what with the move into the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Internet of Things, there will still be cultural meaning and place attachment resonant within the heart and soul of Kuala Lumpur. Even in the face of super-diversity, the clan association building will still reinvent itself as a place of attachment not only to those of Chinese descent but to all who are interested to appreciate its value. Findings Chan See Shu Yuen Clan Association Kuala Lumpur & Selangor (CSSYKL) is one example of a historical building which functioned not only in the past as a community centre for the Chinese who migrated to Malaya in search of economic opportunity, but still retains its functions today as a gateway to maintaining links with Mainland China, especially in the economic dimension. Simultaneously, the heritage building also attracts tourists from all around the world, including those from China and local tourists themselves. Acknowledgement This research work is supported by the Ministry of Education of Malaysia under Grant Number FRGS/1/2018/WAB12/UKM/02/1 (Superdiversity Networks: Cantonese Clan Associations in Malaysia as Transnational Social Support System).

This study explores the intersections between the study of sport and the study of the city through the extension of sport history to themes traditionally explored by geography—notably urban planning scholars. Its focus is two case studies related to urban planning decisions in early millennial Sydney, Australia. Through an examination of public submissions in response to building development applications made by two community-owned professional sports organizations competing in the National Rugby League, the study explores how modern sporting fandom complicates ideas about place and locality through forms of delocalization and glocalization. The authors conclude that when exploring the phenomenon of place protection, the built environment is not necessarily the primary factor informing a sense of place attachment in an urban environment.

Baseball has been proudly coined “the national pastime” for nearly its entire existence. The sport evolved from several English bat and ball games and quickly became part of the American identity in the 19th century. Only a few decades after the first baseball club formed in New York City, amateur clubs began to organize into loose confederations as competition and glory entered a game originally associated with fraternal leisure. Soon after, clubs with enough fans and capital began to pay players for their services and by 1871 and league of solely professionals emerged. Known as The National Professional Base Ball Players Association, this league would only last five seasons but would lay the groundwork for the American tradition of professional sports that exists today. In this paper, I analyze the development of the sport of baseball into a professional industry alongside the concurrent industrialization and urbanization of the United States. I used primary documents from the era describing the growing popularity of the sport as well as modern historians’ accounts of early baseball. In addition, I rely on sources focusing on the changing American identity during this period known as The Gilded Age, which many attribute to be the beginnings of the modern understanding of American values. Ultimately, I conclude that baseball’s progression into a professional league from grassroots origins compared to a broader trend of the ideal American being viewed as urban, skilled, and affluent despite the majority not able to fit this characterization. How certain attributes become inherent to a group identity and the types of individuals able to communicate these messages are also explored. My analysis of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players provides insight on the formative experience of the modern collective American identity and baseball’s place in it as our national pastime.

Abstract For more than six years, Ukrainian society has been constantly searching for ideas as to how to write a new “national biography.” In a society divided by armed conflict, the so-called decommunization process is considered to be an idea capable of uniting a nation. This process started back in 2015, with the passing of a specific law that required not only the deconstruction of Soviet-time monuments in public spaces, but also a huge decommunization of place names. The article will explore the main practices of place (re-)naming during the different stages of the decommunization (but not de-ideologization) of spaces, as well as describing the problems that may emerge in society as a result of a rapid transition from one narrative to another. Based on a case study of spatial identities of internally displaced people, I am going to answer the question of how people perceive renamed spaces, and how they reclaim and re-appropriate these spaces in the midst of an identity crisis.

Introduction: Health information-seeking behaviors (HISB) are complex, varying by age, race and socioeconomic status. Examination of the process of HISB is critical in addressing the disproportionally high stroke risk in African Americans (AAs), especially in young adults where the stroke risk is greatest. We developed a survey to understand HISB related to stroke knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes, targeted to young AA professionals aged 21-45. Methods: Phase 1 consisted of focus groups in four states, followed by Phase 2: development, pretesting and pilot survey administration of an online survey. AA members of the southern region of the National Urban League Young Professionals (NULYP) network, a 24-chapter consortium across 11 states, were recruited for participation. Results: Phase 1 consisted of 20 AAs, 15 women, ages 26-42. Five themes emerged: 1) health concerns, 2) preventive actions, 3) preventive awareness, 4) stroke knowledge, and 5) trust in information source. Health information was primarily obtained online, and respondents cited credible information sources as researchers, healthcare providers, and government health sources (i.e., CDC or NIH). Personal contacts such as family, close friends and civic organizations were also viewed as trusted sources. The pilot survey in Phase 2 consisted of a 42-item instrument: 10 demographic questions, 8 sets of items comprising 5 scales and 2 dichotomous questions. After pretesting, 89 surveys were completed (75% women, 89% college-educated, employed). Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients ranged from 0.68 to 0.85 across all survey items. Respondents did not perceive themselves at risk for stroke and would not approach their healthcare provider for stroke risk reduction information. Relevance of knowing and monitoring one’s blood pressure did not emerge as a strong belief across either phase. Conclusion: Results from this developmental work show professional AA adults aged 26-42 identify and understand stroke risk factors; however awareness and beliefs regarding personal susceptibility can impose a facilitatory or inhibitory behavior when seeking general health information.

Abstract Today, the reduction of social inequalities in health is on the political agenda in public health. The complex reality of the determinants of these health inequalities remains difficult to understand and translate into practical actions. One of the reasons is that the circulation of expertise amongst researchers, actors in the field, and public decision is not systematic and still too rare. In 2013, the Federative Institute of Interdisciplinary Research and Studies Health Society (IFERISS) of Toulouse has an interdisciplinary platform (health, the humanities, and the social sciences) that directly offers expertise to public health actors, institutions, and local communities in order to respond to public health issues. At the request of the actors, AAPRISS can intervene at all stages of a study or an intervention, from conceptual and methodological construction to implementation support, and data analysis and use. In particular, the team has expertise in public policy evaluation, support for transferability according to the key functions/implementation/context (FIC) model, and awareness-raising at the intersection of urban planning and health. The platform is in a multi-year partnership with local authorities, the regional health agency of Occitanie, the primary health insurance funds of Occitanie, and various partners in civil society. Six years after the establishment of the AAPRISS platform, there is a strong demand for support and research from the actors and institutions. However, funding for activities remains uncertain despite the support of the National Cancer League and an increasingly strong network of partners. Mixed structures housing spaces for both research and action, which create a dynamic of Population Health Intervention Research, are showing themselves to be effective and seem to meet a need, but their financial stability is insufficient to sustain their activities and promote sustainable reduction of social inequalities in health. Key messages Mixed structures housing spaces for both research and action, which create a dynamic of Population Health Intervention Research, are showing themselves to be effective and seem to meet a need. But the financial stability of this mixed structures is insufficient to sustain their activities and promote sustainable reduction of social inequalities in health.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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Introduction The academic area known as food studies—incorporating elements from disciplines including anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, gastronomy, and cultural studies as well as a range of multi-disciplinary approaches—asserts that cooking and eating practices are less a matter of nutrition (maintaining life by absorbing nutrients from food) and more a personal or group expression of various social and/or cultural actions, values or positions. The French philosopher, Michel de Certeau agrees, arguing, moreover, that there is an urgency to name and unpick (what he identifies as) the “minor” practices, the “multifarious and silent reserve of procedures” of everyday life. Such practices are of crucial importance to all of us, as although seemingly ordinary, and even banal, they have the ability to “organise” our lives (48). Within such a context, the following aims to consider the influence and significance of an important (although largely unstudied) professional figure in rural and regional economic life: the country food preparer variously known as the local chef or cook. Such an approach is obviously framed by the concept of “cultural economy”. This term recognises the convergence, and interdependence, of the spheres of the cultural and the economic (see Scott 335, for an influential discussion on how “the cultural geography of space and the economic geography of production are intertwined”). Utilising this concept in relation to chefs and cooks seeks to highlight how the ways these figures organise (to use de Certeau’s term) the social and cultural lives of those in their communities are embedded in economic practices and also how, in turn, their economic contributions are dependent upon social and cultural practices. This initial mapping of the influence and significance of the rural and regional chef in one rural and regional area, therefore, although necessarily different in approach and content, continues the application of such converged conceptualisations of the cultural and economic as Teema Tairu’s discussion of the social, recreational and spiritual importance of food preparation and consumption by the unemployed in Finland, Guy Redden’s exploration of how supermarket products reflect shared values, and a series of analyses of the cultural significance of individual food products, such as Richard White’s study of vegemite. While Australians, both urban and rural, currently enjoy access to an internationally renowned food culture, it is remarkable to consider that it has only been during the years following the Second World War that these sophisticated and now much emulated ways of eating and cooking have developed. It is, indeed, only during the last half century that Australian eating habits have shifted from largely Anglo-Saxon influenced foods and meals that were prepared and eaten in the home, to the consumption of a wider range of more international and sophisticated foods and meals that are, increasingly, prepared by others and eaten outside the consumer’s residence. While a range of commonly cited influences has prompted this relatively recent revolution in culinary practice—including post-war migration, increasing levels of prosperity, widespread international travel, and the forces of globalisation—some of this change owes a debt to a series of influential individual figures. These tastemakers have included food writers and celebrity chefs; with early exponents including Margaret Fulton, Graham Kerr and Charmaine Solomon (see Brien). The findings of this study suggests that many restaurant chefs, and other cooks, have similarly played, and continue to take, a key role in the lives of not only the, necessarily, limited numbers of individuals who dine in a particular eatery or the other chefs and/or cooks trained in that establishment (Ruhlman, Reach), but also the communities in which they work on a much broader scale. Considering Chefs In his groundbreaking study, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Australian food historian Michael Symons proposes that those who prepare food are worthy of serious consideration because “if ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our technologies, arts and religions” (xi). Writing that cooks “deserve to have their stories told often and well,” and that, moreover, there is a “need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light” (xi), Symons’s is a clarion call to investigate the role and influence of cooks. Charles-Allen Baker-Clark has explicitly begun to address this lacunae in his Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (2006), positing not only how these figures have shaped our relationships with food and eating, but also how these relationships impact on identities, culture and a range of social issues including those of social justice, spirituality and environmental sustainability. With the growing public interest in celebrities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while such research on chefs and/or cooks is still in its infancy, most of the existing detailed studies on individuals focus on famed international figures such as Marie-Antoine Carême (Bernier; Kelly), Escoffier (James; Rachleff; Sanger), and Alexis Soyer (Brandon; Morris; Ray). Despite an increasing number of tabloid “tell-all” surveys of contemporary celebrity chefs, which are largely based on mass media sources and which display little concern for historical or biographical accuracy (Bowyer; Hildred and Ewbank; Simpson; Smith), there have been to date only a handful of “serious” researched biographies of contemporary international chefs such as Julia Child, Alice Waters (Reardon; Riley), and Bernard Loiseux (Chelminski)—the last perhaps precipitated by an increased interest in this chef following his suicide after his restaurant lost one of its Michelin stars. Despite a handful of collective biographical studies of Australian chefs from the later-1980s on (Jenkins; O’Donnell and Knox; Brien), there are even fewer sustained biographical studies of Australian chefs or cooks (Clifford-Smith’s 2004 study of “the supermarket chef,” Bernard King, is a notable exception). Throughout such investigations, as well as in other popular food writing in magazines and cookbooks, there is some recognition that influential chefs and cooks have worked, and continue to work, outside such renowned urban culinary centres as Paris, London, New York, and Sydney. The Michelin starred restaurants of rural France, the so-called “gastropubs” of rural Britain and the advent of the “star-chef”-led country bed and breakfast establishment in Australia and New Zealand, together with the proliferation of farmer’s markets and a public desire to consume locally sourced, and ecologically sustainable, produce (Nabhan), has focused fresh attention on what could be called “the rural/regional chef”. However, despite the above, little attention has focused on the Australian non-urban chef/cook outside of the pages of a small number of key food writing magazines such as Australian Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel. Setting the Scene with an Australian Country Example: Armidale and Guyra In 2004, the Armidale-Dumaresq Council (of the New England region, New South Wales, Australia) adopted the slogan “Foodies thrive in Armidale” to market its main city for the next three years. With a population of some 20,000, Armidale’s main industry (in economic terms) is actually education and related services, but the latest Tourist Information Centre’s Dining Out in Armidale (c. 2006) brochure lists some 25 restaurants, 9 bistros and brasseries, 19 cafés and 5 fast food outlets featuring Australian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Thai, Indian and “international” cuisines. The local Yellow Pages telephone listings swell the estimation of the total number of food-providing businesses in the city to 60. Alongside the range of cuisines cited above, a large number of these eateries foreground the use of fresh, local foods with such phrases as “local and regional produce,” “fresh locally grown produce,” “the finest New England ingredients” and locally sourced “New England steaks, lamb and fresh seafood” repeatedly utilised in advertising and other promotional material. Some thirty kilometres to the north along the New England highway, the country town of Guyra, proclaimed a town in 1885, is the administrative and retail centre for a shire of some 2,200 people. Situated at 1,325 metres above sea level, the town is one of the highest in Australia with its main industries those of fine wool and lamb, beef cattle, potatoes and tomatoes. Until 1996, Guyra had been home to a large regional abattoir that employed some 400 staff at the height of its productivity, but rationalisation of the meat processing industry closed the facility, together with its associated pet food processor, causing a downturn in employment, local retail business, and real estate values. Since 2004, Guyra’s economy has, however, begun to recover after the town was identified by the Costa Group as the perfect site for glasshouse grown tomatoes. Perfect, due to its rare combination of cool summers (with an average of less than two days per year with temperatures over 30 degrees celsius), high winter light levels and proximity to transport routes. The result: 3.3 million kilograms of truss, vine harvested, hydroponic “Top of the Range” tomatoes currently produced per annum, all year round, in Guyra’s 5-hectare glasshouse: Australia’s largest, opened in December 2005. What residents (of whom I am one) call the “tomato-led recovery” has generated some 60 new local jobs directly related to the business, and significant flow on effects in terms of the demand for local services and retail business. This has led to substantial rates of renovation and building of new residential and retail properties, and a noticeably higher level of trade flowing into the town. Guyra’s main street retail sector is currently burgeoning and stories of its renewal have appeared in the national press. Unlike many similar sized inland towns, there are only a handful of empty shops (and most of these are in the process of being renovated), and new commercial premises have recently been constructed and opened for business. Although a small town, even in Australian country town terms, Guyra now has 10 restaurants, hotel bistros and cafés. A number of these feature local foods, with one pub’s bistro regularly featuring the trout that is farmed just kilometres away. Assessing the Contribution of Local Chefs and Cooks In mid-2007, a pilot survey to begin to explore the contribution of the regional chef in these two close, but quite distinct, rural and regional areas was sent to the chefs/cooks of the 70 food-serving businesses in Armidale and Guyra that I could identify. Taking into account the 6 returns that revealed a business had closed, moved or changed its name, the 42 replies received represented a response rate of 65.5per cent (or two thirds), representatively spread across the two towns. Answers indicated that the businesses comprised 18 restaurants, 13 cafés, 6 bistro/brasseries, 1 roadhouse, 1 takeaway/fast food and 3 bed and breakfast establishments. These businesses employed 394 staff, of whom 102 were chefs and/cooks, or 25.9 per cent of the total number of staff then employed by these establishments. In answer to a series of questions designed to ascertain the roles played by these chefs/cooks in their local communities, as well as more widely, I found a wide range of inputs. These chefs had, for instance, made a considerable contribution to their local economies in the area of fostering local jobs and a work culture: 40 (95 per cent) had worked with/for another local business including but not exclusively food businesses; 30 (71.4 per cent) had provided work experience opportunities for those aspiring to work in the culinary field; and 22 (more than half) had provided at least one apprenticeship position. A large number had brought outside expertise and knowledge with them to these local areas, with 29 (69 per cent) having worked in another food business outside Armidale or Guyra. In terms of community building and sustainability, 10 (or almost a quarter) had assisted or advised the local Council; 20 (or almost half) had worked with local school children in a food-related way; 28 (two thirds) had helped at least one charity or other local fundraising group. An extra 7 (bringing the cumulative total to 83.3 per cent) specifically mentioned that they had worked with/for the local gallery, museum and/or local history group. 23 (more than half) had been involved with and/or contributed to a local festival. The question of whether they had “contributed anything else important, helpful or interesting to the community” elicited the following responses: writing a food or wine column for the local paper (3 respondents), delivering TAFE teacher workshops (2 respondents), holding food demonstrations for Rotary and Lions Clubs and school fetes (5 respondents), informing the public about healthy food (3 respondents), educating the public about environmental issues (2 respondents) and working regularly with Meals on Wheels or a similar organisation (6 respondents, or 14.3 per cent). One respondent added his/her work as a volunteer driver for the local ambulance transport service, the only non-food related response to this question. Interestingly, in line with the activity of well-known celebrity chefs, in addition to the 3 chefs/cooks who had written a food or wine column for the local newspaper, 11 respondents (more than a quarter of the sample) had written or contributed to a cookbook or recipe collection. One of these chefs/cooks, moreover, reported that he/she produced a weblog that was “widely read”, and also contributed to international food-related weblogs and websites. In turn, the responses indicated that the (local) communities—including their governing bodies—also offer some support of these chefs and cooks. Many respondents reported they had been featured in, or interviewed and/or photographed for, a range of media. This media comprised the following: the local newspapers (22 respondents, 52.4 per cent), local radio stations (19 respondents, 45.2 per cent), regional television stations (11 respondents, 26.2 per cent) and local websites (8 respondents, 19 per cent). A number had also attracted other media exposure. This was in the local, regional area, especially through local Council publications (31 respondents, 75 per cent), as well as state-wide (2 respondents, 4.8 per cent) and nationally (6 respondents, 14.3 per cent). Two of these local chefs/cooks (or 4.8 per cent) had attracted international media coverage of their activities. It is clear from the above that, in the small area surveyed, rural and regional chefs/cooks make a considerable contribution to their local communities, with all the chefs/cooks who replied making some, and a number a major, contribution to those communities, well beyond the requirements of their paid positions in the field of food preparation and service. The responses tendered indicate that these chefs and cooks contributed regularly to local public events, institutions and charities (with a high rate of contribution to local festivals, school programs and local charitable activities), and were also making an input into public education programs, local cultural institutions, political and social debates of local importance, as well as the profitability of other local businesses. They were also actively supporting not only the future of the food industry as a whole, but also the viability of their local communities, by providing work experience opportunities and taking on local apprentices for training and mentorship. Much more than merely food providers, as a group, these chefs and cooks were, it appears, also operating as food historians, public intellectuals, teachers, activists and environmentalists. They were, moreover, operating as content producers for local media while, at the same time, acting as media producers and publishers. Conclusion The terms “chef” and “cook” can be diversely defined. All definitions, however, commonly involve a sense of professionalism in food preparation reflecting some specialist knowledge and skill in the culinary arts, as well as various levels of creativity, experience and responsibility. In terms of the specific duties that chefs and professional cooks undertake every day, almost all publications on the subject deal specifically with workplace related activities such as food and other supply ordering, staff management, menu planning and food preparation and serving. This is constant across culinary textbooks (see, for instance, Culinary Institute of America 2002) and more discursive narratives about the professional chef such as the bestselling autobiographical musings of Anthony Bourdain, and Michael Ruhlman’s journalistic/biographical investigations of US chefs (Soul; Reach). An alternative preliminary examination, and categorisation, of the roles these professionals play outside their kitchens reveals, however, a much wider range of community based activities and inputs than such texts suggest. It is without doubt that the chefs and cooks who responded to the survey discussed above have made, and are making, a considerable contribution to their local New England communities. It is also without doubt that these contributions are of considerable value, and valued by, those country communities. Further research will have to consider to what extent these contributions, and the significance and influence of these chefs and cooks in those communities are mirrored, or not, by other country (as well as urban) chefs and cooks, and their communities. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engaging Histories: Australian Historical Association Regional Conference, at the University of New England, September 2007. I would like to thank the session’s participants for their insightful comments on that presentation. A sincere thank you, too, to the reviewers of this article, whose suggestions assisted my thinking on this piece. Research to complete this article was carried out whilst a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. References Armidale Tourist Information Centre. Dining Out in Armidale [brochure]. Armidale: Armidale-Dumaresq Council, c. 2006. Baker-Clark, C. A. 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