Journal articles on the topic 'Northern Tourism Europe'

Abstract During the past decades, tourism has become one of the fastest growing areas in the service sector in the world. If the aspiration is to develop a well-organised tourism industry, then fulfilment of tourist needs and wishes should be achieved. The most common technique for identifying the compatibility between tourist needs and the experience with tourism destination is tourist satisfaction measurement.Lithuania is a small country in the northern part of Central/ Eastern Europe; the country is rarely considered as an independent tourist destination, but mostly as one of the Baltic States. Foreign tourist satisfaction is very important for the country. Considering the necessity to excel in the region, the aim of the research is to develop the index of tourist satisfaction of Lithuania.The previously elaborated model of Lithuanian tourist satisfaction index is used as a background. The index of tourist satisfaction of Lithuania is constructed by the following stages: 1. A questionnaire research with foreign tourists, based on a theoretical model of Lithuanian Tourist Satisfaction Index, is provided; 2. The impact of model’s variables on tourist satisfaction with Lithuania is determined; 3. The main variables having an impact on foreign tourist satisfaction with Lithuania are determined; and a general model of the index of tourist satisfaction of Lithuania is composed.

Lakes provide different ecosystem services, including those related to tourism and recreation. Sustainable development principles should be respected in lake tourism planning. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of tourism on the lakeshore zone in a typical post-glacial Lakeland in Northern Poland (Central Europe). An explanatory analysis of the distribution of individual spatial factor values was performed using the SHapley Additive exPlanations algorithm (SHAP). In a first step, the aim was to select a Machine Learning model for modelling based on Shapley values. The greater or lesser influence of a given factor on the tourism function was measured for individual lakes. The final results of ensemble modelling and SHAP were obtained by averaging the results of five random repetitions of the execution of these models. The impact of tourism on the lakeshore zone can be much more accurately determined using an indirect method, by analysing the tourism and recreational infrastructure constantly present there. The values of the indices proposed in the study provide indirect information on the number of tourists using the tourist and recreational facilities and are a measure of the impact of tourism on the lakeshore zone. The developed methodology can be applied to the majority of post-glacial lakes in Europe and other regions of the world in order to monitor the threats resulting from shore zone exploitation. Such studies can be an appropriate tool for management and planning by the relevant authorities.

Purpose Cross-cultural research constitutes a pivotal topic for marketing; however, the literature indicates that there are a few studies analyzing social media reviews from a cross-cultural perspective using cultural proximity (supra-national level) as a proxy of culture. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify cross-cultural differences in service evaluations and specifically, in hotel appraisals among tourists from Central, Eastern (including Post-Soviet States), Northern and Southern Europe. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative approach has been taken by studying online user-generated ratings of hotels on Trip Advisor. In total, 1,055 reviews of five hotels in Greece were used for the study. Findings Multivariate analysis of variance and analysis of variances results confirm cultural differences in overall service evaluations and attributes (value, location, sleeping quality, rooms, cleanliness and service) of tourists from various European regions. Specifically, Eastern Europeans uploaded more reviews than any other European group, whereas Northern Europeans were more generous in their appraisals than Eastern, Southern and Central Europeans. Practical implications The results of the study could be used for segmentation purposes of the European tourism market and for recognizing, which aspects of their services need to be improved based on the segments they serve. Moreover, managers should encourage Northern and Eastern Europeans to upload their reviews as both groups are more generous in their evaluations. Moreover, the findings are useful to marketers of other services. Originality/value To the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that examines cross-cultural differences in hotel appraisals from a supra-national perspective including developed (Northern and Western Europe), developing (Southern Europe) and emerging tourism markets (Eastern Europe).

With the implementation of European integration policies such as the single market, the Euro and the Schengen Visa, the EU member states are developing closer economic ties through tourism, and their level of tourism integration is constantly improving. Taking the 28 EU member states as research objects, this paper constructs a tourism economic connection network among them, measures the strength of their tourism economic connections from 1995 to 2018 by using the modified gravity model and social network method, and analyzes the spatial structure characteristics and effects of the EU tourism economy. The results are as follows: (1) The tourism economic ties of EU member states are growing increasingly close, enhancing network stability. (2) Germany, France, Italy, Austria and the United Kingdom are the top five countries in the degree centrality and closeness centrality rankings, meaning that they are located in the center of the network and have great influence, and the network is becoming increasingly concentrated. Germany, Italy, Sweden, Austria and France play an important intermediary role in the network, and the centrality of most member states has increased. (3) The core areas are mainly concentrated in Western Europe, Southern Europe, Mediterranean mainland countries and Central Europe, while the marginal areas are mainly concentrated in Eastern Europe, Northern Europe and Mediterranean island countries; the network connection density of the core area, the network connection density of the marginal area, and the network connection density between the core and marginal area overall show an increasing trend. (4) Improvements in the complete network connectedness and a reduction in graph efficiency can significantly reduce differences in EU tourism economic development levels and improve spatial equity.

In the region of Northern Hungary the unique Cavebath of Miskolcatapolca is one of the leading health tourism service positioning itself on national and international market with its developing supply items and 4 star qualifications. It has a unique natural background all over in Europe; this uniqueness gives an opportunity to develop brand, which is a determinative item of competitiveness. Because of the competition between destinations and the ever-changing nature of tourists’ expectations and behavior tourism destinations need to be managed as other commercial brands. The aim of our research was to analyze the role and possibilities of product development which is based on the unique natural factors, and to help to expand the domestic health tourism supply. We examined how the possibility of branding and brand equity change based on brand elements; how satisfied are guests with the services; how often guests visit the bath; what kind of period guests arrive in the bath; what kind of services do guests try; how do guests arrive in the bath with. In summer of 2014 we asked 210 Hungarian customers to fill the questionnaire in the Cavebath. The choosing of guests happened randomly. 199 questionnaires were correctly filled. JEL CODE: Z32

Hermanten Kate, Travels and researches in Native North America, 1882–1883Rainer Ohliger, Karen Schönwälder, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, European encounters: migrants, migration and European societies since 1945Elizabeth Murphy-Lejeune, Student mobility and narrative in Europe: the new strangersMarja J. Spierenburg, Strangers, spirits and land reforms: conflicts about land in Dande, Northern ZimbabweRenée R. Shield and Stanley M. Aronson, Aging in today’s world: conversations between an anthropologist and a physicianShinji Yamashita, Bali and beyond: explorations in the anthropology of tourism

Abstract Most of the strategies developed to “save” rural territories in Europe have not been successful. One of their main problems has been the adoption of the top-down paradigm when approaching the development of those territories. Portugal is a good example of the difficulty in adopting a bottom-up paradigm. The main objective of this paper is to present the perceptions of the local (including the residents) and regional stakeholders acting at Boticas, regarding the set of resources available and the development of the tourism industry. Boticas is a northern Portuguese, rural low-density municipality. In capturing those perceptions, the research contributes to the establishment of a more integrated and innovative development strategy and thus, a more capable strategy for profiting from the potential associated with the growth of the tourism industry that has been experienced recently in Portugal. The adoption of a mixed-method was suggested for evaluating these resources and capturing the perceptions of the tourist potential by different stakeholders. Empirical data was collected through a survey of 373 of its residents and 25 interviews conducted with local and regional actors, further supported by an inventory of the cultural resources and their capacity for visits. We conclude here that, residents tend to have a very positive perception of tourism development, and indeed, their perceptions largely met those of other stakeholders.

Abstract. Cold extremes are anticipated to warm at a faster rate than both hot extremes and average temperatures for much of the Northern Hemisphere. Anomalously warm cold extremes can affect numerous sectors, including human health, tourism and various ecosystems that are sensitive to cold temperatures. Using a selection of global climate models, this paper explores the accelerated warming of seasonal cold extremes relative to seasonal mean temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics. The potential driving physical mechanisms are investigated by assessing conditions on or prior to the day when the cold extreme occurs to understand how the different environmental fields are related. During winter, North America, Europe and much of Eurasia show amplified warming of cold extremes projected for the late 21st century, compared to the mid-20th century. This is shown to be largely driven by reductions in cold air temperature advection, suggested as a likely consequence of Arctic amplification. In spring and autumn, cold extremes are expected to warm faster than average temperatures for most of the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes to high latitudes, particularly Alaska, northern Canada and northern Eurasia. In the shoulder seasons, projected decreases in snow cover and associated reductions in surface albedo are suggested as the largest contributor affecting the accelerated rates of warming in cold extremes. The key findings of this study improve our understanding of the environmental conditions that contribute to the accelerated warming of cold extremes relative to mean temperatures.

Distribution maps and IUCN threat categories for the 30 named species of Hieracium section Alpina (Asteraceae) in Britain are given, based on taxonomic and distribution studies by D.J. Tennant and others over the last 30 years. Twenty-seven taxa are endemic to Scotland, one to England, one to Britain and one also occurs in mainland Europe and the Arctic. There are three main centres of diversity in Scotland: the Eastern Highlands (especially the Cairngorm Mountains), the Western Highlands and the Northern Highlands. Under the IUCN threat categories, seven taxa are Critically Endangered, seven are Endangered, two are Vulnerable, ten are Near Threatened and seven are Nationally Scarce. The main threats are collecting, natural events such as rock falls and avalanches, global warming, acid rain, over-grazing and tourism. There is particular concern for the long-term survival of four taxa.

In the face of anthropogenic climate change, the management of cultural heritage must change the world over, in order to adapt historic places to the resulting impacts. Concepts for climate change mitigation and adaptation are well developed, but their application specifically in the context of the historic environment is limited. The number of methods and tools to assess the risks of climate change impacts on historic places and the vulnerabilities of these places to these risks is still small. In this article, three assessment methods will be discussed, which were developed through projects in Northern Europe: Cultural and Heritage Added Value to Regional Policies for Tourism and Sustainability (CHARTS) disseminated a risk and vulnerability assessment to investigate the impacts of climate change on the historic environment of Wales. The Aurland project, in Norway, piloted a site-specific assessment method through local and expert input. Historic Environment Scotland (HES) is reviewing its portfolio of historic places with a novel impact assessment and mapping method, using a geographical information system (GIS). This article discusses the differences of the approaches chosen by the projects to assess climate change impacts and plan adaptation measures. The article concludes with outlining a recently started project, Adapt Northern Heritage, involving HES and two Aurland partners, Riksantikvaren and the Norsk institute for kulturminneforskning, as well as Minjastofnun Íslands.

In contrast to Europe, Asia and South America where geotourism is actively pursued, geotourism activities in South Africa have not to-date been a focus of tourism products. The purpose of this paper is to propose a field methodology that can be used to assess the potential for geotourism development. Existing procedures to establish geotourism site potential are reviewed and a new methodology that accounts for more characteristics than currently found in documented methods is proposed. This consists of three phases: creating a standardised manner of inventorying the sites; standardising field rank scoring for each site by geotourism value, cultural value, ecological sensitivity, accessibility, de velopment requirements, currently available academic literature, and, developing a final multi-site database assisting the South African National Parks to preserve geoheritage sites. Based on previous studies, the Kruger National Park has geoheritage sites that could form the basis for geotourism development: therefore, the methodology was piloted in its northern regions at well-known geoheritage sites. The findings of this study intend to assist the South African National Parks, local community leaders, the private sector (including existing tour operators) and government departments in achieving a national database of geoheritage sites to ultimately be associated with sustainable tourism activity led by local communities.

Because the ideological landscape of the present does not match the ideological configurations of the past, the past and present of national monuments often collide in ways that complicate their utility as “patrimony” and “heritage.” In Spain, Islamic monuments such as the Alhambra Palace (built in Granada by Nasrid monarchs in the 13th and 14th centuries) exist in the present as popular tourism sites and points of entry for an imaginative encounter with the Iberian peninsula's Andalusi past. The past evoked is a recognized part of Iberian history and yet, as patrimony, it is simultaneously admired as something that distinguishes Spain from the rest of Europe and resisted as something belonging to an exiled people who left long ago for places like Fez and Istanbul. Under Franco's dictatorship (1947–73), Spain was adamantly Catholic and, despite a small wave of conversions to Islam and the recent immigration of Muslims from northern Africa, it remains predominantly Christian.

The author proposes a novel application for estimating demand for a single recreation site when data are limited. An aggregated zonal travel cost model is outlined and estimated in a panel setting using a negative binomial estimator with time-specific constants to capture unobserved time-varying quality attributes. The data are based on catch records for the Mörrum river salmon fishery, one of the most popular sport fishing destinations in Northern Europe. These are aggregated to the municipal level for the zonal estimation and give number of visits per municipality per week for the period 1999–2011. The results confirm the expected negative influence of travel cost on visits. Further, the inclusion of time-specific constants does not render all time-varying quality attributes insignificant.

According to the hygiene and biodiversity hypotheses, increased hygiene levels and reduced contact with biodiversity can partially explain the high prevalence of immune-mediated diseases in developed countries. A disturbed commensal microbiota, especially in the gut, has been linked to multiple immune-mediated diseases. Previous studies imply that gut microbiota composition is associated with the everyday living environment and can be modified by increasing direct physical exposure to biodiverse materials. In this pilot study, the effects of rural-second-home tourism were investigated on the gut microbiota for the first time. Rural-second-home tourism, a popular form of outdoor recreation in Northern Europe, North America, and Russia, has the potential to alter the human microbiota by increasing exposure to nature and environmental microbes. The hypotheses were that the use of rural second homes is associated with differences in the gut microbiota and that the microbiota related to health benefits are more diverse or common among the rural-second-home users. Based on 16S rRNA Illumina MiSeq sequencing of stool samples from 10 urban elderly having access and 15 lacking access to a rural second home, the first hypothesis was supported: the use of rural second homes was found to be associated with lower gut microbiota diversity and RIG-I-like receptor signaling pathway levels. The second hypothesis was not supported: health-related microbiota were not more diverse or common among the second-home users. The current study encourages further research on the possible health outcomes or causes of the observed microbiological differences. Activities and diet during second-home visits, standard of equipment, surrounding environment, and length of the visits are all postulated to play a role in determining the effects of rural-second-home tourism on the gut microbiota.

Recently in mass media we can find the idea about a new Silk Road or the concept of "Silk Road Economic Belt" which has been formulated by the Chinese PresidentXi Jinping on September 7,2013, during his official visit to Kazakhstan. This project is not only the creation of a transport, power and trade corridor, and also the project which will promote development of tourism in the region and to strengthening of cultural exchanges of China with the countries of Central Asia, it also includes construction of a network of high-speed fiber-optical networks. The economic strip of the Silk Road will begin in China and pass across the Central and the Southern Asia, part of branches across the territory of the Russian Federation and to leave to Europe. This international investment project assumes creation of a continental transport way. For implementation of overland part of "A great Silk Road is a three railway corridors (northern, central have to be constructed and southern) They have form a basis for development of other means of transport, including automobile subsequently. Construction of these three railway corridors acts as the most important and necessary stage of implementation of the project. The government of China declares that creation of an economic belt of the Silk way is a revival of once prospering trade-transport and cultural corridor from Asia to Europe which will promote activization of a friendly exchange between the people of the different countries. Further all this has to connect trade and economic space of Europe and Asia in a whole that has to serve implementation of deeper economic cooperation, between the countries participating in him, to increase in a trade turnover and expansion of scientific and technical exchanges between them.

The island of Lesvos is composed of landscapes that have been influenced since antiquity and has been used by its inhabitants for many centuries. Now, in the wake of the civil war in Syria, social unrest in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and harsh economic and civil strife in northern Africa, more and more nonindigenous people and cultures occupy the island. Social and intercultural relations between the indigenous Greeks and non-Greeks are marked by tension and conflict as they compete for access to the island’s limited resources during this time of fiscal crisis in Greece. This postcard from two sociologists documents the struggle for space, albeit temporary, on an island where the quest for public space has led to contested landscapes of refuge and the creation or maintenance of Greektopias, or zones of exclusion.

A growing hotel sector makes a significant environmental footprint. Due to a contemporary focus on climate change and high competition within tourism, enhancing sustainability through energy savings is a priority for many hotels. Through technological innovations, Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology provides the opportunity to integrate more systems (e.g., heating, air-conditioning, window-openings) on a platform (also known as smart management), making it easy for a hotel guest to operate room conditions through a single device while also optimizing hotel operations. A research gap on the likelihood of adopting IoT technology to pursue sustainability in the hotel sector exists. Based on explorative case studies of five high-end hotels, this paper offers propositions on drivers for hotels’ use of IoT to deliver on their sustainability goals. This study suggests that a hotel is more inclined to implement IoT if (1) the hotel is focused on energy savings, e.g., due to green certificates; (2) it belongs to an international hotel group; (3) decision makers perceive sustainability to be important for their customers; (4) the target group is more B2B (business) than B2C (leisure); (5) the hotel a five star one; and (6) the hotel guests come from Northern Europe or North America.

"Particularities of the Cultural Tourism in Zalău in the Context of the European Heritage: the Roman Festival Zalău Porolissum. Covering an area of 3,850 square kms, the county of Sălaj lies in the north-western part of Romania, as a passage between the Western and Eastern Carpathians. The main settlement of Sălaj is the city of Zalău, lying at the heart of the county, along Zalău valley, near the Northern Meseş Mountains. Evidence of the Dacian culture and civilization can be found all over the county. The stronghold was well known in antiquity as Dacidava, a central place for the gatherings of Dacian tribes living in the region, known today as Sălaj. Here 14 treasures of Dacian silver coins and jewels were found, which may explain the fact that Sălaj was one of the towns that laid on the ancient road of salt whereon salt used to be traded from Transylvania to Central Europe. Another important Dacian settlement would be Moigrad (Porolissum), on the heights of Măgura Moigradului, mentioned by Ptolemeu in his „Geographia”. After the Roman conquest and the colonization of Dacia as a Roman province, Roman experts in military strategy transfomed the Meseş Mountains into the north-eastern border of the Roman Empire. This „limes” separated the territories of the Roman province Dacia from the unoccupied area which belonged to the free Dacians. The military structure of Porolissum, the capital of the province „Dacia Porolissensis”, acquired the rank of „municipium”, by an order of the Emperor Septimius Severus. Ruins of the Porolissum town, together with Roman fortifications near the passage Poarta Meseşului stretch to an area of about 200 hectares. In Porolissum, archaeological discoveries brought to light two large stone-built Roman „castrum”, one amphitheatre, several temples, civilian constructions and Roman roads. Within the study there were both open-response questionnaires, when the subject was free to answer as he saw fit, and closed-response questionnaires, in which the subject had several possible answers from which he could choose the response considered convenient. The Roman Festival Zalău Porolissum recovers a part of the shared historical past within a geographical space where the European community now functions. Through impeccable organization and administration, this part made possibile the development of the greatest empire in ancient times. Through The Roman Festival Zalău Porolissum, the Zalău City Hall proposes to its inhabitants and tourists a vast event with an educative-cultural dimension. We believe that this sort of manifestation may counteract the promotion tendencies of the underground culture. We wish for The Roman Festival Zalău Porolissum to pleasantly provide to the public history moments, traditions, culture and specific costumes. The Roman Festival Zalău Porolissum is an event of our identity that reconfirms our values and space in Europe. At the European Union’s construction a few fundamental facts contributed: shared geography and history, the Greek culture, the Christianity and the Roman legacy. The Roman culture and civilization are marks of the European identity, which define the present European citizen’s consciousness. Keywords: The Roman Festival Zalău Porolissum, Cultural tourism, Global values, European Heritage."

Purpose This study aims to examine the effects of individual and job-related characteristics on employees’ work engagement and its influence on their performance outcomes. This study develops and tests the research model where the impact of positive affectivity, polychronicity and task significance on employees’ work engagement is investigated, and its consequences for employees’ job performance are analyzed. Design/methodology/approach The relationships between study constructs were tested using the structural equation modeling. Data were collected from 222 hotel contact employees from the Pomeranian Voivodeship, a tourist destination of northern Poland. Findings The study findings confirmed that positive affectivity and polychronicity, as personality characteristics and task significance as a job characteristic exert a significant and positive impact on hotel employees’ work engagement, which in turn enhances the level of their job performance. Additionally, polychronicity was significantly related to hotel employees’ job performance. Of all the analyzed predictors, task significance appeared to be the strongest driver of hotel employees’ work engagement. A direct relationship between polychronicity and hotel employees’ job performance was also confirmed by this study. Practical implications Hotel organizations are recommended to modify the standards of their recruitment and selection process and incorporate additional techniques to be more successful in hiring employees with an adequate personality profile (high in positive affectivity and polychronic tendency). The recruited suitable candidates should be guided effectively with appropriate human resource management practices, especially those that increase hotel employees’ experience of work meaningfulness. Therefore, they should be constantly assured, through a variety of management actions, about the influence and importance of their roles and the contribution to the service and organizational success. Originality/value This study contributes to a better understanding of the relationships between personality and job characteristics among frontline hotel employees, extending the study results to the context of East-Central Europe, where, to the best of the author’s knowledge, studies on simultaneous effects of individual and job-related factors on hotel employees’ work engagement and its behavioral consequences are still limited.

From early 2020 onwards, the world has been going through an unprecedented wave of lockdowns, shutdowns, and preventive measures due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It is evident that these have been harmful for tourism, passenger transport, and the service sector in general. However, less is known regarding the implications for manufacturing and logistics, which is the purpose of this research. We concentrate on reporting survey findings from Northern Europe, and mostly from Finland. Based on trade accounts, it is evident that Covid-19 has had significant impacts on Finnish import and export. However, in survey responses, companies report that they have mostly been able to serve customers in a good fashion, and the pandemic has increased transportation costs only moderately. Inventories might experience an increase due to the virus, however, in the longer term they will likely remain at the earlier levels (or slightly increase). Companies are mostly afraid of the effects of the second wave of the epidemic, and are also already thinking about the long-term issues with transportation modes used together with supply chain dependencies. For example, the Chinese and, in part, Russian, markets are increasingly being served by railways during the current decade. For some companies (especially small and medium-sized ones) and foreign trade markets, however, the epidemic era has been very harmful. Therefore, as a conclusion we argue that the pandemic is causing rather asymmetrical impacts on manufacturing and logistics.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications for the sales function of the infusion of services by formerly product-based firms. In particular, it aims at identifying the changes that need to be made at the sales-function level if the services are to be successfully sold. Design/methodology/approach – This research is an exploratory qualitative case study. Data were collected by focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with relevant managers in three large multinational companies based in Northern Europe, which were pursuing service-led growth. Findings – The effects of service infusion processes on the sales function could be seen with respect to the three parts of the analytical framework: organization, roles, and competences. The results illustrate the need for a changed perspective with respect to all three parts, if a product-based firm is to be successful in the infusing of associated services into its portfolio of offerings. Analysis of the results identifies key operational initiatives that management needs to understand and implement when corporate and marketing strategies increasingly focus on service-led growth. Research limitations/implications – The study was exploratory and vendor centric, which means that it did not quantitatively assess the results or directly involve the customers at whom the services were directed. Also, the choice of business-to-business firms limits the capacity to generalize the findings. Originality/value – Whereas relationship-based and value-based selling are approaches more geared to the sales-force level, the study reported in this paper set out to understand fundamental differences at the sales-function level when firms pursue service-led growth. The findings suggest that the realignment of corporate strategy toward an increased focus on services may have far-reaching implications for the sales function.

Abstract Background Older travelers (≥ 60 years) are a unique risk population for travel related infections and adverse events from antibiotics. We evaluated the differences in travel characteristics, exposures, illnesses and antibiotic use among older travelers and those between 18 – 59 y using a prospective, observational cohort of US Department of Defense (DoD) beneficiaries traveling outside the US for ≤ 6.5 months (TravMil). Methods Adult DoD beneficiaries were enrolled pre-travel. Itineraries limited to Western/Northern Europe, Canada, or New Zealand and active duty personnel on military travel were excluded. Demographics, itineraries and prescriptions were abstracted. A post-travel survey collected information on exposures and illnesses (travelers’ diarrhea (TD), influenza-like illness (ILI) or febrile illness). Categorical variables were analyzed using chi-square or Fishers exact test and the Mann-U Whitney test was used for continuous variables. Results Of the 1468 travelers, 755 were ≥ 60y and 719 were < 60y. Asia (35%) and South/Central America (28%) were the most common travel regions. Older travelers were more likely to be Caucasian (80% vs. 67%), male (52% vs. 39%) and travel for tourism (84% vs. 51%) (p< 0.05). Younger travelers were more likely engage in risk behaviors (e.g. consume poorly cooked meat or seafood (16% vs 9%) or street vendor food (26% vs 8.6%), wade in fresh water (24% vs. 18%), and non-compliance with malaria prophylaxis (22% vs 12%) (p< 0.05). Older travelers had a lower incidence of TD (18% vs 24%), and a higher proportion of cases with loose stool or mild TD that did not interfere with daily activities (63% vs. 51%) (p< 0.05). Inappropriate antibiotic use for loose stool or mild TD were similar among the two age groups (67% vs 59%). Non-significant trends of lower incidence and mild infections were observed for ILI and febrile illness in older travelers. Conclusion Older travelers were less likely to engage in risk behaviors, had a lower TD incidence and reported mild diarrheal symptoms. Inappropriate antibiotic use for loose stool or mild TD was common in both age groups. Enhancing antibiotic stewardship is important for older travelers to prevent potential side effects, drug interactions and antibiotic resistance. Disclosures All Authors: No reported disclosures

The main aim of the article is to discuss the travels of duchess Jadwiga Sapieha nee Zamoyska. In her life she experienced painful moments – seven out of her eight children died at various ages. In order to improve their health she left for health resorts, which she continued even after her children’s deaths. She travelled as a tourist, visited her family scattered around Europe, received various treatments together with her husband in various spas. Her travels entailed considerable activity. She travelled to remote destinations from the perspective of her contemporary times: she visited northern Africa, rested at the French Riviera or the Alpes.

Using the concept that landscapes are ideas formed by viewers about their physical surroundings, this article examines visitors' landscape perceptions of two peripheral regions of Europe: Gyimes in the Romanian Eastern Carpathians, and Las Hurdes in the Northern Extremadura of Spain. Both are characterized by exceptional, historically-evolved cultural landscapes and a population that culturally or ethnically differs from the national mainstream surrounding them. Based on literature review, expert consultations, and a questionnaire survey conducted in the research areas, I conclude that due to historical developments, socio-economic settings, and ethnic differences, the outsiders' view of these landscapes can be strongly distorted. In the tourist, misinformation and wishful thinking create a “mental map” that does not represent reality. I also note that along with having a possible impact on inhabitants' landscape perception and their strong regional identity, the outsiders' view might influence policy decisions and therefore the general development of a region.

Leishmaniasis is world-wide one of the most common infectious disorders caused by protozoa. Due to the climate change, there is a risk of further spread of the disease to central and northern Europe. Another important issue is the high number of refugees from Syria since Syria is one of the hot spots of Old World leishmaniasis. We report on single-centre experience with leishmaniasis in the capital of Saxony, Dresden, during the years 2001 to 2017. We noted a substantial increase in the last five years. Once a very rare exotic disorder in Germany, cutaneous leishmaniasis has become a reality and physicians should be aware of it. A significant number of cases are from Syrian refugees; other cases had been acquired by tourists in the Mediterranean region!

On July 30, 1870, a visitor to the Niagara Falls noted glumly in his diary that “the impression of the waterfall was gripping, but not what I had expected”. Having traveled from Northern Europe to reach this scenic spot, the traveler - a railway engineer - was frankly disappointed. The landscape was flat and dreary, and only seen from very particular angles did the falls live up to their sublime reputation. What consoled the disillusioned tourist, however, were the many beautiful bridges built to accommodate traffic, commerce, and sightseeing around the falls: “The proud Clifton suspension bridge with its 1269’ span, 300’ above the river, was light and beautiful. The picturesque bridges across to Goat Island and “Three sisters” - all in pleasant harmony - give to the place a decidedly attractive character” he enthused. Regardless of its reputation as the most spectacular natural scenery in the world, to our railway engineer, Niagara was saved only by the sublime spectacle of the bridges.

The author studies UNESCO’s activities in the cultural sphere, especially the protection and preservation of cultural heritage around the world. There is World Heritage List. Sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet the special criteria to be included on this List. Countries are trying to include their cultural objects for protection. Cultural heritage is architectural works, works of monumental sculpture and painting, elements or structures of an archaeological nature groups of buildings which are of outstanding universal value. The World Heritage Committee is responsible for the implementation of the World Heritage Convention («Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage»,1972), gives financial assistance and decides on the listing or deletion of properties in the List of World Heritage in Danger. The List of World Heritage in Danger informs the international community of threat and to encourage corrective action. Special attention was given to European cultural and natural sites which are in this list. These are sites in Serbia (Medieval Monuments in Kosovo (2006)), United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Liverpool – Maritime Mercantile City (2012)), Austria (Historic Centre of Vienna (2017)). This article focuses on the reasons for listing in the List of World Heritage in Danger (different conflicts, war, natural disasters, pollution, poaching, uncontrolled urbanization, tourist development etc.). Author outlines problems of protection world cultural heritage that need to be solved in the future. International community can help in this problem because each site in World Heritage List has outstanding universal value in our life. The author emphasizes on high importance of cultural sphere of the UNESCO’s activities.

This introduction to the special issue introduces the contributors’ articles and identifies key themes relating to how increased transnational mobility has affected urbanisation processes in many cities, resulting in the globalisation of rent gaps. A mix of local and transnational real estate interests work to attract higher-income lifestyle migrants and tourists, often from higher-income countries to lower-income urban space in order to increase its exchange value. In the process, however, they act to reduce the use value of urban space to lower-income residents. The introduction notes that the acceleration of lifestyle mobilities moving through urban spaces, and the development of transnational lifestyles of urban place consumption, have produced new forms of gentrification – not merely the spread of an urban strategy to new cities, but the planetarisation of rent gaps. Transnational gentrification is the form of contemporary urbanisation that occurs as a result of closing these rent gaps through attraction of higher income, transnational migrants, often from high-income countries in Northern Europe and North America.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> While public participation in scientific achievements has a long history, the last decades have seen more attention and an impressive increase in the number of involved people. Citizen science, the term used for denoting such an attitude, is a very diverse practice, encompassing various forms, depths, and aims of collaboration between scientists and citizen researchers and a broad range of scientific disciplines. Different classifications of citizen science projects exist based on the degrees of influence and contributions of citizens. Haklay, Mazumdar, and Wardlaw (2018) distinguish the citizen science projects in three different classes:</p> <ol><li>Long-running citizen science, which are the traditional ones, the projects similar to those run in the past (Koboriet al., 2016; Bonney et al., 2009)</li> <li>Citizen cyberscience, strictly connected with the use of technologies (Grey, 2009) and which can be subclassified in:<ol><li>volunteer computing, where citizens offer the unused computing resources of their computers;</li><li>volunteer thinking, where citizens offer their cognitive abilities for performing tasks difficult for machines;</li><li>passive sensing, where citizens use the sensors integrated into mobile computing devices to carry outautomatic sensing tasks.</li></ol></li> <li>Community science, involving a more significant commitment of citizens also in designing and planning theproject activities in a more egalitarian (if not bottom-up) approach between scientists and citizen scientists(Jepson &amp; Ladle, 2015; Nascimento, Guimarães Pereira, &amp; Ghezzi, 2014; Breen, Dosemagen, Warren, &amp;Lippincott, 2015), which can be divided into:<ol><li>participatory sensing, where citizens use the sensors integrated into mobile computing devices to carry outsensing tasks;</li><li>Do It Yourself (DIY) science, which implies participants create their scientific tools and methodology to carry out their researches; </li><li>civic science, “which is explicitly linked to community goals and questions the state of things” (Haklay et al., 2018).</li></ol></li></ol> <p>The work presented here is of interest of community scientists which voluntarily offer their time for the development of scientific projects. Many software tools have been developed in order to simplify the insertion of data into structured forms and the aggregation and analysis of the obtained data. In recent years, the growing availability of feature-rich and low-cost smartphones have boosted the development of innovative solutions for data collection using portable devices. In this field, ODK (OpenDataKit) is widely known. It is an open-source suite of tools focused on simplicity of use, which includes an Android application for data collection. We used ODK for the first applications we developed.</p><p>One of the applications we developed using ODK is Via Regina (http://www.viaregina.eu/app). The application aims to support slow tourism in Via Regina, which is a road that overlooks the west coast of Lake Como in Northern Italy. Over the centuries, Via Regina has been a critical trade and pilgrim route in Europe. Moreover, from this road, a compact system of slow mobility paths departs, which span the mountainous region at the border between Italy and Switzerland. This region is rich in culture, regarding history, art, architecture, cuisine and people’s lifestyle. Considering collecting data on Via Regina and the paths around it would enable to rediscover and promote its culture while enjoying the territory, an Interreg project named “The Paths of Regina” started. The application developed within this project allows collecting data in predefined types: historical and cultural, morphological, touristic, and critical. Moreover, while reporting a point of interest (POI), the application asks the name, the position (through GPS or an interactive map), a picture, and optionally a video and an audio record of it (Antonovic et al., 2015).</p><p>However, since ODK application can be used only on Android devices, we developed a cross-platform application to collect similar data for the same purpose. It is available on Android, iOS, and web (http://viaregina3.como.polimi.it/app/). The application is developed using Apache Cordova, which is a mobile application development framework that enables running the application in multiple platforms. Leaflet library is used for web mapping. The data is stored in NoSQL PouchDB and CouchDB database, which enables both online and offline data collection. While reporting a POI, the application asks for its type, the user’s rating, a comment, and a picture of it either uploaded from device’s storage or taken using the camera of the mobile device. In addition to being cross-platform, it has the advantage of displaying and enabling the query of POIs reported, compared to the ODK-based version (Brovelli, Kilsedar, &amp; Zamboni, 2016). Regarding citizen science, besides the citizens using these two applications, Iubilantes, a voluntary cultural organization, has been involved in the project as community scientists. Iubilantes created slow mobility paths to walk in and around Via Regina, using their experience gained through studying ancient paths while protecting and enhancing their assets since 1996.</p><p>Mobile data collection can also be used to compensate for the lack of reference data available for land cover validation. We developed the Land Cover Collector (https://github.com/kilsedar/land-cover-collector) application for this purpose, which collects data using the nomenclature of GlobeLand30. GlobeLand30 is the first global land cover map at 30-meter resolution, provided by National Geomatics Center of China, available for 2000 and 2010 (Chen et al., 2015). There are ten land cover classes in the GlobeLand30 dataset, which are: artificial surface, bare land, cultivated land, forest, grassland, permanent snow and ice, shrubland, tundra, water body, and wetland. The collected data will be used for validating GlobeLand30 (Kilsedar, Bratic, Molinari, Minghini, &amp; Brovelli, 2018). The data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 and can be downloaded within the application in JSON format. The application is currently available in eight languages: English, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, French and Spanish. The technologies used are the same as the cross-platform Via Regina application. As a result, it is available on Android, iOS, and web (https://landcover.como.polimi.it/collector/); and it supports display and query of the collected data. While reporting a POI, the application asks the land cover class of it, the user’s degree of certainty on the correctness of the stated class, photos in north, east, south and west directions, and the user’s comment. Three hands-on workshops were given to teach this application and various ways to validate GlobeLand30: the first on September 1, 2018 at the World Bank in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (in conjunction with the FOSS4G 2018 conference); the second on September 3, 2018 at the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) in Nairobi, Kenya; and the third on October 1, 2018 at the Delft University of Technology in Delft, Netherlands. The workshops, run by representatives of the project's principal investigators &amp;ndash; Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the National Geomatics Center of China (China) &amp;ndash; were attended by a total of 100 people with a background in GIS and remote sensing. (Brovelli et al., 2018).</p><p>Nonetheless, there are no widely adopted cross-platform open-source solutions or systems for on-site surveys that address the problem of information silos: isolated databases, where the information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system, which is an obstacle to using data mining to make productive use of data of multiple systems.</p><p> PSAB (Participatory Sensing App Builder) is a platform that provides an open-source and easy to use cross-platform solution for the creation of custom smartphone applications as well as web applications and catalog service for publishing the data and make them available to everyone. It takes advantage of established standards (like XLSForm for defining the structure of the form and DublinCore for exposing metadata) as well as less known yet effective solutions, like WQ (https://wq.io), a framework developed for building reusable software platforms for citizen science. These technologies have been merged, together with other software like Django, PyCSW, PostgreSQL, in a single solution, in order to assist the user during the entire process, from the definition of the form structure, to the creation of an ad-hoc application and the publication of the collected data, inside a flexible and open-source platform.</p><p> Users registered to PSAB are allowed to create a new application by filling a web form where they can upload their XLSForm files and submit the metadata describing the data to be collected. A new application for collecting data on the field is generated and accessible via web and Android (while iOS requires a particular setup), ready to be used online and offline. The creator of each application is also the administrator of it, which means he/she is allowed to add or ban users and modify or remove existing data. Data is automatically synchronized between all the users participating in the project.</p><p> In the presentation we will show the applications we developed, starting from the ODK-based ones and coming to the PSAB application builder, and our experience related to their usage.</p>

Covid 19 – living the experience As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share. This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to create harmony in a globalising world. However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now, this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the global North. From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus livelihoods debate has a long way still to run. Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders, will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution: increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature. Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life, dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future. Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future? In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless, increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc. However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As the writer observes Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet 2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability. As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring. As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end of narcissism?” I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions – the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval. Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy lifting. To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’ problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed: The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague. So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus, we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start to look like surely has some attraction. But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made clear. This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe - soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment to the democratic ownership of sport. Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies, Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task. The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28 and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no matter what the national origins of players might be. Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further, Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India - cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the skilled performance also evolves. To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game, but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order sooner rather than later. It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their goals align closely with ours. May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others in the world of comparative and international sport studies, John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020

Tourism specialization has been studied so far at an aggregate geographical level and by considering tourism as a homogeneous product. The result is a simplistic and stereotypical image of tourism specialization, as for Europe where southern European Union (EU) countries are commonly viewed as highly specialized in tourism services and northern EU countries highly specialized in other activities. The purpose of this article is to provide a method for a deeper analysis of tourism specialization. We study comparative advantages and disadvantages of a sample of 20 European countries over the period 2010–2016 by considering bilateral flows of three different quality tourism services (high, middle, low). Our results show serious differences with those obtained by the traditional approach.

<p>This report is the result of fieldwork in Iceland, Northern Norway and Finnish Lapland, undertaken by tourism researchers from the three countries in 2014. One aim of the study was to establish comparative knowledge on Northern Lights tours. The research is part of the ‘Winter tourism’<a title="" href="file:///Y:/Septentrio_Academic_Publishing/Tidsskriftene/Septentrio%20Reports/2015-1/Report-ver2.docx">[1]</a> project at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.</p><p> </p><p>During the last decade Northern Lights tourism has boomed in the case study areas. Important destinations for Aurora tourism are: Reykjavik and Akureyri in Iceland, Tromsø and Alta in Norway, and Rovaniemi and the region around Muonio in Finland. A common feature of this type of tourism is the increased interest from international tourists, mainly from Europe, Northern America and Asia. Moreover, these tourists travel to both large scale and small scale destinations. In common are also the development of mass tourism in the bigger cities, in regards of the number of tour providers and number of tourists, and a more moderate development in the smaller cities. In spite of commonalities several factors also separate the tours and destinations. The Norwegian Northern Lights tours, for instance, tend to be more expensive and they often last longer. In Finland most of the tours are in combination with other outdoor activities and mass tourism is the most noticeable in Reykjavik. Thus, there the tours are the cheapest. Furthermore, in Iceland and Alta mostly local guides are employed, whereas in Finnish Lapland and Tromsø many workers are from other Europeans countries.</p><p> </p>The researchers participated in 17 tours in total. Consequently this report gives only a glimpse of various ways of guiding and how skills, knowledge, equipment, weather and so on affect Aurora Borealis performances in a toured setting. This report continues with a presentation of the Northern Lights tourism development and offers in each country. In the description of each country we also point to guiding practices that enhance and diminish the experiences with the tours. In the last section we discuss the Northern Lights tourism in the three countries, and reflect upon the importance of the guide, safety and infrastructure and some other aspects of the tours.

International travel plunges 70% in the first eight months of 2020 International tourist arrivals (overnight visitors) declined 70% in the first eight months of 2020 over the same period of last year, amid global travel restrictions including many borders fully closed, to contain the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. International arrivals plunged 81% in July and 79% in August, traditionally the two busiest months of the year and the peak of the Northern Hemisphere summer season. Despite such large declines, this represents a relative improvement over the 90% or greater decreases of the previous months, as some destinations started to reopen to international tourism, mostly in the European Union. The decline in January-August 2020 represents 700 million fewer international tourist arrivals compared to the same period in 2019, and translates into a loss of US$ 730 billion in export revenues from international tourism, more than 8 times the loss in 2009 under the impact of the global economic crisis. Asia and the Pacific, the first region to suffer the impact of the pandemic, saw a 79% decrease in arrivals in January-August 2020. Africa and the Middle East both recorded a 69% drop this eight-month period, while Europe saw a 68% decline and the Americas 65%. Data on international tourism expenditure continues to reflect very weak demand for outbound travel, though in several large markets such as the United States, Germany and Italy there is a small uptick in spending in the months of July and August. Based on latest trends, a 75% decrease in international arrivals is estimated for the month of September and a drop of close to 70% for the whole of 2020. While demand for international travel remains subdued, domestic tourism is strengthening recovery in several large markets such as China and Russia. The UNWTO Confidence Index continues at record lows. Most UNWTO Panel Experts expect a rebound in international tourism by the third quarter of 2021 and a return to pre-pandemic 2019 levels not before 2023. Experts consider travel restrictions as the main barrier weighing on the recovery of international tourism, along with slow virus containment and low consumer confidence.

International travel plunges 70% in the first eight months of 2020. International tourist arrivals (overnight visitors) declined 70% in the first eight months of 2020 over the same period of last year, amid global travel restrictions including many borders fully closed, to contain the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. International arrivals plunged 81% in July and 79% in August, traditionally the two busiest months of the year and the peak of the Northern Hemisphere summer season. Despite such large declines, this represents a relative improvement over the 90% or greater decreases of the previous months, as some destinations started to reopen to international tourism, mostly in the European Union. The decline in January-August 2020 represents 700 million fewer international tourist arrivals compared to the same period in 2019, and translates into a loss of US$ 730 billion in export revenues from international tourism, more than 8 times the loss in 2009 under the impact of the global economic crisis. Asia and the Pacific, the first region to suffer the impact of the pandemic, saw a 79% decrease in arrivals in January-August 2020. Africa and the Middle East both recorded a 69% drop this eight-month period, while Europe saw a 68% decline and the Americas 65%. Data on international tourism expenditure continues to reflect very weak demand for outbound travel, though in several large markets such as the United States, Germany and Italy there is a small uptick in spending in the months of July and August. Based on latest trends, a 75% decrease in international arrivals is estimated for the month of September and a drop of close to 70% for the whole of 2020. While demand for international travel remains subdued, domestic tourism is strengthening recovery in several large markets such as China and Russia. The UNWTO Confidence Index continues at record lows. Most UNWTO Panel Experts expect a rebound in international tourism by the third quarter of 2021 and a return to pre-pandemic 2019 levels not before 2023. Experts consider travel restrictions as the main barrier weighing on the recovery of international tourism, along with slow virus containment and low consumer confidence.

AbstractThe Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Directive was ratified (2014/89/EU) along the Strategy of the European Union (EU) on the Blue Economy to contribute to the effective management of maritime activities and resources and incorporate the principal elements of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) (2002/413/EC) into planning at the land-sea interface. There is a need to develop the ICZM approach throughout Europe to realise the potential for both socio-economic and environmental targets set by the EU and national legislations. In this study, we co-developed different approaches for land-sea interactions in four case areas in Estonia and Finland based on the defined characteristics and key interests derived from local or regional challenges by integrating spatial data on human activities and ecology. Furthermore, four ICZM drafts were co-evaluated by stakeholders and the public using online map-based assessment tools (public participatory GIS). The ICZM approaches of the Estonian cases ranged from the diversification of land use to the enhancement of community-based entrepreneurship. The Finnish cases aimed to define the trends for sustainable marine and coastal tourism and introduce the ecosystem service concept in land use planning. During the project activities, we found that increased communication and exchange of local and regional views and values on the prevailing land-sea interactions were important for the entire process. Thereafter, the ICZM plans were applied to the MSP processes nationally, and they support the sustainable development of coastal areas in Estonia and Finland.

The global financial crisis has put the question to practically all countries of the world to take on the inevitable changes and take the negative consequences of the financial downturn, or to accept new revolutionary changes in all sectors of the economy and become modern competitive states, able to withstand the challenges of the modern world. Some countries have left everything as it is, others have tried to adapt to the new situation. One of these countries is Iceland. The state began structural changes many decades ago, but the crisis events of 2008 somehow accelerated this process. The post-crisis plan for the country’s exit from the financial crisis and the recovery of the economy at pre-crisis positions was adopted; subsequently, the targets were adjusted improvement of pre-crisis indicators. The essence of the plan was to make full use of the country’s natural resources for the benefit of the state, namely: tourism, geothermal energy, the fishing industry, as well as biotechnology and pharmaceuticals were to become the basic “pillars” on which the national economy was based. An intelligent approach along with original ideas has brought its positive results: over the years Iceland has become one of the leaders in Europe for a number of indicators, namely: annual tourist flow, production and export of fish, use of renewable energy sources for their own needs, life expectancy, etc. In 2018, the government of Iceland created a new state development plan aimed at consolidating the results of previous years and improving individual indicators. It was decided to pay more attention to the latest innovation processes both in the state and in the world as a whole, as well as the development and support of innovative enterprises to update all components of the Icelandic economic system. Judging by the pace of development shown by this northern country, the results from the implementation of the points of the new plan will be more than positive

I artiklen sættes med afsæt i fjernvandreruten fokus på, hvad det er der gør, at vi i Danmark ikke har samme vandrekultur som i vores nabolande.The Missing LinkA long-distance footpath runs from Kilpisjärvi in northern Finland to Alexandroupolis in Greece. However the track does not cross intact but is interrupted on the island of Funen in Denmark. It is no coincidence that the rupture is in Denmark, nor that it is on Funen. In this article this ‘missing link’ provides the starting point to discuss a walking culture, which in Denmark is notable by its absence.At the beginning of 20th century, thanks to the influence of neighbouring countries, the culture of walking did increasingly make itself felt in Denmark. Longer walks became popular and many Danes embarked on hiking tours, walking for several days and spending the night at special ‘vandrehjem’ (or ‘youth hostels’). Since the Second World War this culture has more or less disappeared, and the question asked here is why?The article is divided in two parts. In the first there is a historical review of the development of the Danish culture of walking from the beginning of 20th century until the late 1930’s. This is followed by a discussion of the circumstances that led to the disappearance of this walking culture, focusing on the long distance footpath. This centres on a jostling for supremacy among sporting factions and on the struggle between various outdoor interests, between different management concerns, and between farmers, the state and local authorities about who should have the right to develop and exploit the landscape in southern Funen area. In this struggle organisations representing outdoor activities have been poorly organized and until now the landscape has primary been developed on the premises of agriculture, industry and urbanism.Today the position and status of outdoor life (friluftsliv) and the culture of hiking are improving. Councils in particular are focusing on health, tourism and attracting new residents´, and there is both a political and a popular will to establish hiking trails. For the long-distance footpath these changes mean that the missing link on Funen now disappears and that the hiking trail across Europe is established.

Each community’s title deed carries the indelible blood stains of our ancestors. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 2)IntroductionAccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term coalition comes from the Latin coalescere or ‘coalesce’, meaning “come or bring together to form one mass or whole”. Coalesce refers to the unity affirmed as something grows: co – “together”, alesce – “to grow up”. While coalition is commonly associated with formalised alliances and political strategy in the name of self-interest and common goals, this paper will draw as well on the broader etymological understanding of coalition as “growing together” in order to discuss the Australian government’s recent changes to land rights legislation, the 2007 Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory, and its decision to use Indigenous land in the Northern Territory as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. What unites these distinct cases is the role of the Australian nation-state in asserting its sovereign right to decide, something Giorgio Agamben notes is the primary indicator of sovereign right and power (Agamben). As Fiona McAllan has argued in relation to the Northern Territory Intervention: “Various forces that had been coalescing and captivating the moral, imaginary centre were now contributing to a spectacular enactment of a sovereign rescue mission” (par. 18). Different visions of “growing together”, and different coalitional strategies, are played out in public debate and policy formation. This paper will argue that each of these cases represents an alliance between successive, oppositional governments - and the nourishment of neoliberal imperatives - over and against the interests of some of the Indigenous communities, especially with relation to land rights. A critical stance is taken in relation to the alterations to land rights laws over the past five years and with the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, hereinafter referred to as the Intervention, firstly by the Howard Liberal Coalition Government and later continued, in what Anthony Lambert has usefully termed a “postcoalitional” fashion, by the Rudd Labor Government. By this, Lambert refers to the manner in which dominant relations of power continue despite the apparent collapse of old political coalitions and even in the face of seemingly progressive symbolic and material change. It is not the intention of this paper to locate Indigenous people in opposition to models of economic development aligned with neoliberalism. There are examples of productive relations between Indigenous communities and mining companies, in which Indigenous people retain control over decision-making and utilise Land Council’s to negotiate effectively. Major mining company Rio Tinto, for example, initiated an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Policy platform in the mid-1990s (Rio Tinto). Moreover, there are diverse perspectives within the Indigenous community regarding social and economic reform governed by neoliberal agendas as well as government initiatives such as the Intervention, motivated by a concern for the abuse of children, as outlined in The Little Children Are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson; hereinafter Little Children). Indeed, there is no agreement on whether or not the Intervention had anything to do with land rights. On the one hand, Noel Pearson has strongly opposed this assertion: “I've got as much objections as anybody to the ideological prejudices of the Howard Government in relation to land, but this question is not about a 'land grab'. The Anderson Wild Report tells us about the scale of Aboriginal children's neglect and abuse" (ABC). Marcia Langton has agreed with this stating that “There's a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy - a Trojan Horse - to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous” (Langton). Patrick Dodson on the other hand, has argued that yes, of course, the children remain the highest priority, but that this “is undermined by the Government's heavy-handed authoritarian intervention and its ideological and deceptive land reform agenda” (Dodson). WhitenessOne way to frame this issue is to look at it through the lens of critical race and whiteness theory. Is it possible that the interests of whiteness are at play in the coalitions of corporate/private enterprise and political interests in the Northern Territory, in the coupling of social conservatism and economic rationalism? Using this framework allows us to identify the partial interests at play and the implications of this for discussions in Australia around sovereignty and self-determination, as well as providing a discursive framework through which to understand how these coalitional interests represent a specific understanding of progress, growth and development. Whiteness theory takes an empirically informed stance in order to critique the operation of unequal power relations and discriminatory practices imbued in racialised structures. Whiteness and critical race theory take the twin interests of racial privileging and racial discrimination and discuss their historical and on-going relevance for law, philosophy, representation, media, politics and policy. Foregrounding contemporary analysis in whiteness studies is the central role of race in the development of the Australian nation, most evident in the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and lives, which occurred initially prior to Federation, as well as following. Cheryl Harris’s landmark paper “Whiteness as Property” argues, in the context of the US, that “the origins of property rights ... are rooted in racial domination” and that the “interaction between conceptions of race and property ... played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination” (Harris 1716).Reiterating the logic of racial inferiority and the assumption of a lack of rationality and civility, Indigenous people were named in the Australian Constitution as “flora and fauna” – which was not overturned until a national referendum in 1967. This, coupled with the logic of terra nullius represents the racist foundational logic of Australian statehood. As is well known, terra nullius declared that the land belonged to no-one, denying Indigenous people property rights over land. Whiteness, Moreton-Robinson contends, “is constitutive of the epistemology of the West; it is an invisible regime of power that secures hegemony through discourse and has material effects in everyday life” (Whiteness 75).In addition to analysing racial power structures, critical race theory has presented studies into the link between race, whiteness and neoliberalism. Roberts and Mahtami argue that it is not just that neoliberalism has racialised effects, rather that neoliberalism and its underlying philosophy is “fundamentally raced and produces racialized bodies” (248; also see Goldberg Threat). The effect of the free market on state sovereignty has been hotly debated too. Aihwa Ong contends that neoliberalism produces particular relationships between the state and non-state corporations, as well as determining the role of individuals within the body-politic. Ong specifies:Market-driven logic induces the co-ordination of political policies with the corporate interests, so that developmental discussions favour the fragmentation of the national space into various contiguous zones, and promote the differential regulation of the populations who can be connected to or disconnected from global circuits of capital. (Ong, Neoliberalism 77)So how is whiteness relevant to a discussion of land reform, and to the changes to land rights passed along with Intervention legislation in 2007? Irene Watson cites the former Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, who opposed the progressive individual with what he termed the “failed collective.” Watson asserts that in the debates around land leasing and the Intervention, “Aboriginal law and traditional roles and responsibilities for caring and belonging to country are transformed into the cause for community violence” (Sovereign Spaces 34). The effects of this, I will argue, are twofold and move beyond a moral or social agenda in the strictest sense of the terms: firstly to promote, and make more accessible, the possibility of private and government coalitions in relation to Indigenous lands, and secondly, to reinforce the sovereignty of the state, recognised in the capacity to make decisions. It is here that the explicit reiteration of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possession” is clearly evidenced (The Possessive Logic). Sovereign Interventions In the Northern Territory 50% of land is owned by Indigenous people under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (ALRA) (NT). This law gives Indigenous people control, mediated via land councils, over their lands. It is the contention of this paper that the rights enabled through this law have been eroded in recent times in the coalescing interests of government and private enterprise via, broadly, land rights reform measures. In August 2007 the government passed a number of laws that overturned aspects of the Racial Discrimination Act 197 5(RDA), including the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007. Ostensibly these laws were a response to evidence of alarming levels of child abuse in remote Indigenous communities, which has been compiled in the special report Little Children, co-chaired by Rex Wild QC and Patricia Anderson. This report argued that urgent but culturally appropriate strategies were required in order to assist the local communities in tackling the issues. The recommendations of the report did not include military intervention, and instead prioritised the need to support and work in dialogue with local Indigenous people and organisations who were already attempting, with extremely limited resources, to challenge the problem. Specifically it stated that:The thrust of our recommendations, which are designed to advise the NT government on how it can help support communities to effectively prevent and tackle child sexual abuse, is for there to be consultation with, and ownership by the local communities, of these solutions. (Wild & Anderson 23) Instead, the Federal Coalition government, with support from the opposition Labor Party, initiated a large scale intervention, which included the deployment of the military, to install order and assist medical personnel to carry out compulsory health checks on minors. The intervention affected 73 communities with populations of over 200 Aboriginal men, women and children (Altman, Neo-Paternalism 8). The reality of high levels of domestic and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities requires urgent and diligent attention, but it is not the space of this paper to unpack the media spectacle or the politically determined response to these serious issues, or the considered and careful reports such as the one cited above. While the report specifies the need for local solutions and local control of the process and decision-making, the Federal Liberal Coalition government’s intervention, and the current Labor government’s faithfulness to these, has been centralised and external, imposed upon communities. Rebecca Stringer argues that the Trojan horse thesis indicates what is at stake in this Intervention, while also pinpointing its main weakness. That is, the counter-intuitive links its architects make between addressing child sexual abuse and re-litigating Indigenous land tenure and governance arrangements in a manner that undermines Aboriginal sovereignty and further opens Aboriginal lands to private interests among the mining, nuclear power, tourism, property development and labour brokerage industries. (par. 8)Alongside welfare quarantining for all Indigenous people, was a decision by parliament to overturn the “permit system”, a legal protocol provided by the ALRA and in place so as to enable Indigenous peoples the right to refuse and grant entry to strangers wanting to access their lands. To place this in a broader context of land rights reform, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 2006, created the possibility of 99 year individual leases, at the expense of communal ownership. The legislation operates as a way of individualising the land arrangements in remote Indigenous communities by opening communal land up as private plots able to be bought by Aboriginal people or any other interested party. Indeed, according to Leon Terrill, land reform in Australia over the past 10 years reflects an attempt to return control of decision-making to government bureaucracy, even as governments have downplayed this aspect. Terrill argues that Township Leasing (enabled via the 2006 legislation), takes “wholesale decision-making about land use” away from Traditional Owners and instead places it in the hands of a government entity called the Executive Director of Township Leasing (3). With the passage of legislation around the Intervention, five year leases were created to enable the Commonwealth “administrative control” over the communities affected (Terrill 3). Finally, under the current changes it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of Aboriginal people will be able to access individual land leasing. Moreover, the argument has been presented that these reforms reflect a broader project aimed at replacing communal land ownership arrangements. This agenda has been justified at a rhetorical level via the demonization of communal land ownership arrangements. Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin, researchers at the rightwing think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), released a report entitled A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities, in which they argue that there is a direct casual link between communal ownership and economic underdevelopment: “Communal ownership of land, royalties and other resources is the principle cause of the lack of economic development in remote areas” (in Norberry & Gardiner-Garden 8). In 2005, then Prime Minister, John Howard, publicly introduced the government’s ambition to alter the structure of Indigenous land arrangements, couching his agenda in the language of “equal opportunity”. I believe there’s a case for reviewing the whole issue of Aboriginal land title in the sense of looking more towards private recognition …, I’m talking about giving them the same opportunities as the rest of their fellow Australians. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 1)Scholars of critical race theory have argued that the language of equality, usually tied to liberalism (though not always) masks racial inequality and even results in “camouflaged racism” (Davis 61). David Theo Goldberg notes that, “the racial status-quo - racial exclusions and privileges favouring for the most part middle - and upper class whites - is maintained by formalising equality through states of legal and administrative science” (Racial State 222). While Howard and his coalition of supporters have associated communal title with disadvantage and called for the equality to be found in individual leases (Dodson), Altman has argued that there is no logical link between forms of communal land ownership and incidences of sexual abuse, and indeed, the government’s use of sexual abuse disingenuously disguises it’s imperative to alter the land ownership arrangements: “Given the proposed changes to the ALRA are in no way associated with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities […] there is therefore no pressing urgency to pass the amendments.” (Altman National Emergency, 3) In the case of the Intervention, land rights reforms have affected the continued dispossession of Indigenous people in the interests of “commercial development” (Altman Neo-Paternalism 8). In light of this it can be argued that what is occurring conforms to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has highlighted as the “possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty” (Possessive Logic). White sovereignty, under the banner of benevolent paternalism overturns the authority it has conceded to local Indigenous communities. This is realised via township leases, five year leases, housing leases and other measures, stripping them of the right to refuse the government and private enterprise entry into their lands (effectively the right of control and decision-making), and opening them up to, as Stringer argues, a range of commercial and government interests. Future Concerns and Concluding NotesThe etymological root of coalition is coalesce, inferring the broad ambition to “grow together”. In the issues outlined above, growing together is dominated by neoliberal interests, or what Stringer has termed “assimilatory neoliberation”. The issue extends beyond a social and economic assimilationism project and into a political and legal “land grab”, because, as Ong notes, the neoliberal agenda aligns itself with the nation-state. This coalitional arrangement of neoliberal and governmental interests reiterates “white possession” (Moreton-Robinson, The Possessive Logic). This is evidenced in the position of the current Labor government decision to uphold the nomination of Muckaty as a radioactive waste repository site in Australia (Stokes). In 2007, the Northern Land Council (NLC) nominated Muckaty Station to be the site for waste disposal. This decision cannot be read outside the context of Maralinga, in the South Australian desert, a site where experiments involving nuclear technology were conducted in the 1960s. As John Keane recounts, the Australian government permitted the British government to conduct tests, dispossessing the local Aboriginal group, the Tjarutja, and employing a single patrol officer “the job of monitoring the movements of the Aborigines and quarantining them in settlements” (Keane). Situated within this historical colonial context, in 2006, under a John Howard led Liberal Coalition, the government passed the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act (CRWMA), a law which effectively overrode the rulings of the Northern Territory government in relation decisions regarding nuclear waste disposal, as well as overriding the rights of traditional Aboriginal owners and the validity of sacred sites. The Australian Labor government has sought to alter the CRWMA in order to reinstate the importance of following due process in the nomination process of land. However, it left the proposed site of Muckaty as confirmed, and the new bill, titled National Radioactive Waste Management retains many of the same characteristics of the Howard government legislation. In 2010, 57 traditional owners from Muckaty and surrounding areas signed a petition stating their opposition to the disposal site (the case is currently in the Federal Court). At a time when nuclear power has come back onto the radar as a possible solution to the energy crisis and climate change, questions concerning the investments of government and its loyalties should be asked. As Malcolm Knox has written “the nuclear industry has become evangelical about the dangers of global warming” (Knox). While nuclear is a “cleaner” energy than coal, until better methods are designed for processing its waste, larger amounts of it will be produced, requiring lands that can hold it for the desired timeframes. For Australia, this demands attention to the politics and ethics of waste disposal. Such an issue is already being played out, before nuclear has even been signed off as a solution to climate change, with the need to find a disposal site to accommodate already existing uranium exported to Europe and destined to return as waste to Australia in 2014. The decision to go ahead with Muckaty against the wishes of the voices of local Indigenous people may open the way for the co-opting of a discourse of environmentalism by political and business groups to promote the development and expansion of nuclear power as an alternative to coal and oil for energy production; dumping waste on Indigenous lands becomes part of the solution to climate change. During the 2010 Australian election, Greens Leader Bob Brown played upon the word coalition to suggest that the Liberal National Party were in COALition with the mining industry over the proposed Mining Tax – the Liberal Coalition opposed any mining tax (Brown). Here Brown highlights the alliance of political agendas and business or corporate interests quite succinctly. Like Brown’s COALition, will government (of either major party) form a coalition with the nuclear power stakeholders?This paper has attempted to bring to light what Dodson has identified as “an alliance of established conservative forces...with more recent and strident ideological thinking associated with free market economics and notions of individual responsibility” and the implications of this alliance for land rights (Dodson). It is important to ask critical questions about the vision of “growing together” being promoted via the coalition of conservative, neoliberal, private and government interests.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers of this article for their useful suggestions. ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Authority. “Noel Pearson Discusses the Issues Faced by Indigenous Communities.” Lateline 26 June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s1962844.htm>. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Altman, Jon. “The ‘National Emergency’ and Land Rights Reform: Separating Fact from Fiction.” A Briefing Paper for Oxfam Australia, 2007. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.oxfam.org.au/resources/filestore/originals/OAus-EmergencyLandRights-0807.pdf>. Altman, Jon. “The Howard Government’s Northern Territory Intervention: Are Neo-Paternalism and Indigenous Development Compatible?” Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research Topical Issue 16 (2007). 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://caepr.anu.edu.au/system/files/Publications/topical/Altman_AIATSIS.pdf>. Brown, Bob. “Senator Bob Brown National Pre-Election Press Club Address.” 2010. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹http://greens.org.au/content/senator-bob-brown-pre-election-national-press-club-address>. Davis, Angela. The Angela Davis Reader. Ed. J. James, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Dodson, Patrick. “An Entire Culture Is at Stake.” Opinion. The Age, 14 July 2007: 4. Goldberg, David Theo. The Racial State. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002.———. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Neoliberalism. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2008. Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1709-1795. Keane, John. “Maralinga’s Afterlife.” Feature Article. The Age, 11 May 2003. 24 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/11/1052280486255.html>. Knox, Malcolm. “Nuclear Dawn.” The Monthly 56 (May 2010). Lambert, Anthony. “Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia.” M/C Journal 13.6 (2010). Langton, Marcia. “It’s Time to Stop Playing Politics with Vulnerable Lives.” Opinion. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Nov. 2007: 2. McAllan, Fiona. “Customary Appropriations.” borderlands ejournal 6.3 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no3_2007/mcallan_appropriations.htm>. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision.” borderlands e-journal 3.2 (2004). 1 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm>. ———. “Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation.” Whitening Race. Ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 75-89. Norberry, J., and J. Gardiner-Garden. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Bill 2006. Australian Parliamentary Library Bills Digest 158 (19 June 2006). Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 75-97.Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd. ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Rio Tinto. "Rio Tinto Aboriginal Policy and Programme Briefing Note." June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.aboriginalfund.riotinto.com/common/pdf/Aboriginal%20Policy%20and%20Programs%20-%20June%202007.pdf>. Roberts, David J., and Mielle Mahtami. “Neoliberalising Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing 'Race' in Neoliberal Discourses.” Antipode 42.2 (2010): 248-257. Stringer, Rebecca. “A Nightmare of the Neocolonial Kind: Politics of Suffering in Howard's Northern Territory Intervention.” borderlands ejournal 6.2 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/stringer_intervention.htm>.Stokes, Dianne. "Muckaty." n.d. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.timbonham.com/slideshows/Muckaty/>. Terrill, Leon. “Indigenous Land Reform: What Is the Real Aim of Land Reform?” Edited version of a presentation provided at the 2010 National Native Title Conference, 2010. Watson, Irene. “Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108.1 (2009): 27-51. Watson, Nicole. “Howard’s End: The Real Agenda behind the Proposed Review of Indigenous Land Titles.” Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 9.4 (2005). ‹http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AILR/2005/64.html>.Wild, R., and P. Anderson. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarie: The Little Children Are Sacred. Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Northern Territory: Northern Territory Government, 2007.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry from 1898 is not held in high esteem by connoisseurs. Scholars focus rather on the ‘Florence Diary’, published posthumously in 1942. As a journal from an educational trip to Florence and Viareggio in the spring of 1898, it records visits to Renaissance artworks, great collections and famous churches, but it does not contain any poetical and lyrical traces. Nevertheless, poems do emerge but their motifs deviate from picturesque vedutas and classical forms; their objects are neither the great examples of art nor the everyday world of tourists but they rather moves to so-called ‘third places’, topographically recognizable in the city periphery and surrounding landscapes as well as the choice of ordinary people as poetic characters, insignificant young girls on their pilgrimage to sacred sites of the Madonna, and remote rituals of popular religion. From these ‘new’ contexts Rilke tries to create a poetry and poetics of his own, which contrasts with the epigonal style of poetry on Italy from central and northern Europe.

Every continent has its unique beauty, and Europe isn’t an exception. Here you will find a variety of tourist destinations ranging from beaches, beautiful sceneries, cultural and art centers among others. It’s no wonder Europe has always been voted among the best continents to visit. So, if you are planning for a romantic getaway, cultural tour, family vacation, or a getaway with your friends, this content has something to offer and more in what you are looking for. However, with 51 countries and thousands of destinations to discover, narrowing down on a single destination can be overwhelming. We are here to make your decision easier with the following 5 places that will guarantee you a getaway of your lifetime. Tuscany, Italy There is no better way to tour Tuscany than taking a road trip. Plan to land in Florence and start your tour there as it is home to the largest airport. While there, you can visit the Uffizi Gallery and savor the art in the display or enjoy a beautiful view of the city from up the hill at Piazzale Michelangelo. After enjoying the city, start your journey to the countryside stopping at stunning sceneries to enjoy the sites. You can make your first stop in Lucca. Enjoy the breathtaking Piazza d’Anfiteatro and take a stroll along the tops of the city’s fortifying walls. After that, make other stops at Pisa, San Gimignano, Siena, Val d’Orcia, and Montepulciano to enjoy all that these spots have to offer; beautiful sceneries, food and get to taste the local wine before heading back to Florence. While you can move around using public transport, renting a car and driving yourself around offers a more convenient option. To do this, however, you would need to possess an international driver's license, a document that allows you to drive in a foreign city. Make sure you obtain one before leaving for your trip. Madeira, Portugal If you love nature, Madeira in Portugal is one of the best destinations for this. This place is full of flowers, trees, beaches, and unique landscapes that are home to birds and other incredible wildlife. If you are in for some amazing scenery, head to the Valley of the Nuns also known as Camara De Lobos, or to Miradouro das Flores viewpoint to enjoy the cliffs around. The geological formation of Pico de Ana Ferreira will not disappoint either. If you haven’t experienced black sandy beaches, Madeira Island has this to offer. You can head to Praia do Porto do Seixal to savor this and enjoy a swim or to the sea to search for dolphins. Of course, a nature trip wouldn’t be complete without a hike to a nature trail; head to Ribeiro Frio Natural park for some rugged mountains and forest experience. San Sebastian, Spain If you are looking for the best beach experience, this gem along the northern coastline of the Basque Country is your best bet. The famous La Concha Beach offers the best atmosphere to chill out or take a walk. You can also go surfing off Zurriola Beach or take a ferry to Santa Clara Island. Apart from the beaches, San Sebastian is surrounded by green hills and numerous historical and cultural attractions. You can dive into this after you are done enjoying the beach. A visit to the San Vicente Church, the oldest in San Sebastian, a tour around the cobbled streets of the Old Town, or a funicular ride up the top of Monte Igueldo will leave you mesmerized. Paris, France Paris is one of the most romantic cities in the world. If you have been looking for the best destination for your honeymoon, proposal, anniversary or your spouse’s birthday weekend, the City of Love is perfect for a romantic getaway. Sip a glass of champagne from the top of the famous Eiffel Tower overlooking the beautiful views of the city and wait for the dark to see the tower sparkle with numerous gold lights. You can also take a stroll or cycle around the city and linger at romantic spots such as the iron footbridge at the intersection of rue de la Grange aux Belles and Quai de Jemmapes to see the road bridge open to let canal boats through. Explore the city’s art galleries to savor romantic works or go boat riding in Bois de Boulogne and afterward head to Jardin Shakespeare through the woods to see flowers, plants, and trees in Shakespeare plays grow. Rotterdam, Netherlands With diverse cultures, Rotterdam is one of the best destinations for a cultural tour. Start your tour at The Markthal, a huge, horseshoe-shaped building that houses a gigantic food court. You will enjoy different local cuisines as you marvel at some of the largest artworks the planet has to offer. You can then take a stroll through Witte de Withestraat to enjoy contemporary art in galleries located along the street. Head to WORM to enjoy some concerts of the local music or to Kinderdijk, a UNESCO heritage site to witness 300 years old windmills that pump water from swamps. Complete the cultural experience by renting a suite in one of the city’s iconic buildings such as Hotel New York and enjoy beautiful views from there. Conclusion There you have it! Five European destinations that are bound to blow your mind away. You can determine the best time to visit the continent by considering the weather, your budget, and your personal preferences. If you want the best weather for hikes and adventurous activities, the summer that runs from June to August is the best time to visit. However, be prepared to pay more and deal with crowds. The rest of the months can be cheaper since they are off-peak seasons, but you might have to endure unfavorable weather.

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. Continued narrative uncertainty generates a sense of perpetual wandering, symbolic of the writer’s shadowy task of representing the past.ReferencesAnstett, Elisabeth. “Memory of Political Repression in Post-Soviet Russia: The Example of the Gulag.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 13 Sep. 2011. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/memory-political-repression-post-soviet-russia-example-gulag>.Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62.Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267–87.Brabon, Katherine. The Memory Artist. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2016.Gussow, Mel. “W.G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57.” The New York Times 15 Dec. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html>.Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 152–174.Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word: An Interview with WG Sebald.” The Guardian 22 Sep. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation>.Karp, Masha. “An Interview with Irina Flige.” RightsinRussia.com 11 Apr. 2012. 2 Aug. 2019 <http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/interviews-1/irina-flige/masha-karp>.Lewis, Tess. “WG Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20 (2001).MacDonald, Anna. “‘Pictures in a Rebus’: Puzzling Out W.G. Sebald’s Monstrous Geographies.” In Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier. Eds. Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2013. 115–25.Modiano, Patrick. The Search Warrant. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin. London: Harvill Secker, 2014.Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Ed. Markus Zisselsberger. Rochester New York: Camden House, 2010. 37–62. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26: (Spring 1989): 7–24.Polster, Heike. The Aesthetics of Passage: The Imag(in)ed Experience of Time in Thomas Lehr, W.G. Sebald, and Peter Handke. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2009.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. ———. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002.Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

‘Country’ is a word that is made to do much discursive work. In one common configuration, country is synonymous with ‘rural’, also evinced through terms like countryside and country-minded. Yet, at the same time, country is synonymous with ‘nation’. This usage is more emotive and identificatory than administrative, as in ‘my country’, ‘my land’, ‘my homeland’. Augmenting a sense of national allegiance, this use of country evokes something of the connection between people, landscape, belonging, identity and subjectivity. Moreover, country-as-rural(ity) and country-as-nation(ality) have significant overlaps. The rural landscape – the countryside – is often imagined as the ‘heartland’ of the modern Western nation-state – a source of national identity and a storehouse for values ‘lost’ through the experience of progress, modernity and industrialisation (Bell). Here, the countryside, supposedly, is a traditional material and discursive site for family, community and well-being (Little and Austin). From yet another angle, country is a genre or style, as in country music, country and western film, country living, country comfort and country cooking. In this way, country becomes a commercial selling point and a commodified imaginary – although this is not at all mutually exclusive with the evocation of belonging, identity and national cultural values through the countryside. This commodification is seen in the recent revaluing of country getaways (McCarthy), sea-change (Burnley and Murphy) and tree-change (Costello), which in turn invokes the notion of country as a store of traditional values, moral restoration and physical revitalisation. Clearly, then, these multifaceted invocations of country – as rurality, nationality and commodity – interleave and overlap in various and complex ways. The papers comprising this issue of M/C Journal seek to explore the intermingling discourses of country, and how these have changed (and continue to change) over time and between places. Indeed, many of these meanings have heightened importance in the present cultural and political moment, and the contents of the papers draw attention to these emerging currencies. Country-as-nation(ality) – and as homeland – is reinforced in the current context of social unrest around terror, security, minority political rights, and climate change threats. And as people search for anchors of security, reinvestments are made in the ‘authenticity’ of rurality and rural communities as sources of both personal respite and wider national cultural values. This has flow on effects in the sphere of the cultural economy, where country living, rustic style and bucolic retreats are increasingly sought by cultural consumers. These affiliations between country, nation, rurality, security, community and consumption are critically interrogated in the subsequent papers. One key theme elicited across the collection is how country – as style, commodity, rurality and/or nationality – shapes social and cultural identities. Annabel Cooper, Chris Gibson, Loria Maxwell and Kara Stooksbury, Anthony Lambert and Catherine Simpson, and Andrew Gorman-Murray, explore the links between country and national identities, and how these interconnections take both similar and different contours across the United States, Europe and the Antipodes. In their papers, Cooper and Gibson also consider the connections between national identities, country style and gendered subjectivities. Simpson and Lambert, Michael Wesch and Clemence Due, meanwhile, draw attention to the links between land, country and Indigenous subjectivities. In doing so, Due and Lambert and Simpson, as well as Lelia Green, Gerry Bloustien and Mark Balnaves, elicit how discourses of country exclude particular identities, and leave certain social groups with a sense of unease. Terry Maybury, Donna Lee Brien and Jesse Schlotterbeck focus on the broader intermingling of rurality, regionality and identity. Another key theme traced through the papers is how county is also linked with a range of media and cultural commodities. Country music is most well-known in this regard, but also prominent are country and western films and country cooking. Several authors in this collection – Gibson, Maxwell and Stooksbury, and Brien – show the ongoing importance of these products, and their role in linking different notions of country across the scales and sites of the rural, the national and the transnational. Cooper, Schlotterbeck, and Lambert and Simpson reveal how ideas of country seep into films not specifically designated as country films, such as the noir, period and thriller genres. The deployment of country in a range of other cultural and media products is explored in this collection as well, including print news media (Due; Gorman-Murray), tourist promotions (Brien; Gorman-Murray), archival photographs (Gorman-Murray), statecraft (Wesch), and social mores and practices of belonging, attachment and alienation (Green et al; Maybury). Importantly, then, the papers in this collection, drawing on a range of data, entry points and conceptual lenses, explore the way different meanings and scales country overlap, and how notions of country ‘travel’ between places and contexts, in the process transforming and taking on new inflections. In the lead paper, Annabel Cooper explores the way country, national identities and feminine subjectivities come together in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady. In this evocative discussion she shows how gender is modulated by national identities as much as other subjectivities, and moreover, how the insertion of an Antipodean femininity in the film version of Portrait reworked the geographical underpinnings of Henry James’ novel. She argues that the United States’ national self-imagination has moved on in the century between the novel and the film, and that Campion rearticulated the story through a feminine Antipodean lens. In Campion’s Portrait, notions of country and narratives of national femininities travel not only between the United States and Europe, but between the Americas and the Antipodes as well. Chris Gibson provides a complementary piece. Focusing on the imagery and lyrics of country sheet music in pre-war Australia, he shows how masculinities are inflected by discourses of both country-as-rurality and country-as-nation. In this case, images of masculinities from the American West insinuated into Australia through the trans-Pacific transaction of country music, particularly in the simultaneously visual and oral register of sheet music. For both Gibson and Cooper, country, whether associated with rurality or nationality, is not singularly emplaced, but travels transnationally as well. Lori Maxwell and Kara Stooksbury also turn their attention to country music. In their case the focus is contemporary country music in the United States, and the role this genre and its artists has played in recent American political culture, particularly Republican positions on ‘love of country’ and national allegiance. Their analysis shows how country, as a commodity linked with a particular species of rurality, is used by presidents, politicians and commentators to frame discourses of patriotic nationalism and appropriate notions of American belonging. Also focusing on cultural production in the United States’ context, Jesse Schlotterbeck critically examines the diverse roles of rurality and rural places in film noir, helping to define a subgenre of ‘rural noir’. He not only discusses the deployment of the rural in noir as a place of goodness, decency and traditional values, but also how the rural is simultaneously drawn into networks of crime, and even becomes a haven for criminality. This adds to work which challenges the romantic idyllisation of the countryside as a site of moral integrity and a store of ‘proper’ national cultural values. Anthony Lambert and Catherine Simpson similarly raise the spectre of criminality in the countryside through film analysis, but their focus is on the Australian film Jindabyne and the associated geographical context of the Australian Alps. The issues around criminality and country(side) in their analysis is broader than legal transcendence, encompassing contemporary cultural politics and social justice. Jindabyne’s narrative focus on the murder of a young Aboriginal woman provides a catalyst for interrogating Indigenous dispossession, postcolonial race relations, environmental change, and the shifting senses of belonging to country for settler Australians negotiating this ‘aftermath culture’. Andrew Gorman-Murray also concentrates on the Australian Alps, and explores the changing links between this countryside and national identity in a postcolonial settler society, but his cultural political context and catalyst are different: the threats to landscape, country and national values from imminent climate change impacts in the Australian Alps. Cultural dimensions and meanings of climate change are an emerging and important research concern (Hulme), and his analysis demonstrates how national identities and ideals of country(side) are reconfigured through the anticipated effects of climate change on the landscape. The next few papers turn to minority or Indigenous social groups’ belonging and attachment to country, both as nation and (home)land, through various experiences of insecurity. Lelia Green, Gerry Bloustien and Mark Balnaves discuss their survey finding that Jewish-Australians express the highest level of fear amongst religious groups in this country. Analysing both survey responses and additional narratives, they comprehensively interpret this heightened fear through intersecting contemporary processes of terror, insecurity, anti-Semitism, and diasporic community-formation, which collide in the context of cultural and political rhetoric about national homeland security. Complimenting both this paper and Simpson and Lambert’s discussion, Clemence Due considers the vexed question of who can lay claim to country in Australia – understood at-once as the nation, the rural countryside, and its resources – in the cultural political context of Indigenous dispossession and native title issues. She examines how this debate – about negotiating Indigenous rights to country in a political and legal context of white sovereignty – has been depicted in The Australian during 2008. Michael Wesch explores similar tensions between government authority and Indigenous sovereignty in a different context, that of New Guinea. His ethnographic analysis is evocative, showing the quite different concepts of country deployed by the state and local peoples in relation to land, settlement and governance, where Indigenous relational connections to land and belonging rub up against the categorical imperatives of statecraft. The final two papers return to rural and regional areas of Australia, and consider embodied connections to place for settler Australians. Situating her discussion within the academic arenas of food studies and the cultural economy, Donna Lee Brien provides an illuminating analysis of the role and significance of rural and regional chefs within their local communities. Her geographical focus is Armidale and Guyra, in northern New South Wales. Linking country as a generic commodity and as a rural locality, she shows how ‘foodie culture’ is not merely a tourist drawcard, but also deeply implicated in the maintenance of the local community. Terry Maybury, meanwhile, delivers a provocative discussion of the links between country, regionality and belonging through a diagrammatical analysis of ‘home’ – home understood as both “the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings.” In this conceptualisation, home provides a nexus for self in a global/regional network, the site which allows one to gather the various elements, scales and nuances of country together in a comprehensible fashion. Home, in this way, lies at the heart of country, and makes sense of all its multifarious and interleaving dimensions and meanings. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Rohan Tate, our cover artist, for providing a photographic montage of ‘country’ which draws together the various strands explored through this collection – as nationality, rurality and commodity. The collection of various signifiers and objects prompts one to question what country is and where it is to be found. I extend thanks to those who reviewed the submissions for this issue. I trust the readers find this collection of papers as stimulating as I have. I hope the juxtaposition of various takes on country, and discussions of how those meanings and experiences intermingle, prompt further exploration and conceptualisation of the discursive and material significance of country in contemporary society and culture. References Bell, David. “Variations on the Rural Idyll.” Handbook of Rural Studies. Eds. Paul Cloke, Terry Marsden and Patrick Mooney. London: Sage, 2006. 149-160. Burnley, Ian and Peter Murphy. Sea Change: Movement from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004. Costello, Lauren. “Going bush: the implications of urban-rural migration.” Geographical Research 45.1 (2007): 85-94. Hulme, Mike. “Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33.1 (2008): 5-11. Little, Jo and Patricia Austin. “Women and the Rural Idyll.” Journal of Rural Studies 12.1 (1996): 101-111. McCarthy, James. “Rural Geography: Globalizing the Countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32.1 (2008): 129-137.

Image 1: View from Geodha Sgoilt towards the sea stacks, Uig, Isle of Lewis. Image credit: George Jaramillo.IntroductionOver the cliffs of Mangerstadh on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, is a small plot of land called Geodha Sgoilt that overlooks the North Atlantic Ocean (Image 1). On the site is a small dirt gravel road and the remnants of a World War II listening station. Below, sea stacks rise from the waters, orange and green cliff sides stand in defiance to the crashing waves. An older gentleman began to tell me of what he believed could be located here on the site. A place where visitors could learn of the wonders of St Kilda that contained all types of new storytelling technologies to inspire them. He pointed above the ruined buildings, mentioning that a new road for the visitors’ vehicles and coaches would be built. With his explanations, you could almost imagine such a place on these cliffs. Yet, before that new idea could even be built, this gentleman and his group of locals and incomers had to convince themselves and others that this new heritage centre was something desired, necessary and inevitable in the development of the Western Isles.This article explores the developing relationships that come about through design innovation with community organisations. This was done through a partnership between an academic institution and a non-profit heritage community group as part of growing study in how higher education design research can play an active partner in community group development. It argues for the use of design thinking and innovation in improving strategy and organisational processes within non-profit organisations. In this case, it looks at what role it can play in building and enabling organisational confidence in its mission, as well as, building “beyond the museum”. The new approach to this unique relationship casts new light towards working with complexities and strategies rather than trying to resolve issues from the outset of a project. These enabling relationships are divided into three sections of this paper: First it explores the context of the island community group and “building” heritage, followed by a brief history of St Kilda and its current status, and designation as a World Heritage site. Second, it seeks the value of developing strategy and the introduction of the Institute of Design Innovation (INDI). This is followed by a discussion of the six-month relationship and work that was done that elucidates various methods used and ending with its outcomes. The third section reflects upon the impacts at the relationship building between the two groups with some final thoughts on the partnership, where it can lead, and how this can represent new ways of working together within community groups. Building HeritageCurrent community research in Scotland has shown struggles in understanding issues within community capability and development (Barker 11; Cave 20; Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 23) though most focus on the land tenure and energy (McMorran 21) and not heritage groups. The need to maintain “resilient” (Steiner 17) communities has shown that economic resilience is of primary importance for these rural communities. Heritage as economic regenerator has had a long history in the United Kingdom. Some of these like the regeneration of Wirksworth in the Peak District (Gordon 20) have had great economic results with populations growing, as well as, development in the arts and design. These changes, though positive, have also adversely impacted the local community by estranging and forcing lower income townspeople to move away due to higher property values and lack of work. Furthermore, current trends in heritage tourism have managed to turn many rural regions into places of historic consumption (Ronström 7) termed “heritagisation” (Edensor 35). There is thus a need for critical reflection within a variety of heritage organisations with the increase in heritage tourism.In particular, existing island heritage organisations face a variety of issues that they focus too much on the artefactual or are too focused to strive for anything beyond the remit of their particular heritage (Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 33; Ronström 4). Though many factors including funding, space, volunteerism and community capability affect the way these groups function they have commonalities that include organisational methods, volunteer fatigue, and limited interest from community groups. It is within this context that the communities of the Outer Hebrides. Currently, projects within the Highlands and islands focus on particular “grassroots” development (Cave 26; Robertson 994) searching for innovative ways to attract, maintain, and sustain healthy levels of heritage and development—one such group is Ionad Hiort. Ionad Hiort Ionad Hiort is a community non-profit organisation founded in 2010 to assist in the development of a new type of heritage centre in the community of Uig on the Isle of Lewis (“Proposal-Ionad Hiort”). As stated in their website, the group strives to develop a centre on the history and contemporary views of St Kilda, as well as, encouraging a much-needed year-round economic impetus for the region. The development of the group and the idea of a heritage centre came about through the creation of the St Kilda Opera, a £1.5 million, five-country project held in 2007, led by Scotland’s Gaelic Arts agency, Proiseact nan Ealan (Mckenzie). This opera, inspired by the cliffs, people, and history of St Kilda used creative techniques to unite five countries in a live performance with cliff aerobatics and Gaelic singing to present the island narrative. From this initial interest, a commission from the Western Isles council (2010), developed by suggestions and commentary from earlier reports (Jura Report 2009; Rebanks 2009) encouraged a fiercely contentious competition, which saw Ionad Hiort receive the right to develop a remote-access heritage centre about the St Kilda archipelago (Maclean). In 2013, the group received a plot of land from the local laird for the establishment of the centre (Urquhart) thereby bringing it closer to its goal of a heritage centre, but before moving onto this notion of remote-heritage, a brief history is needed on the archipelago. Image 2: Location map of Mangerstadh on the Isle of Lewis and St Kilda to the west, with inset of Scotland. Image credit: © Crown Copyright and Database Right (2017). Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence).St KildaSt Kilda is an archipelago about 80 kilometres off the coast of the Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic (Image 2). Over 2000 years of habitation show an entanglement between humans and nature including harsh weather, limited resources, but a tenacity and growth to develop a way of living upon a small section of land in the middle of the Atlantic. St Kilda has maintained a tenuous relationship between the sea, the cliffs and the people who have lived within its territory (Geddes, and Gannon 18). Over a period of three centuries beginning in the eighteenth century an outside influence on the island begin to play a major role, with the loss of a large portion of its small (180) population. This population would later decrease to 100 and finally to 34 in 1930, when it was decided to evacuate the final members of the village in what could best be called a forced eviction.Since the evacuation, the island has maintained an important military presence as a listening station during the Second World War and in its modern form a radar station as part of the Hebridean Artillery (Rocket) Range (Geddes 14). The islands in the last thirty years have seen an increase in tourism with the ownership of the island by the National Trust of Scotland. The UNESCO World Heritage Organisation (UNESCO), who designated St Kilda in 1986 and 2004 as having outstanding universal value, has seen its role evolve from not just protecting (or conserving) world heritage sites, but to strategically understand sustainable tourism of its sites (“St Kilda”). In 2012, UNESCO selected St Kilda as a case study for remote access heritage conservation and interpretation (Hebrides News Today; UNESCO 15). This was partly due to the efforts of 3D laser scanning of the islands by a collaboration between The Glasgow School of Art and Historic Environment Scotland called the Centre for Digital Documentation and Visualisation (CDDV) in 2009.The idea of a remote access heritage is an important aspect as to what Ionad Hiort could do with creating a centre at their site away from St Kilda. Remote access heritage is useful in allowing for sites and monuments to be conserved and monitored “from afar”. It allows for 3D visualisations of sites and provides new creative engagements with a variety of different places (Remondino, and Rizzi 86), however, Ionad Hiort was not yet at a point to even imagine how to use the remote access technology. They first needed a strategy and direction, as after many years of moving towards recognition of proposing the centre at their site in Uig, they had lost a bit of that initial drive. This is where INDI was asked to assist by the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the regional development organisation for most of rural Scotland. Building ConfidenceINDI is a research institute at The Glasgow School of Art. It is a distributed, creative collective of researchers, lecturers and students specialising in design innovation, where design innovation means enabling creative capabilities within communities, groups and individuals. Together, they address complex issues through new design practices and bespoke community engagement to co-produce “preferable futures” (Henchley 25). Preferable futures are a type of future casting that seeks to strive not just for the probable or possible future of a place or idea, but for the most preferred and collectively reached option for a society (McAra-McWilliam 9). INDI researches the design processes that are needed to co-create contexts in which people can flourish: at work, in organisations and businesses, as well as, in public services and government. The task of innovation as an interactive process is an example of the design process. Innovation is defined as “a co-creation process within social and technological networks in which actors integrate their resources to create mutual value” (Russo‐Spena, and Mele 528). Therefore, innovation works outside of standard consultancy practices; rather it engenders a sense of mutual co-created practices that strive to resolve particular problems. Examples include the work that has looked at creating cultures of innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (Lockwood 4) where the design process was used to alter organisational support (Image 3). These enterprises tend to emulate larger firms and corporations and though useful in places where economies of scale are present, smaller business need adaptable, resilient and integrated networks of innovation within their organisational models. In this way, innovation functioned as a catalyst for altering the existing organisational methods. These innovations are thus a useful alternative to existing means of approaching problems and building resilience within any organisation. Therefore, these ideas of innovation could be transferred and play a role in enabling new ways of approaching non-profit organisational structures, particularly those within heritage. Image 3: Design Council Double Diamond model of the design process. Image credit: Lockwood.Developing the WorkIonad Hiort with INDI’s assistance has worked together to develop a heritage centre that tries to towards a new definition of heritage and identity through this island centre. Much of this work has been done through local community investigations revolving around workshops and one-on-one talks where narratives and ideas are held in “negative capability” (McAra-McWilliam 2) to seek many alternatives that would be able to work for the community. The initial aims of the partnership were to assist the Uig community realise the potential of the St Kilda Centre. Primarily, it would assist in enabling the capabilities of two themes. The first would be, strategy, for Ionad Hiort’s existing multi-page mission brief. The second would be storytelling the narrative of St Kilda as a complex and entangled, however, its common views are limited to the ‘fall from grace’ or ‘noble savage’ story (Macdonald 168). Over the course of six months, the relationship involved two workshops and three site visits of varying degrees of interaction. An initial gathering had InDI staff meet members of Ionad Hiort to introduce members to each other. Afterwards, INDI ran two workshops over two months in Uig to understand, reflect and challenge Ionad Hiort’s focus on what the group desired. The first workshop focused on the group’s strategy statement. In a relaxed and facilitated space in the Uig Community Hall, the groups used pens, markers, and self-adhesive notes to engage in an open dialogue about the group’s desires. This session included reflecting on what their heritage centre could look like, as well as what their strategy needed to get there. These resulted in a series of drawings of their ‘preferred’ centre, with some ideas showing a centre sitting over the edge of the cliffs or one that had the centre be an integral component of the community. In discussing that session, one of members of the group recalled:I remember his [one of INDI’s staff] interrogation of the project was actually pretty – initially – fairly brutal, right? The first formal session we had talking about strategy and so on. To the extent that I think it would be fair to say he pissed everybody off, right? So much so that he actually prompted us to come back with some fairly hard hitting ripostes, which, after a moment’s silence he then said, ‘That’s it, you’ve convinced me’, and at that point we kind of realised that that’s what he’d been trying to do; he’d been trying to really push us to go further in our articulation of what we were doing and … why we were doing it in this particular way than we had done before. (Participant A, 2016).The group through this session found out that their strategy could be refined into a short mission statement giving a clear focus as to what they wanted and how they wanted to go about doing it. In the end, drawings, charts, stories (Image 4) were drawn to reflect on what the community had discussed. These artefacts became a key role-player in the following months of the development of the group. Image 4: View of group working through their strategy workshop session. Image credit: Fergus Fullarton-Pegg (2014). The second set of workshops and visits involved informal discussion with individual members of the group and community. This included a visit to St Kilda with members from INDI, Ionad Hiort and the Digital Design Studio, which allowed for everyone to understand the immensity of the project and its significance to World Heritage values. The initial aims thus evolved into understanding the context of self-governance for distributed communities and how to develop the infrastructure of development. As discussed earlier, existing development processes are useful, though limited to only particular types of projects, and as exemplified in the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Western Isles Council commission, it tends to put communities against each other for limited pots of money. This existing system can be innovated upon by becoming creative liaisons, sharing and co-creating from existing studies to help develop more effective processes for the future of Ionad Hiort and their ‘preferable future’. Building RelationshipsWhat the relationship with GSA has done, as a dialogue with the team of people that have been involved, has been to consolidate and clarify our own thinking and to get us to question our own thinking across several different aspects of the whole project. (Participant A, 2016)As the quote states, the main notion of using design thinking has allowed Ionad Hiort to question their thinking and challenge preconceptions of what a “heritage centre” is, by being a critical sounding board that is different from what is provided by consultants and other stakeholders. Prior to meeting INDI, Ionad Hiort may have been able to reach their goal of a strategy, however, it would have taken a few more years. The work, which involved structured and unstructured workshops, meetings, planning events, and gatherings, gave them a structured focus to move ahead with their prospectus planning and bidding. INDI enabled the compression and focus of their strategy making and mission strategy statement over the course of six months into a one-page statement that gave direction to the group and provided the impetus for the development of the prospectus briefs. Furthermore, INDI contributed a sense of contemporary content to the historic story, as well as, enable the community to see that this centre would not just become another gallery with café. The most important outcome has been an effective measure in building relationships in the Outer Hebrides, which shows the changing roles between academic and third sector partnerships. Two key points can be deemed from these developing relationships: The first has been to build a research infrastructure in and across the region that engages with local communities about working with the GSA, including groups in North Uist, Barra and South Uist. Of note is a comment made by one of the participants saying: “It’s exciting now, there’s a buzz about it and getting you [INDI] involved, adding a dimension—we’ve got people who have got an artistic bent here but I think your enthusiasm, your skills, very much complement what we’ve got here.” (Participant B, 2016). Second, the academic/non-profit partnership has encouraged younger people to work and study in the area through a developing programme of student research activity. This includes placing taught masters students with local community members on the South Uist, as well as, PhD research being done on Stornoway. These two outcomes then have given rise to interest in not only how heritage is re-developed in a community, but also, encourages future interest, by staff and students to continue the debate and fashion further developments in the region (GSAmediacentre). Today, the cliffs of Mangerstadh continue to receive the pounding of waves, the blowing wind and the ever-present rain on its rocky granite surface. The iterative stages of work that the two groups have done showcase the way that simple actions can carve, change and evolve into innovative outcomes. The research outcomes show that through this new approach to working with communities we move beyond the consultant and towards an ability of generating a preferable future for the community. In this way, the work that has been created together showcases a case study for further island community development. We do not know what the future holds for the group, but with continued support and maintaining an open mind to creative opportunities we will see that the community will develop a space that moves “beyond the museum”. AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Ionad Hiort and all the residents of Uig on the Isle of Lewis for their assistance and participation in this partnership. For more information on their work please visit http://www.ionadhiort.org/. The author also thanks the Highlands and Islands Enterprise for financial support in the research and development of the project. Finally, the author thanks the two reviewers who provided critical commentary and critiques to improve this paper. ReferencesBarker, Adam. “Capacity Building for Sustainability: Towards Community Development in Coastal Scotland.” Journal of Environmental Management 75.1 (2005): 11-19. 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