Journal articles on the topic 'Reading – Parent participation – Botswana'

This study investigated the contributions of curriculum approach and parent involvement to the short- and long-term effects of preschool participation in the Title I Chicago Child-Parent Centers. Data came from the complete cohort of 989 low-income children (93% African American) in the Chicago Longitudinal Study, who attended preschool in the 20 Child-Parent Centers in 1983-1985 and kindergarten in 1985-1986. We found that implementation of an instructional approach rated high by Head Teachers in teacher-directed and child-initiated activities was most consistently associated with children’s outcomes, including school readiness at kindergarten entry, reading achievement in third and eighth grades, and avoidance of grade retention. Parent involvement in school activities, as rated by teachers and by parents, was independently associated with child outcomes from school readiness at kindergarten entry to eighth grade reading achievement and grade retention above and beyond the influence of curriculum approach. Findings indicate that instructional approaches that blend a teacher-directed focus with child-initiated activities and parental school involvement are origins of the long-term effects of participation in the Child-Parent Centers.

This study used a family-centered ecological lens to examine predictive relations among fathers’ and mothers’ language acculturation, parenting practices, and academic readiness in a large sample of Mexican American children in preschool ( N = 880). In line with prior early childhood research, parent language acculturation was operationalized as fathers’ and mothers’ English proficiency and primary language used in the home. Parenting was operationalized as fathers’ and mothers’ participation in home learning stimulation (e.g. shared book reading). Analyses showed that, after controlling for demographics, fathers’ and mothers’ primary language in the home predicted children’s reading achievement and fathers’ and mothers’ English proficiency predicted children’s math achievement. Furthermore, maternal home learning stimulation made a unique contribution to children’s reading achievement after the influence of parent language acculturation was accounted for, underscoring the importance of home learning stimulation for strengthening Mexican American children’s reading skills prior to school entry.

The purpose of this study was to examine parent-child influences associated with highly competitive gymnastics participation. Athletes (n = 24) responded to self-report measures of perceived parental influences, and the athletes’ parents (n = 39) responded to interview questions regarding the influence of their child’s gymnastics involvement on their own behaviors. Descriptive analyses of gymnasts’ responses revealed that parents (a) frequently attended meets, (b) encouraged their child’s participation extensively, (c) demonstrated positive affect toward their child’s involvement, and (d) held positive beliefs and realistic expectations about their child’s competence. Parents’ responses indicated large time and financial investments as a result of their child’s involvement and indicated that their child’s participation positively influenced such behaviors as (a) attendance at gymnastics meets, (b) reading sports-related literature, (c) watching sports on television, (d) participating in fitness-related activities, and (e) parenting in general. These findings support theory and research that advocate the reciprocal nature of parent-child socialization effects in sport.

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at increased risk of persistent language and literacy difficulties. This study investigated the effectiveness of an 8-week parent-implemented shared book reading intervention designed to change parent and child book reading behaviours. Sixteen parents and their preschoolers on the autism spectrum participated. Nine parents were randomly allocated to receive the shared book reading intervention first. The intervention used a coaching model and comprised a training session, four home visits, and four follow-up phone calls. Parents completed a shared book reading video with their child prior to the intervention, immediately post-intervention and eight weeks after the intervention was completed. Following intervention, there was a significant increase in the intervention group parents’ use of book-related vocabulary and their explicit teaching of story structure, compared to the waitlist control group. Compared to the control group, there was a significant increase in children’s verbal participation (number of utterances and number of different words). However, these effects disappeared when the significant increase in reading duration following the intervention was taken into account. All improvements were maintained over time. Our results highlight the feasibility of a parent-implemented shared book reading intervention for encouraging early language skills in children on the spectrum in a naturalistic setting that is part of many family routines.

ABSTRACTThe Hebrew Parent Questionnaire for Communication and Early Language (HPQ-CEL) was administered by 154 parents of Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1 ; 0 to 1 ; 3 (77 boys, 77 girls). The Questionnaire guided parents in observing and rating their toddlers in six contexts at home. The study aimed to identify inter-correlations between toddlers' non-linguistic behaviors that co-occur during the transition to speech. Seven communicative behaviors were extracted from the questionnaire data: Crying, Vocalizations, Collaboration with Adults, Pointing, Words, Joint Engagement in a Peek-a-Boo Game, and Triadic Interaction in Book Reading. Collaboration with Adults and Triadic Interaction in Book Reading yielded more significant correlations than other prelinguistic behaviors. Participation in social games and book-reading activities was associated with the toddlers' number of words at the period studied.

Participation in parent education appears to be becoming more acceptable and legitimate for many Victorian parents over the past decade. The experience of parenting or ‘being a parent’ has been recognised as potentially confusing and difficult for many adults (Allen and Schultz, 1987: 14). In response to parents' perceived difficulties and expression of need for assistance with the parenting role, professionals who work with children and families have devised a diverse range of approaches to working with parents from informal, often unstructured, individualised, needs based reading and/or discussion type programs to the more formal and structured approaches which employ the often imported pre packaged programs with groups of parents in a variety of settings. Although little systematic information is available concerning the basis and nature of the burgeoning parent education programs currently operating in Victoria, Allen and Schultz (1987) described the current status of parent education in Australia as diverse in theoretical orientations, emphases, topics and settings. However, it appears that many programs currently operating cannot be described as systematic and theoretically based. Fine (1980: 5) defined parent education as “instruction on how to parent” and argued that this definition properly applies to organised, structured programs rather than to more informal discussions.

This study aims to describe the implementation of the school literacy movement through the GICA intracuricular (morning reading) and GITA (morning storytelling) at the habituation stage and to know the supporting and inhibiting factors for the implementation of the school literacy movement through the GICA intracuricular movement (morning reading) and GITA (morning storytelling) habituation at SD Muhammadiyah Karangkajen Yogyakarta. This type of research uses descriptive research with a qualitative approach. The subjects of this study are the principal, teachers, students, data collection techniques using the method of observation, interviews, and documentation. Data analysis techniques in this study used the Miles and Huberman models. The data validity technique in this study uses the triangulation of techniques and sources. Based on observations, interviews, and documentation, it is known that the implementation of the school literacy movement through the GICA intracuricular (morning reading) and GITA (morning storytelling) at the habituation stage at SD Muhammadiyah Karangkajen Yogyakarta has been carried out. Supporting factors include school community awareness about the importance of literacy culture, students' awareness, availability of literacy facilities and infrastructures such as school libraries and reading angles, posters and bulletin boards in the school environment, library visit activities, active participation of school residents, program socialization school literacy movements, and parent participation of students. The inhibiting factors include book collection not complete, some reading corners have not used bookshelves, the implementation of the GITA program (morning storytelling) has not been maximized, and the new library staff has not optimally run library visits.

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and holistic approaches to reading and critical approaches to family literacy, the analysis centres on assessment sessions with two mother–child dyads whose children attended school in a relatively new migration setting. Primary data were drawn from four reading assessment sessions and audio-recordings over a 7-month period with each child, individual interviews and home visits with mothers, and field notes from research team members. The analysis examined linguistic patterns related to second-language approximations and code-switching in miscues and oral retellings. The analysis also includes coding of strategies and resources children used in their English and Spanish retelling of the same text, using their home language to retell the texts to their mothers. Findings illustrate that while children’s miscues may be shaped by their developing control of syntactic structures and new vocabulary, they draw from multiple language resources in English retellings, conveying their complex understandings of texts. We also found that the children negotiated translating and retelling for their parents in different ways, shaped by their family literacy practices. These involved co-construction of stories, a focus on accuracy and the paraphrasing and embellishing of stories and dialogue. Insights from this study highlight the complexity of pooled language resources in young children’s repertoires. Findings also document the situated nature of oral retelling at home, when parents engage children in the sharing and translating of English books in ways that align with existing roles, practices and goals. Implications for equitable literacy assessment in new migration contexts are discussed.

<p>Poor performance in Kenya Certificate of Primary Education Examinations has often been attributed to a lack of parental participation in children’s academics. The claim that parents are not supportive of their children, especially at home, therefore holds water as researchers have established that parent involvement with their children's homework could have an influence on their academic performance. This paper draws our attention to a study conducted to investigate the influence of parental involvement in school work on pupils’ academic performance in public primary schools in Ainabkoi Sub County, Kenya. Joyce Epstein’s framework of six types of parent involvement guided the study adopting the ex-post facto research design. Targeting 2404 Class 8 pupils and 61 class teachers in Ainabkoi Sub County, the authors drew a sample of 331 class eight pupils through stratified simple random sampling while census approach was employed to involve all the class teachers in the selected schools. The modes of data collection used were questionnaire and interview schedule whose validity was ensured through pilot study and reliability by test-retest technique. Quantitative data was then analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics in the form of percentages, means and chi-square, to test the study hypothesis. It was found out that parental participation in educational activities at home (X²=8.196; p=0.017) had a positive and significant influence on academic performance in public primary schools. Qualitative data was presented thematically. The study recommends that parents should provide their children with the required learning materials, such as supplementary reading complements to improve their academic performance.</p>

Literacy interventions in the family context have great potential to promote reading development in children. However, the results of meta-analyses indicate that family-based approaches tend not to be as effective as expected. Although the effectiveness of family literacy interventions can be assumed to hinge largely on the quality of their implementation in families, this aspect has attracted surprisingly little research attention to date. This article identifies, analyses, and discusses aspects of implementation quality that may enhance or diminish the effectiveness of family literacy interventions. Data from two evaluation studies of programmes for kindergarten- and school-age children were used to examine three types of implementation variables (intensity and quality of parent-child activities; support and training provided for parents; participation). The results indicate possibilities for how implementation quality in all three areas can be improved. Implications for future family literacy programmes as well as for evaluation and implementation studies are discussed.

Parent engagement has been a cornerstone of Head Start since its inception in 1965. Prior studies have found evidence for small to moderate impacts of Head Start on parenting behaviors but have not considered the possibility that individual Head Start programs might vary meaningfully in their effectiveness at improving parenting outcomes. The present study uses the Head Start Impact Study to examine the average effect of random assignment to and participation in Head Start on parenting outcomes as well as variation in that effect across Head Start programs. Findings reveal that Head Start is effective on average at promoting parents’ daily reading and overall literacy and math activities with children but that effects vary significantly for parents’ literacy and math activities, with some programs much more and some much less effective than their local alternatives. Findings also demonstrate that Head Start has consistent near-zero impacts across centers on parents’ disciplinary interactions with children.

Communication is the process of reaching mutual understanding where participants not only exchange information, ideas and feelings but also create and share meaning. Effective communication imparts knowledge and paves way towards building and strengthening relationships which uphold peace between parents and children for lasting associations. However, the authoritarian parenting style tends to manipulate communication which creates fear and compromise learner participation in class. The study explored the relationship between communication in authoritarian parenting model and participation of learners in Early Childhood Education (ECE) science classroom in Homabay County, Kenya. The population of the study involved 314 respondents including 4 County education officers; 60 head teachers; 60 ECE teachers attached to public primary schools; 120 learners and 70 parents. The teachers’ questionnaire was used as the main data collection tool. Correlation analyses were performed to determine which demographic characteristics should be used as control variables. Regression analyses were also performed to examine the relationship between communication in authoritarian parenting model and children’s participation in class activities. Data was gathered, summarized and analyzed by reading the information collected through the research instruments and pattern trends and relationships from the information gathered were established. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze qualitative data while quantitative statistics were employed to match authoritarian parenting numbers to learner participation attributes. Frequency distribution tables were used to present the data. Anchored on social learning theory, the study findings supported the view that communication in authoritarian parenting model is negatively related to children’s participation in class. The 91% of ECE teachers confirmed that learners from authoritarian settings could not express themselves well as a result of limited communication existing between the child and the parent and only 9% observed eloquence in the learners of authoritarian parents. For further research the study suggested that since authoritarian mothers and fathers behave differently, studies should be done separately to assess consistency of the parenting model in both parents.

This paper tries to unravel the empowerment process by the Paguyuban Pengajar Pinggir Sungai (P3S) in Kampung Blunyah Gede. In the context of empowerment, I emphases the concepts and implementation of activities that have been permitted. This activity is expected to have an impact on the Code River community so that they can be empowered and live independently. The definition of independence can be identified through active participation in non formal education programs. Explosively, this study found that the Sungai Code community can improve well-being by taking alternative education. This offer is known collectively with Free Tutoring, Cheerful Sunday, annual Art Performances, provision of Reading Houses, organizing parents through Parent Committees, and Volunteer Schools. Program routines have an impact on children’s learning enthusiasm, new work produced by children, reporting on learning outcomes, reading group activities, regeneration of volunteers, and children’s potential to develop artistic skills.Tulisan ini berusaha mengeksplorasi proses pemberdayaan yang dilakukan oleh Paguyuban Pengajar Pinggir Sungai (P3S) di Kampung Blunyah Gede. Dalam konteks pemberdayaan, penulis menyoroti konsep dan implementasi kegiatan yang sudah dilakukan. Kegiatan ini diharapkan memberi dampak kepada masyarakat pinggir Sungai Code sehingga dapat berdaya dan hidup mandiri. Definisi kemandirian dapat diketahui melalui partisipasi aktif sehingga dapat mengikuti program non formal education. Secara eksploratif, dalam kajian ini ditemukan bahwa masyarakat sungai Code dapat meningkatkan kesejahteraan dengan mengikuti pendidikan alternatif. Tawaran ini diketahui secara kolektif dengan Bimbingan Belajar Gratis, Minggu Ceria, Pentas Seni tahunan, pengadaan Rumah Baca, pengorganisasian Paguyuban Pengajar Pinggir Sungai (P3S) orang tua melalui Komite Orangtua dan Sekolah Relawan. Rutinitas program berdampak pada semangat belajar, pelaporan hasil belajar, dan karya baru yang dihasilkan anak-anak. Program tersebut juga berdampak pada aktivitas reading group, regenerasi relawan, serta pengembangan skill dan potensi kesenian pada anak-anak.

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated an extensive and sudden digital transformation in the education. Suddenly, an entire of students had to start managing and mastering with digital tools to participate in their compulsory basic education. In this study, starting primary school first grade remotely is examined according to teachers' views. The research method is qualitative phenomenology study. The study group consists of nine teachers determined by the maximum variation sampling method, which is one of the purposeful sampling types. Three of these teachers work in the village, three in the city center, and three in a private school. The data collected from teachers with the interview technique were analyzed using content analysis. According to the results of the research, teachers' views on remote teaching in the first grade of primary school were divided into two groups, positive and negative. While teachers have positive views in the parent participation, academic and convenience themes, they have negative views in the social, equal opportunity, psychology and academic themes. The experiences of teachers in the first grade of primary school show that first reading and writing can be achieved remotely. It is very important to reduce the social, psychological and equal opportunity problems.

Purpose: Studies have documented that the majority of consent documents for medical diagnosis and treatment are written at a reading level above that of the majority of the U.S. population. This study hypothesized that use of an easy-to-read consent statement, when compared with a standard consent statement, will result in higher patient comprehension of the clinical treatment protocol, lower patient anxiety, higher patient satisfaction, and higher patient accrual. Methods: A randomized controlled trial was conducted in 44 institutions that were members or affiliates of three cooperative oncology groups. Institutions were randomly assigned to administer either an easy-to-read consent statement or the standard consent statement to patients being recruited to participate in selected cancer treatment trials. Telephone interviews were conducted with a total of 207 patients to assess study outcomes. Results: Patients in the intervention arm demonstrated significantly lower consent anxiety and higher satisfaction compared with patients in the control arm. Patient comprehension and state anxiety were not affected by the intervention. Accrual rates into the parent studies also did not differ significantly between the two study groups. Conclusion: Clinical trial informed consent statements can be modified to be easier to read without omitting critical information. Patient anxiety and satisfaction can be affected by the consent document. The generalizability of these study results is limited by the characteristics of the patient sample. Ninety percent of the sample were white women, and the mean Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine score was approximately 64, indicating a literacy level at or above the ninth grade.

The growth of literacy in the Philippines is attributed to the formalization of the education system. Learning experiences from formal schooling and the home environmental influence, complement and reinforce the role of the teacher and the parent in promoting literacy. Home literacy practices which are centred on parent-child interaction can promote literacy through the sharing of information. This study examines home practices that are directly or indirectly associated with or promote family literacy. Narratives and stories of participant families about their literacy practices were gathered through naturalistic life-story interviews, observation and participation in selected outside activities. Themes were drawn from the data collected, wherein interpretative phenomenological analysis was applied in the analysis. Four themes were identified which focus on language; home strength and activities; faith, values and aspirations; and home and school connection. Languages used at home by the family serve as a springboard for family literacy, which also supports classroom instructions. Household chores and other home activities are used as a support to learn literacy concepts taught in school, such as science concepts, survival skills, hygiene and childcare. Family literacy practices are anchored in family values and aspirations that enable each family to pursue and sustain their literacy practices. Storytelling and reading are practised at home, which provides opportunities for teaching and learning among family members. Each family in this study found ways to maximize their limited resources to support the literacy of their children for better education. The findings suggest that the economic condition of the family is not a deterrent to family literacy practices. Family literacy practices depend upon the unique dynamics of each family, which are influenced by the languages used at home, household activities, family values and aspirations. Literacy practices are also related to teaching and learning activities at school.

Background:Cleft lip and palate are among the common birth defects in the United States. Management is complex and may be difficult for parents and patients to understand. The goal of this study was to evaluate the readability of online educational material provided by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) and the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association (ACPA) websites regarding cleft lip and palate and to assess parents’ comprehension.Methods:Parents of children younger than 10 years of age presenting to the plastic and reconstructive surgery clinic at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital for conditions other than cleft lip and palate were recruited for participation. Parents were given the literature published on the ASPS and ACPA web sites to review and were asked to complete a 5-question test specifically targeted to the content of the passage they reviewed. We tested the readability of the 2 online passages using Readability Studio software (Oleander Software Solutions Ltd).Results:Sixty parents completed the study. Across all groups, the mean score was 4.35 of a possible 5. The mean score was 4.4 for the ASPS web site and 4.29 for the ACPA web site. Fifty-three percent of participants answered all questions correctly. No significant difference in scores was noted between web sites ( P = .48).Conclusions:Despite containing content of varying reading-level difficulty, the literature posted on the ACPA and ASPS web sites concerning cleft lip and palate conveyed information equally well to the target parent demographic with high levels of comprehension.

This study was conducted with an aim to determine the effects of school-home parenting to scholastic performance of intermediate pupils in the District of Los Banos, Division of Laguna for school year 2019-2020. Specifically, it sought to answer the following questions: 1. What is the extent of the teacher’s role in improving the scholastic performance of their pupils through: a. Remedial Reading b. Interpersonal relationship with the child c. Recognizing pupils potential d. Guidance counselling 2. What is the degree of participation of parents in the following activities towards improving the scholastic performance of pupils as perceived by teachers and parents’ themselves: a. Monitoring school activities b. Coordinating with teachers on pupils performances in school c. Giving financial support d. Helping develop good traits e. Cooperating in school projects 3. What is the level of performance of intermediate pupils in the following district achievement tests? 4. Is there a significant effect of school and home parenting to scholastics performance of intermediate pupils as to district and division achievement tests? This study used descriptive method of research to analyze the data systematically. The research instruments used in the study were researcher-made questionnaires checklist. Two sets of questionnaires were used one for the teacher-respondents and the other for parent-respondents. The questionnaires consisted of roles perform by teachers and parents to improve scholastic performance of pupils. The data gathered were treated using average weighted mean for the descriptive statistics. The chi-square was used to determine the effects of school-home parenting to scholastic performance of intermediate pupils. The findings of the study are the following: 1. The average weighted mean of 4.55 shows that the extent of teacher’s role in improving the scholastic performance of the pupils such as remedial teaching, interpersonal relationship with the child, recognizing pupils’ potentials and guidance and counselling were performed with the great extent by the teacher. 2.a. The degree of participation of parents in the activities such as monitoring school activities, coordinating with teachers in pupils’ performance in school, giving financial support, helping develop good traits and cooperating in school projects, are roles performed by parents towards improving the scholastic performance of pupils as perceived by teachers’ gained on average weighted mean of 3.30 interpreted as occasionally done by parents. 2.b. The weighted average mean of 3.76 shows that the degree of participation of parents with the activities towards improving the scholastic performance of pupils as perceived by themselves was done “paminsan-minsan” or occasionally. 3. Ten (10) or 12.5% of pupils fall within the range of 85.89. Forty (40) or 50% reach the average level and within the range 80.84. Thirty-one (31) or 38.75% fall within the level of 75-79 which is below average. The computed average weighted mean of 81.89 shows that the level of performance of intermediate pupils is average. 4.a. The computed chi-square value of 35.62 exceeds the critical value of 9.488 with a degree of freedom of 4. Thus, it reveals the school parenting has a significant effect to scholastic performance of intermediate pupils. 4.b. With the 17.749 computed chi-square value which also exceeds the 9.488 critical values signifies that home parenting is of great value to pupils in enhancing their scholastics performance. Based on the findings, the following conclusions were drawn: 1. Teacher’s role done in great extent to improve scholastic performance of pupils by exerting effort in developing the knowledge, skills and attitudes through the proper guidance and close teacher-pupil relationship, remedial teaching and recognizing potentials, 2. Parents help improve the scholastic performance by monitoring and observing close coordination with the teacher regarding the intellectual and physical development of their children. 3. The level of performance of intermediate pupils in Los Banos district in the District Mid-Year Achievement test is average level. 4. The roles performed by both the teachers and the parents significantly relate to scholastic achievement of the pupils.

Indonesia is a country that has a high potential for natural disasters. Picture story book is a form of disaster management learning that can help children from an early age to prepare for a natural disaster. The aims of this study to develop story books as a disaster management learning media, to improve knowledge and skills of children and teacher about the understanding, principles, and actions of rescue when facing the natural disasters, to increase the teacher’s learning quality in disaster management. Developmental research approach is used to execute the study. A total of 48 children aged 5-6 years have to carry out pre-test and post-test. Pre-test data shows that children's knowledge about disaster management with an average of 47.92% and its improved at post-test with 76,88%. Five theme of story books involves floods, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, lands and forest fires is the product. 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Many studies have shown a link between being competent in early mathematics and achievement in school. Early math skills have the potential to be the best predictors of later performance in reading and mathematics. Movement and songs are activities that children like, making it easier for teachers to apply mathematical concepts through this method. This study aims to develop audio-visual learning media in the form of songs with a mixture of western and traditional musical idioms, accompanied by movements that represent some of the teaching of early mathematics concepts. The stages of developing the ADDIE model are the basis for launching new learning media products related to math and art, and also planting the nation's cultural arts from an early age. These instructional media products were analyzed by experts and tested for their effectiveness through experiments on five children aged 3-4 years. The qualitative data were analyzed using transcripts of field notes and observations and interpreted in a descriptive narrative. The quantitative data were analyzed using gain score statistics. The results showed that there was a significant increase in value for early mathematical understanding of the concepts of geometry, numbers and measurement through this learning medium. The results of the effectiveness test become the final basis of reference for revision and complement the shortcomings of this learning medium. Further research can be carried out to develop other mathematical concepts through motion and song learning media, and to create experiments with a wider sample. Keywords: Early Mathematical Skills, Movement and Song Idiom Traditional, Audio-visual Learning Media References An, S. A., & Tillman, D. A. (2015). Music activities as a meaningful context for teaching elementary students mathematics: a quasi-experiment time series design with random assigned control group. 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Since 2003, Room to Read, an international education NGO, has been working in India to help foster a culture of reading in schools through the establishment of over 1500 school libraries. This paper outlines the evolution Room to Read’s Reading Room program in India as an example of how school library programs can address the reading challenges of children in developing countries. The focus of the paper is on Room to Read India’s Primary Reading Enhancement Program (PREP), which will be piloted in the Reading Room program in 2008. The goal of PREP is to have a significant impact on the way reading is taught in primary schools in India. Details are provided on the approach, materials, activities, parent and community participation, government participation, and student assessments that make up the core components of the PREP design.

Educational theorists concerned with antiracist and critical multicultural practices have identified the need for teachers to begin changing the processes of social exclusion which children of colour experience in the school system. An ethnographic study of critical educators teaching practices is provided as a useful directive. The study examines how two critical educators respond to the diversity represented in their school by incorporating antiracist and critical multicultural approaches in their teaching practice. Of interest in relation to Julia Neuman’s practice is the question: How do white teachers negotiate their ‘whiteness’ in relation to the diversity in student population? In the case of Sita Ramana a South Asian teacher, the study considers how cultural and linguistic congruence with her students engages their interests in culturally response reading programs that involve dual language books as well as parent - student active participation in heritage language programs.

This study investigated the association of a performance-based measure of executive functioning (EF) with academic, social, and behavioral performance ratings in a convenience sample of 153 children aged 5 to 12 (78% male, 83% Caucasian) diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Multivariate regression showed that above and beyond age and ADHD severity, poorer EF performance was uniquely associated with more impairment in reading, written expression, and math by teacher report, and more impairment in the overall school and reading domains by parent report. ADHD symptoms were more strongly associated with ratings of impairment in social relationships, organized peer activities, and classroom behaviors than EF performance. Age did not moderate the findings, but younger children were rated as having more trouble with participation in organized activities by parents, as more likely to disrupt class by teachers, and to have problematic relationships with peers by parents and teachers. EF and academic performance appeared worst in the groups seen as highly symptomatic and impaired by both parents and teachers, and by teachers only. EF deficits may be a specific risk factor for academic impairment in children with ADHD.

This study aims to determine the forms of emotional social values of children aged 5-6 years and their implementation with a parent engagement program. With the subject of research children aged 5-6 years group B in the Sugihwaras kindergarten in Sidoarjo Temple with a total of 7 children and their parents. The research approach used is qualitative data collection techniques through observation, documentation and interviews and field notes as well as the use of Cresswell's data analysis which is processing data and preparing data for analysis, reading all data, coding data, applying the results of the coding process and finally describe the results of the data during the study. From the findings of this study will be tested for truth by using triangulation techniques. The findings of this study indicate the results that the Parental Involvement in the Children's Emotional Social Value Program in TK Darussalam Sugihwaras Sidoarjo Temple is carried out through the social emotional value program by involving parents in the TK institution. Parental support has benefits and a big contribution to the education of their children. Through out bonding activities, cooking classes, parenting, curriculum preparation, habituation activities at home and modeling to develop children's emotional emotional values according to their age stages and abilities. The involvement of parents in children's emotional social value programs at every school institution should be fully socialized. Given the participation of parents is needed in the child's emotional social process. Support, appropriate stimulation and opportunities to explore children can grow and develop good social emotional values of children.

The ProjectThe Hand Up Linkage project focuses on the family as a communication context through which to explore the dynamics of intergenerational welfare dependency. In particular, it explores ways that creative life-course interventions might allow children in welfare dependent families to construct alternative realities for themselves and alternative views of their future. Formed through an alliance between a key Western Australian social welfare not-for-profit organisation, St Vincent de Paul WA (SVDPWA and also, in the context of volunteers, ‘Vinnies’), and Edith Cowan University, the project aims to address the organisation’s vision to provide “a hand up” (St Vincent 1) rather than ‘a hand out’, so that people can move forward with their lives without becoming dependent upon welfare. Prior to the start of the research, SVDPWA already had a whole of family focus in its outreach to poverty-impacted families including offering homework clubs and school holiday children’s camps run by their youth services division. Selected families supported by SVDPWA have been invited to participate in an in-depth interview for the project (Seidman), partly so that researchers can help identify “turning points” (King et al.) that might disrupt the communication of welfare dependency and inform more generalised intervention strategies; but also in order to explore the response to creative interventions within the children’s daily lives, including investigation of how strategies the child (and family) employed might help them to imagine alternative realities and futures for themselves. This paper closely examines the way that one 10 year old child from a non-English-speaking background family has employed alternative ways of viewing her life, through the camp program provided by the Linkage Partner St Vincent de Paul WA, and through reading novels such as Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket Unfortunate Incidents series. Such activities help fuel hope for a different future which, in Snyder’s view has “two main components: the ability to plan pathways to desired goals despite obstacles, and agency or motivation to use those pathways” (Carr 96).The FamilyKani is a 10 year old girl living in a migrant sole parent family. The parents had moved to Australia from Bangladesh on student visas when Kani was 5 years old, however due to domestic violence the mother had recently separated from her husband, first into a women’s refuge then into private rental accommodation. The mother is in protracted negotiations with the Department of Immigration for permanent residency, which she had to recommence due to her separation. There are also family court negotiations for child custody and which restrict her leaving Australia. She receives no government benefits and minimal child support, works fulltime and pays full childcare fees for Kani’s 3 year old brother Adil and full primary school fees for Kani at a local religious school, given that Kani had experienced bullying and social aggression in previous schools. Kani was referred to SVDPWA by the women’s refuge and she began attending SVDPWA Kids’ Camps thereafter. (NB: Whilst the relevant specifics of this description are accurate, non-relevant material has been added or changed to protect the child’s and family’s identity.)Creative Life-Course InterventionsThe creative engagement that Kani experienced in the Hand Up project is constructed as one component in a larger model of creativity which includes “intrapersonal insights and interpretations, which often live only within the person who created them,” (Kaufman and Beghetto 4). Such an approach also acknowledges Csikszentmihalyi’s work on the concept of “flow”, whereby optimal experiences can result from positive absorption in a creative activity. Relevant Australian research such as the YouthWorx project has identified participatory engagement in creativity as one means of engaging with young people at risk (Hopkins; Podkalicka). The creative interventions in the Hand Up project take two forms; one is the predesigned and participatory creative activities delivered as part of the SVDPWA Kids’ Camp program. The second is a personalised intervention, identified by way of an in-depth interview with the child and parent, and is wholly dependent on the interests expressed by the child, the ability for the family to engage in that activity, and the budget restraints of the project.Reading as an Alternative RealityA key creative intervention embedded in the Hand Up Linkage project is determined by the interests expressed by the child during their in-depth interview. Also taken into account is the ability for the family to engage in that activity. For example, Kani’s mother works fulltime at a location which is an hour by public transport from home and does not have a car or driver’s license, so the choice of creative opportunity was restricted to a home-based activity or a weekend activity accessible by public transport. A further restriction is the limited budget available for this intervention in the project, along with an imperative that such interventions should be equitable between families and within families, and be of benefit to all the children in addition to the interviewed child. Fortunately, transport was not an issue because Kani expressed her interest very emphatically as books and reading. When asked what she liked doing most in life, Kani replied: “Reading. I like reading like big books, like really thick books and stuff. I have like 30 in my room. Like those really big books. And I'm starting to read Harry Potter now. Okay, the books that I like reading is Harry Potter, the entire set Roald Dahl books and the Baudelaire Orphans by Lemony Snicket. I like reading David Walliams. I like Little Women” (Kani). Her excitement in listing these books further animated the interview and was immediately emphasised because Kani took the interviewer (second author) and her mother into her room to demonstrate the truth of her statement. When asked again at the close of the interview “what’s a favourite thing that makes you feel good inside?” Kani’s answer was “Family and reading”. The energy and enthusiasm with which Kani talked about her reading and books made these the obvious choice as her creative intervention. However, participation in book-related courses or after-school activities was restricted by Kani’s mother’s transportation limitations. Taking into account how the financial constraints of her sole parent family impacted upon their capacity to buy books, and the joy that Kani clearly experienced from having books of her own, it was decided that a book voucher would be provided for her at a local bookstore easily accessible by bus. The research team negotiated with the bookstore to try to ensure that Kani could choose a book a month until the funds were expended so that the intervention would last most of the coming six months.What Kani was expressing in her love of books was partly related to the raw material they provide that help her to imagine the alternative reality of the fictional worlds she loved reading about. Kani’s passionate engagement in these alternative realities reflects theories of narrative immersion in one’s chosen medium: “One key element of an enjoyable media experience is that it takes individuals away from their mundane reality and into a story world. We call the process of becoming fully engaged in a story transportation into a narrative world” (Green et al. 311–12). Kani said: “Reading is everything, yeah. Like getting more books and like those kind of things and making me read more... ‘cause I really love reading, it’s like watching a movie. Do you know ... have you watched Harry Potter? … the book is nothing like the movie, nothing, they’ve missed so many parts so the book is more enjoyable than the movie. That’s why I like reading more. ‘Cause like I have my own adventures in my head.” This process of imagining her own adventures in her head echoes Green and Brock’s explanation of the process of being transported into alternative realities through reading as a result of “an integrative melding of attention, imagery, and feelings” (701).Constructing Alternative Realities for Herself and an Alternative Possible FutureLike many 10 year olds, Kani has a challenging time at school, exacerbated by the many school moves brought about by changes in her family circumstances. Even though she is in a school which supports her family’s faith, her experience is one of being made to feel an outsider: “all the boys and the girls in our class are like friends, they’re like ... it’s a group. But I’m not in their group. I have my friends in other classes and they’re [my classmates are] not happy with it, that’s why they tease me and stuff. And like whenever I play with my friends they’re like ... yeah”. The interviewer asked her what she liked about her special friends. “They’re fun. Creative like, enjoyable, yeah, those kind of things …they have lots of cool ideas like plans and stuff like that.” As Hawkins et al. argue, the capacity to develop and maintain good relationships with peers (and parents) is a key factor in helping children be resilient. It is likely that Kani also shares her creativity, ideas and plans with her friendship group as part of her shared contribution to its existence.A domestication of technology framework (Silverstone et al.) can be useful as part of the explanation for Kani’s use of imaginative experience in building her social relationships. Silverstone et al. argue that technology is domesticated via four interlocking activities: ‘appropriation’ (where it embraced, purchased, taken into the household), ‘objectification’ (where a physical space is found for it), ‘incorporation’ (the spaces through which it is inserted into the everyday activities of the household or users) and ‘conversion’ (whereby the experience and fact of the technology use – or lack of use – becomes material through which family members express themselves and their priorities to the social world beyond the home). Arguably, Kani ‘converts’ her engagement with books and associated imaginative experiences into social currency through which she builds relationships with the like-minded children with whom she makes friends. At the same time, those children feed into her ideas of what constitutes a creative approach to life and help energise her plans for the future.Kani’s views of her future (at the age of 10) are influenced by the traditional occupations favoured by high achieving students, and by the fact that her parents are themselves educational high achievers, entering Australia on student visas. “I want to be a doctor … my cousin wants to be a doctor too. Mum said lawyer but we want to be a doctors anywhere. We want to be a ...me and my cousin want to be doctors like ...we like being doctors and like helping people.” Noting the pressures on the household of the possible fees and costs of high school, Kani adds “I need to work even harder so I get a scholarship. ‘Cause like my mum can’t pay for like four terms, you know how much money that will be? Yeah.” Kani’s follow-on statement, partly to justify why she wants “a big house”, adds some poignancy to her reference to a cousin (one of many), who still lives in Bangladesh and whom Kani hasn’t seen since 2011. “Like I want to live with my mum and like yeah and like I live with my cousin too because like I have a cousin ... she’s a girl, yeah? And like yeah, she’s in Bangladesh, I haven’t seen her for very long time so yeah.” In the absence of her extended family overseas, Kani adds her pets to those with whom she shares her family life: “And my mum and my uncle and then our cat Dobby. I named it [for Harry Potter’s house elf] ...and the goldfish. The goldfish are Twinkle, Glitter, Glow and Bobby.”Kani’s mum notes the importance of an opportunity to dream a future into existence: “maybe she’s too young or she hasn’t really kind of made up her mind as yet as to what she wants to do in life but just going out and just you know doing stuff and just giving them the opportunity”. The SVDPWA Kids’ Camp is an important part of this “they [the refuge] kind of told us like ‘there’s this child camp’. … I was like yeah, sure, why not?” Providing Alternative Spaces at the SVDPWA Kids’ CampThe SVDPWA Kids’ Camps themselves constitute a creative intervention in offering visions of alternative realities to their young participants. Their benefit is delivered via anticipation, as well as the reality of the camp experience. As Kani said “I forget all about the things that’s just past, like all the hard things, you know like I go through and stuff and it just makes me forget it and it makes me like think about camp, things we’re going to do at camp”. The Kids’ Camps take place three times a year and are open to children aged between 8 and 13, with follow-on Teen Camps for older age groups. Once a child is part of the program she or he can continue to participate in successive camps while they are in the target age group. Consisting of a four day activity-based experience in a natural setting, conducted by Vinnies Youth and staffed by key SVDPWA employees and Youth volunteers, the camps offer children a varied schedule of activities in a safe and supported environment, with at least one volunteer for every two child participants. The camps are specifically made available to children from disadvantaged families and are provided virtually free to participants. (A nominal $10 enrolment fee is applied per child). Kani was initially reticent about attending her first camp. She explained: “I was shy, scared because I sleep with my mum so it’s different sleeping without Mum. I know it’s kind of embarrassing ‘cause, sleeping with my mum like, but I just get scared at night”. Kani went on to explain how the camp facilitators were able to allay her fears “I knew I was safe. And I had people I could talk to so yeah ...like the leader”. As one Vinnies Youth volunteer explains, the potential of offering children like Kani time out from the pressures of everyday life is demonstrated when “towards the end of every camp we always see that progression of, they came out of their shell … So I think it’s really just a journey for everyone and it’s understandable if they did feel stuck. It’s about what we can do to help them progress forward” (VY1). Kani was empowered to envision an alternative idea of herself at camp, one which was unexpectedly intuited by the research interviewer.When the interviewer closed the interview by expressing that it had been lovely to talk to Kani as she was “such a bundle of energy”, Kani grinned and replied “Do you know the warm fuzzies, yeah? [When positive thoughts about others are exchanged at the SVDPWA Kids’ Camp]. The bundle ... all the leaders say I’m a bundle of happiness”. The Kids’ Camp provided Kani with a fun and positive alternative reality to the one she experienced as a child handling the considerable challenges experienced by social isolation, domestic violence and parental separation, including the loss of her home, diminished connection to her overseas extended family, legal custody issues, and several school changes. Taking the role of cultural intermediary, by offering the possibility of alternative realities via their camp, SVDPWA offered Kani a chance that supported her work on creating a range of enticing possible futures for herself. This was in contrast to some commercial holiday camp experiences which might more centrally use their “cultural authority as shapers of taste and … new consumerist dispositions” (Nixon and Du Gay 497). Even so, Kani’s interview made clear that her experience with the SVDPWA Kids’ Camps were only part of the ways in which she was crafting a range of possible visions for her adult life, adding to this her love of books and reading, her fun, creative friends, and her vision for a successful future which would reunite her with her distant cousin and offer security to her mother. ConclusionUnderstandably, Kani at 10 lacks the critical insight required to interpret how her imaginative and creative life provides the raw materials from which she crafts her visions for the future. Further, the interviewer is careful not to introduce words like ‘creative’ into her work with the participant families, so that when Kani used it to talk about her friends she did so drawing upon her own store of descriptions and not as a result of having recently been reminded of creativity as a desirable attribute. The interview with this young person indicates, however, how greatly she values the imaginative and cultural inputs into her life and how she converts them in ways which help ensure access to further such creative currency. Apart from referencing her reading in the naming of her cat, Kani’s vision for herself reflects both the conventional idea of success (“a doctor”) and a very specific idea of her future living as an adult in house large enough to include her mum and her cousin.Kani’s love of reading, her pleasure in books, her choice of friends and her aspirations to scholarly excellence all offer her ways to escape the restricted options available to families who seek support from organisations such as SVDPWA. At the same time the Kids’ Camps themselves, like Kani’s books, provide an escape from the difficulties of the present. Kani’s appropriation of the cultural raw materials that she draws into her life, and her conversion of these inputs into a creative, social currency, offers her an opportunity to anticipate a better future, and some tools she can use to help bring it into existence.ReferencesCarr, A. Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Human Strengths. 2nd ed. Hove, UK: Routledge, 2011.Csikszentmihalyi, M. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.Green, M., and T. Brock. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000): 701–21.———, T. Brock, and G. Kaufman. “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds." Communication Theory 14.4 (2004): 311–27.Hawkins, J.D., R. Kosterman, R.F. Catalano, K.G. Hill, and R.D. Abbott. “Promoting Positive Adult Functioning through Social Development Intervention in Childhood: Long-Term Effects from the Seattle Social Development Project.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 159.1 (2005): 25. Hopkins, L. “YouthWorx: Increasing Youth Participation through Media Production.” Journal of Sociology 47.2 (2011): 181–197. doi: 10.1177/1440783310386827.Kani. In-depth interview, de-identified, 2016.Kaufman, J. C., and R.A. Beghetto. “Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity.” Review of General Psychology 13.1 (2009): 1–12. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0013688>. King, G., T. Cathers, E. Brown, J.A. Specht, C. Willoughby, J.M. Polgar, and L. Havens. “Turning Points and Protective Processes in the Lives of People with Chronic Disabilities.” Qualitative Health Research 13.2 (2003): 184–206.Nixon, S., and P. Du Gay. “Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries?” Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 495–500.Podkalicka, A. “Young Listening: An Ethnography of YouthWorx Media’s Radio Project.” Continuum 23.4 (2009): 561–72.St Vincent de Paul Society (WA). St Vincent de Paul Society, Annual Report 2013. Perth, WA: St Vincent de Paul Society (WA), 2013. 5 Jan 2017 <http://www.vinnies.org.au/icms_docs/169819_Vinnies_WA_2012_Annual_Report.pdf>.Seidman, I. Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2006.Silverstone, R., E. Hirsch, and D. Morley. “Information and Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household.” Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Eds. R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch. London: Routledge, 1992. 9–17.Snyder, C.R. Handbook of Hope. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 2000.VY1. In-depth interview with Vinnies Youth volunteer, de-identified, 2016.

Screens, as technological but also narrative and social devices, alter reading and writing practices. Users consume vids, read stories on the Web, and produce creative contents on blogs or Web archives, etc. Uses of seriality and transmediality are here discussed, that is watching, reading, and writing as interpreting, as well as respective and reciprocal uses of iteration and interaction (with technologies and with others). A specific figure of users or readers will be defined as a skilful and literate audience: fans on archives (FanFiction.net-FFNet, and Archive of Our Own-AO3). Fans produce serial and transmedia narratives based upon their favourite TV Shows, publish on-line, and often produce discourses or meta-discourse on this writing practice or on writing in general.The broader perspective of reception studies allows us to develop a three-step methodology that develops into a process. The first step is an ethnographic approach based on practices and competencies of users. The second step develops and clarifies the ethnographic dimension into an ethno-narrative approach, which aims at analysing mutual links between signs, texts, and uses of reading and writing. The main question is that of significance and meaning. The third step elaborates upon interactions in a technological and mediated environment. Social, participative, or collaborative and multimodal dimensions of interacting are yet regarded as key elements in reshaping a reading-writing cultural practice. The model proposed is a socio-narrative device, which hangs upon three dimensions: techno-narrative, narratological, and socio-narrative. These three dimensions of a shared narrative universe illustrate the three steps process. Each step also offers specific uses of interacting: an ethnographic approach of fictional expectation, a narrative ethnography of iteration and transformation, and a socio-narrative perspective on dialogism and recognition. A specific but significant example of fans' uses of reading and interacting will illustrate each step of the methodology. This qualitative approach of individual uses aims to be representative of fans' cultural practice (See Appendix 1). We will discuss cultural uses of appropriation. How do reading, interpreting, writing, and rewriting, that is to say interacting, produce meaning, create identities, and build up our relation to others and to the (story)world? Given our interest in embodied and appropriated meanings, appropriation will be revealed as an open cultural process, which can question the conflict and/or the convergence of the old and the new in cultural practices, and the way former and formal dichotomies have to be re-evaluated. We will take an interest in the composition of meaning that unfolds a cultural and critical process, from acknowledgement to recognition, a process where iteration and transformation are no longer opposites but part of a continuum.From Users' Competencies to the Composition of Narrative and Social Skills: A Fictional ExpectationThe pragmatic question of real uses steers our approach toward reading and writing in a mediated environment. Michel de Certeau's work first encourages us to apply his concepts of strategies and tactics to institutional strategies of engaging the audience and to real audience tactics of appropriation or diversion. Real uses are traceable on forums, discussions groups, weblogs, and archives. A model can be built upon digital tracks of use left on fan fiction archives: types of audience, interactions, and types of usage are here considered.Media Types Interaction Types Usage Types Media audienceConsumerSkilfulViewingReadingInformation searchContent production (informative, critical, and creative)Multimedia audienceConsumerSkilful+Online readingE-shoppingSharingRecommendationDiscussionInformative content productionCross-media audienceConsumerSkilful+SerendipityPutting objects in perspectiveNetworkingCritical content productionTransmedia audienceConsumerSkilfulInvolvedPrecursor+Understanding enhanced narrativesValue judgments, evaluationUnderstanding economic dimensions of the media systemCreative content productionTable 1 (Cailler and Masoni Lacroix)Users gear their reading and writing practices toward one medium, or toward multiple media in multi-, cross-, and trans- dimensions. These dimensions engage different and specific kinds of content production, and also the way users think about their relation to the media system. We focus on cumulative uses needed in an evolving media system. Depending on their desire for cultural products issued from creative and entertainment industries, audiences can be consumer-oriented or skilful, but also what we term "involved" or "precursor." Their interactive capacity within these industries allows audiences to produce informative, narrative, discursive, creative (or re-creative), and critical content. An ethnographic approach, based upon uses, understands that accumulating, crossing, and mastering different uses requires available and potential competencies and literacies, which may be immediately usable, or which have to be gained.Figure 1 (Masoni Lacroix and Cailler)The English language enables us to use different words to specify competencies, from ability to skill (when multiple abilities tend towards appropriation), to capability and competency (when multiple skills tend towards cultural practice). This introduces an enhancement process, which describes the way users accumulate and cross competencies to enhance their capability of understanding a multimedia or transmedia system, shaped by multiple semiotic systems and literacies.Abilities and skills represent different literacies that can be distributed in four groups-literacy, graphic literacy, digital literacy and interactive literacy, converging to a core of competencies including cognitive capability, communicative capability, cultural capability and critical capability. Note that critical skills appear below in bold italics. Digital LiteracyTechnical ability / Computational ability / Digital ability or skill Informational skill Visual LiteracyGraphic abilityVisual abilitySemiotic skillSymbolic skill Core of CompetenciesCognitive capabilityCommunicative capabilityCultural capabilityCritical capability Interactive LiteracyInteractional abilitySpectatorial abilityCollective abilityAffective skill LiteracyNarrative ability or skill / Linguistic ability / Reading and interpreting ability / Mimetic and fictional ability Discursive skillTable 2 (Masoni Lacroix and Cailler)Our first illustration exhibits the diversity, even the profuse and confused multiplicity, of cultural influences and preferences of a fan, which he or she comprehends as a whole.Gabihime, born on 6 October in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the United States, joined FFNet in 2001, and last updated her profile in September of 2010. She has written 44 stories for a variety of fandoms, and she belongs to two fandom communities. She has written one story about Twin Peaks (1990-) for an annual fandom gift exchange in 2008. Within Twin Peaks, her favourite and only romantic pair is Audrey Horne and Dale Cooper. Pairing represents a formal and cultural use of fan fiction writing, and also a favourite variation of the original text. Gabihime proposes notes to follow the story:I love Twin Peaks, and I love Audrey Horne particularly, and the rich stilted imagery of the show certainly […] I started watching my favourite season one episodes and reading the script notes for them. When I got to the 4-5 episode break (when Cooper comes back from visiting Jacques's cabin to the delightful sounds of the Icelandic junket roaring at their big shindig and finds Audrey in his bed) I discovered that this scene was originally intended to be left extremely ambiguous.Two main elements can be highlighted. Love founds fans' relation to the characters and the text. Interaction is based on this affect or emotion. Ambiguity, real or presumed, leads to what can be called a fictional expectation. This strong motive to interact within a text means that readers have to fill in the blanks of the text (Jenkins, "Transmedia"). They fill it with their desire for a character, a pairing, and a story. Another illustration of a fan's affective investment, Lynzee005 (see below) specifies that her fiction, "shows what I hope happened in between the scenes to which we were treated in the series."Gabihime does not write fan fiction stories anymore. She has a web site where she posts her stories and links to other fan art, vids, or fiction, as well as a blog where she writes her original fiction, and various meta-narrative and/or meta-discursive productions, including a wiki, Tumblr account, LiveJournal page, and Twitter account.A Narrative Ethnography of Fans' Production Content: Acculturation as Iteration and TransformationWe can briefly focus on another partial but significant example of narratives and discourses of a fan, in the perspective of a qualitative and iterative approach. We will then emphasise that narratives and discourses circulate, in other words that they are written and reformulated in and on different periods and platforms, but also that narratives use iteration and variation (Eco 1985).Lynzee005 was born in 1985 in Canada. She joined FFNet in 2008 and last updated her profile in September 2015. She has a beta profile, which means that she reads and reviews other fans' work-in-progress. We can also clarify that publishing chapter-by-chapter and being re-read on FFNet appears to be a principle of writing and of writing circulation. So, writing reveals an iterative and participative practice.Prior to this updating she wrote:When I read, I look for an emotional connection with the characters and I hope to be genuinely invested in where the story is going. […] I tackle everything in chunks, concentrating on the big issues (consistent characterization, believable plot lines, etc.) before moving down to the smaller ones (spelling, punctuation). Once I finish reading a "chunk," I put it together in the whole and see if it works against the other "chunks," and if not, then I go back and start over.She has written 17 stories for 7 different fandoms. She wrote five stories for Twin Peaks including a crossover with another fandom. She joined AO3 in December 2014 and completed her Twin Peaks trilogy. Her profile no longer underlines this serial process of chunking and dispersal, stressed by Jenkins ("Transmedia"), but only evokes how scenes can be stitched together. She now insists on the outcome of unity or continuity rather than on the process of serialization and fragmentation.Stories about fans, their affective and interpretive relations to a story universe and their uses of reading and writing in and out a fandom, can illustrate a diversity of attachments and interests. We can briefly describe a range of attachments. Attachment to the character, described above, can move towards self-narration, to the exhibit of self both as a person and a character, to a self-distancing, an identity affect. Attachment also has interpretative and critical dimensions. Attached to a narrative universe, attached to storytelling, fans promote a writing normalisation and a narrative format (genre, pairing, tagging, memes, etc.). Every fan seems to iterate and alter this conduct. This appropriation renews self-imposed narrative codes. The use of writing by fans, based on attachments, is both iterative and transformative. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), AO3's parent apparatus, asserts that derivative fans' work is transformative.According to Umberto Eco's vision of a postmodern aesthetics of seriality, "Something is offered as original and different […] this something is repeating something else that we already know; and […] just because of it we like it" (167). There is an "enjoyment of variations" (174). "Seriality and repetition are not opposed to innovation" (175). Eco claims a dialectic between repetition and innovation, that is to say a: "dialectic between order and novelty -in other words, between scheme and innovation," where "the variation is no longer more appreciable than the scheme" (173). We acknowledge the "inseparable knot of scheme-variation" he is stressing (Eco 180), and we intend to put narrative fragmentation and narration dispersal forward to their reconstruction in a narrative universe as a whole, within the socio-narrative device. The knot illustrates the dialogical principle of exceeding dichotomies that will be discussed hereunder.The plurality of uses and media calls for an accumulation of competencies, which engage users in the process of media acculturation. A "literate" or skilful user should be able to comprehend "the flow of content across multiple media platforms," the media industries' cooperation, "the migratory behavior of media audiences," and the "technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes" that the word convergence manages to describe (Jenkins, Convergence, 3).Acculturation conveys an appropriation process, borrowed from "French" sociology of uses. Audiences become gradually intimate with the context of the evolving media environment. Scholars progressively understand how audiences are familiarizing themselves with competencies until they master literacies, where competencies are gathered. Users become sensitive, as well as mindful of time and space in literacy (Literacy), and of how writing can be spatialised (Graphic Literacy), of how the media space is technologized (Digital Literacy), and of what kind of structural interactions are emerging (Interactive Literacy).Thus, the research question takes shape: "What kind of interactions can users establish with objects that are both technical and cultural?" Which also means: "In a study of effective uses, can the researcher find appropriation logics or tactics in the way users, specifically here readers and writers, improve their cultural practices?" As Davallon and Le Marec furthered it, uses have to be included in a process of cultural growth. Users can cross technical and cultural dimensions of an object in two main ways: They can compare the object with other cultural products they are used to, or they can grasp its novelty when engaging a cognitive and cultural capability of adaptation. Acknowledgment and adaption are part of the social process of cultural growth. In this sense, use can be an integrated activity or a novel one.The model of cultural growth means that different and dispersed uses are progressively entering a meaning-making process. The question of meaning holds together, even unifies, multiple uses of reading and writing in a cultural practice of reading-writing. With this in mind, the core of competencies described above accurately displays the importance of critical skills (semiotic, informational, affective, symbolic, narrative, and discursive) nourishing a critical capability. Critically literate, users are able to question the place to which they have been attributed and the place they can gain, in an evolving (and even uncertain) media system. They can elaborate a critical reflection on their own practices of reading and writing.Two Principles of a Socio-Narrative Device: Dialogism and RecognitionUses of reading and writing online invite us to visualize and think through the convergence of a narrative object (technical, visual, and cultural), its medium and format(s), and the audiences involved. Here, multimodality has to be (re)considered. This is not only a question of different modes but a question of multiplicity in reading and writing uses, that leads us to the way a fan attachment creates his or her participation in the meaning of the text, and more generally leads us to the polyphonic form of writing questions. Dispersed uses converging into a cultural and social practice bring to light dialogical dimensions of writing, in the sense pointed out by Bakhtin in the early 1930s. Dialogism expands the notion of intertextuality to a social practice; enunciation appears polyphonic, and speakers are interacting. Every discourse is oriented to other discourses, interacting and responding to pre-existing discourses addressing the same object. Discourse is always others' discourse and shows a multiple and inter-relational subject.A fan producing meta-narratives or meta-discourses on media and fan fiction is an inter-relational subject. By way of illustration, Slaymesoftly, displays her stories on AO3, on her own Web site, and on specialized archives. She does not justify fan fiction writing through warnings or disclaimers but defines broadly what fiction is and how she uses fiction in her stories. She analyses publishing, describes her universe and the alternative universes that she explores, and depicts how stories become a series. Slaymesoftly can be considered a literate fan, approaching writing with emotion or attachment and critical rationality, or more precisely, leading her attachment to writing with the distance that critical thought allows. She writes "Essays -about writing, vampires, and whatever else I decide to blather on about" on her Web site or on her LiveJournal, where she also joined a community. In the main, Slaymesoftly experiences multiple variations, in the sense of Eco, variations that oppose and tie a character to a canon, or a loving writing object to what could be newly told. Slaymesoftly also exposes the desire for recognition engaged by fans' uses of interaction. This process of mutual recognition, stated in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit highlights and questions fans' attachment, individual identity, and normative foundation. Mutual recognition could strengthen communitarianism or conformism in writing, but it can also offer a way for attachments to be shared, a way to initiate a narrative, and a social practice of dialog.Dialogical dimensions of cultural practices of reading-writing (both in production and reception) design a fragmented narrative universe, unfinished but one, that can be comprehend in a socio-narrative device.Figure 2 (Masoni Lacroix & Cailler)Texts, authors, writers, and readers are not opposed but are part of a socio-narrative continuity. This device crosses three complementary and evolving dimensions of the narrative universe: techno-narrative, socio-narrative (playful, creative, and critical, in their interactivity), and narratological. Uses of literacy generating multimedia, cross-media, and transmedia productions also question the multimodal form of writing and invite us to an iterative, open, dialogical, and interrogative practice of multimodality. A (post)narratological activity opens up to an interrogative practice. This practice dialogs with others' discourse and narrative. The questioning complexity remains open. In a proximate meaning, a transmedia narrative is fragmented, open to incompletion, but enrolled in a continuum (Jenkins, "Transmedia").Looking back, through the overtaken dichotomy between production and reception, a social and narrative process has been described that leads to the reshaping of multiple uses of literacies into cultural practices, and further on, to a cultural and social practice of reading-writing blended into interactivity. Competencies, dictated uses of reading and writing and alterna(rra)tive upsurges (as fans' production content) can be questioned. What can be questioned is either the fragmentation, the incompletion, and the continuity of narratives, that Jenkins no longer brings into conflict ("Transmedia"). This is also what the social and narrative form of dialogism teaches us: dichotomies, as a tool or a structure of thought, appear suspect or no longer significant. There is continuity in the acculturation process, from acknowledgement to recognition, continuity in the multiple uses of interacting, continuity from narrative to discourse, continuity from emotion to writing critically, a transformative continuity in iteration and variation, a polyphonic continuity.ReferencesBakhtin, Michaïl, and V.N. Volosinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973.Cailler, Bruno, and Céline Masoni Lacroix. "El 'French Touch' Transmediatico: Un Inventario." Transmediación: Espacios, Reflexiones y Experiencias. Eds. Denis Porto Renó et al. Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2012. 181-98.Davallon, Jean, and Joëlle Le Marec. "L'Usage en son Contexte. Sur les Usages des Interactifs des Céderons des Musées." Réseaux 101 (2000): 173-95.De Certeau, Michel. L'Invention du Quotidien. Paris: Folio Essais, 1990.Eco, Umberto. "Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Postmodern Aesthetics." Daedalus 114 (1985): 161-84.Hegel, G.W.F. Phénoménologie de l'Esprit. Trans. Bernard Bourgeois. Paris: Vrin, 2006.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York UP, 2006.———. "Transmedia 202: Further Reflections." 2011. <http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>.Masoni Lacroix, Céline. "Mise en Récit des Fictions de Fans de Séries Télévisées: Variations, Granularité et Réflexivité." Tension narrative et Storytelling. Eds. Nicolas Pélissier and Marc Marti. Paris: L'harmattan, 2014. 83-100.———. "Narrativités 2.0: Fragmentation-Organisation d'un Métadiscours." Cahiers de Narratologie 32 (2017). <http://journals.openedition.org/narratologie/7781>.———, and Bruno Cailler. "Fans versus Universitaires, l'Hypothèse Dialogique de la Transmédialité au sein d'un Dispositif Socio-narratif." Revue française des sciences de l'information et de la communication 7 (2015). <http://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/1662>.———, and Bruno Cailler. "Principes Co-extensifs de la Fiction Sérielle, de la Distribution Diffusée à une Pratique Interprétative Dialogique: une Nouvelle Donne Socio-narrative?" Cahiers de Narratologie 31 (2016). <http://narratologie.revues.org/7576>. TV Show Fandoms ExploredBuffy The Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon).Sherlock (Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat).Twin Peaks (Mark Frost & David Lynch).Wallander (from Henning Mankell to Philip Martin).

Introduction The construction of meaning is specifically denoted by texts that are created and published by the mass media. To highlight how that meaning is constructed, we might take a communication research approach which then enables us to understand how mass media texts impact society. To undertake such an approach it is useful to reflect on two methods outlined by Adoni and Mane who suggest there are two communication research methodologies. “The first focuses on the social construction of reality as an important aspect of the relationship between culture and society. The second approach concentrates on the social construction of reality as one type of media effect.” (Adoni and Mane 323). Relying on Adoni and Mane’s second communication research approach and combining this with the practice of remix, we can begin to understand how practitioners construct a reality from the mass audience perspective and not the mass media’s construction. This aligns with the approach taken by the ABC Pool remix practitioners in that they are informed by the mass media’s construction of meaning, yet oppose their understanding of the text as the basis for their altered construction of meaning. The oppositional reading of the media text also aligns with Hall’s encoding/decoding theory, specifically the oppositional reading where audiences resist the dominant or preferred reading of the text (Long & Wall). If we align Deuze’s (Media Work) thinking to mass media that suggests we live in media as opposed to with media, the effects of the construction of reality have a major impact on how we construct our own lives. Until recently, that media and consequent meaning has been constructed by the mass media and broadcast into our living rooms, headphones, billboards and other public spaces where media resides. The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the affordances these information and communication technologies provide for the audience to talk back in new and innovative ways has challenged that traditional model of meaning construction. Now, instead of the mass media designing and disseminating meaning through our media consumption channels, the audience also has an opportunity to participate in this consumption and production process (Bruns; Jenkins; Shirky). “Remix means to take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends,” according to (Knobel & Lankshear 22) where Lessig argues that digital remix is writing on a mass cultural practice scale (Remix). Remix within this paper is considered a practice that takes the affordances of the technology and couples that with the creative ability of the artists to create socially constructed meanings through new and inventive methods. In considering socially constructed meaning, it is useful to reflect on media dependency theory, which suggests the amount of subjective reality depends on direct experience with various phenomena and the exposure to the media in relation to those phenomena (Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur). “According to the media dependency hypothesis, the degree of media contribution to the individual's construction of subjective reality is a function of one's direct experience with various phenomena and consequent dependence on the media for information about these phenomena” (Adoni and Mane 324). Remix requires a parent piece of media (the original meaning) to create a remixed child (the re-constructed meaning). There is a clear dependency relationship between the parent and child pieces of media in this arrangement, which realistically shapes how the child will be created. If this material is published in a non-institutional environment, the artist is more or less free to demonstrate what ever meaning they wish to express. However when this practice emerges from within an institutional environment, this raises concerns of the media production, namely is the media institution challenging the original meaning they placed on certain texts and are they endorsing the new socially constructed meaning provided by remix artists? Constructing new forms of meaning and challenging the preferred meaning of institutionally generated texts intrinsically connects remix to the act of online activism. Activism can be defined as “people and organisations that work to promote social or political changes” for the benefit of society (Jones 1). Scholars have noted the significance of online technologies to aid in the mobilisation of mass groups of individuals in protest. In light of the recent Arab Spring uprisings, González-Bailón et al. note “the number of events connecting social media with social unrest has multiplied, not only in the context of authoritarian regimes exemplified by the recent wave of upsurges across the Arab world but also in western liberal democracies, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis and changes to welfare policies” (para 1). Although the majority of work that is remixed on ABC Pool is not related to an authoritarian regime, it is representative of the frustrations many citizens have towards the inequality of distribution of wealth and power to a few privileged individuals. Remix as an online activism activity also explicitly demonstrates Hall’s oppositional reading of encoded texts. This paper will use media dependency theory as a lens to investigate how remix occurs outside of the institution to challenge the meanings created by authorities within the institutional setting, while challenging the mass media approach towards social discourse construction. To do this, the paper will focus on the case study of one remix artist, Main$treaM, who was an active participant within the institutional online community, ABC Pool. ABC Pool was a user created content space that ceased to operate during May 2013 from within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The Pool project enabled users to publish their audio, video, photography and writing on a platform that was developed and resourced by the ABC. ABC Pool was open to everyone and was governed by the same editorial policies that regulated all media and activities across the ABC in relation to the ABC Charter (ABC Act 1983). ABC Pool also operated under a Creative Commons licensing regime which enabled media to flow across platforms, for example the Internet, radio and television, while providing attribution to the original author (generally under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license). Main$treaM was one active user that engaged in remix to pursue his creative direction but to also challenge the meanings of texts that had been created by the mass media. Max Prophet$ equals Ca$h for Comments Main$treaM had been active in Pool for several months when he began publishing his remixed works. His approach towards media and its production is especially important as his technique involved challenging the societal discourse that is accepted from traditional forms of media production and reappropriating them to reflect how an audience would reconstruct them, from their Deuzian lived in experience. Main$treaM can also be classified as an oppositional reader of text in regards to how he decodes the meaning within the message (Hall). His online activist approach is obvious in his self-described profile. Main$treaM’s profile on ABC Pool says: Making animations, music & loads of max prophet$ However, his profile on Discogs (Discogs is one of the largest online music databases, where users can contribute music information and data while locating collectables within the global marketplace) reveals the artist’s creative and political perspectives: Main$treaM started off wanting to piss people off. He loathed the studio recording industry professionals & Sound Production Mass Media Culture in general. How could it be that a TV Camera can record what you say in the street, then edit it into something YOU DID NOT SAY but take a little news sample off the TV & bam: "WE WILL SUE YOU" These days it makes me sick that hard breaks & media cut ups are trendy. Not sick enough to actually stop. Main$treaM’s approach is one that challenges the stereotypical rhetoric tropes of the mass media and is concerned with choosing a remix style that aligns with the media dependency theory. That is, he draws on the one perspective which is garnered by the traditional media figureheads and applies his lived in experience with those same societal discourses to provide a significantly different meaning (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur). The tool he uses to operationalise this is the art of remix by taking multiple cultural artefacts to create new creative blends (Knobel & Lankshear). John Laws is a radio celebrity who has dominated the Australian media landscape for decades with his at times controversial ‘shock jock’ talk back radio program. He is right wing in his political alignment and has at times been the centre of controversial programming efforts that has riled Australian audiences, which also involved input from Australian media authorities. His political alignment coupled with his disregard for audience sensitivities makes Laws an ideal character for an activist remix artist such as Main$treaM to target. Main$treaM had taken comments that Laws had made, placed them out of context and remixed them to deliberately misrepresent Laws’s opinion. One track in particular, Max Prophet$, is a reaction to the controversial Cash for Comments scandal (Johnson). In this case, John Laws was accused of receiving remuneration from Toyota to endorse their products on his radio program without acknowledging this activity as advertising. Main$treaM, through one of his ABC Pool contributions Max Prophet$, selected various comments that Laws had made during his radio broadcasts, and remixed them in a format that had John Laws say he was indeed receiving large amounts of money from Toyota. His remix, in the tradition of Pauline Pantsdown, took Laws’s comments and connected them to say “That really is a terrific vehicle that Hilux Workmate, great name too isn’t it”, highlighting a clear endorsement of the Toyota product by the radio presenter. However, Main$treaM did not stop at proving his point with this one remix contribution. He also provided in addition to the Max Prophet$ contribution, many other controversial social commentary works, including Cock Cheek parts One and Two, Prickseye Picture of You and I, and Ca$h for Comment$. Each contribution focussed on a particular character trait that Laws had become known for, such as inviting input from his listeners and then hanging up on them when they provided commentary that was contrary to his opinion. “Did I call you or did you call me” was Main$treaM’s method of whimsically suggesting that Laws is a rude, right wing conservative. The public opinion within Australia of John Laws is split between support from the conservatives and disdain from the liberals. Main$treaM was attempting to provide a voice from within the liberal perspective that illuminates the public opinion of Laws. The public opinion of Laws is one cultural discourse that is difficult to define, and almost impossible to publish to the broader public. Remix, as Lessig suggests, provides the most suitable genre of mass cultural practice to interrogate both perspectives of someone as controversial as Laws, where ABC Pool provides the most suitable platform to publish remixed societal perspectives on contemporary controversial issues. However, as outlined earlier, ABC Pool is contained within the same regulatory framework as any other publication space of the ABC. Essentially by publishing this controversial work on an ABC platform is blurring the boundaries between the ABC providing a place to publish the material and the ABC endorsing the material. ABC Pool operated under a reactive mode of moderation which suggests that content can be published without any form of moderation but if it were flagged as inappropriate by another user or audience member it had to be investigated by the ABC Pool team. Main$treaM’s contemporary material contained confronting concepts, language and techniques and was flagged as inappropriate by an anonymous Pool user during 2011. In this instance, it becomes clear that remix within an institutional setting is a complicated activity to facilitate. By providing a Creative Commons licensing regime, the ABC Pool project is endorsing remix as an institutional activity, and given the ethos of ABC Pool to experiment with new and innovative ways of engaging the audience, remix is crucial to its operation. However given the complaints of the other users that Main$treaM’s material was inappropriate, the problem arose of how to manage contentious remix activity. Aligning with Jenkins’s convergent cultures and Bruns’s produsage theories which incorporates the audience into the production process, the ABC Pool project was required to promote remix as a suitable activity for its users. Remix as an online activist activity in turn attracted the societal dissent approach from remix artists, providing a problem of adhering to the rules and regulations of the ABC more broadly. In the immediacy of the complaint, a large proportion of Main$treaM’s material was temporarily unpublished from ABC Pool until the team could provide a suitable solution on how to solve the tensions. The Legal Consultation Process In an instance such as this, an ABC employee is required to consult the editorial policy people to seek their advice on the most appropriate approach on the problematic material. The ABC Editorial Policies representatives referenced the material in the then Section 9 of the Editorial Policies, which relates to user-generated content. After the consultation process, they could see no breach of the guidelines; however, given the obscene constitution of the material, they suggested the Pool team refer the material to ABC Legal, a process in the ABC known as ‘referring up’. ABC Legal had a team of media lawyers interrogate the material from a criminal law perspective. It is worth noting, in both departments, Legal and Editorial Policies, there was support for Main$treaM’s creative expression (Fieldnotes, 2011). However, both parties were approaching the material and acting in a risk management capacity to protect the integrity of the ABC brand. After receiving the approval of the editorial policy people, the ABC Pool team had to seek the advice from ABC Legal. After two weeks of investigation, ABC Legal returned the following recommendations for the Pool team: Ultimately, risk management is the deciding factor to determine if the material should be published or not, supported by a solid defense should the case go to court.There are three areas to be considered with Main$treaM’s content:CopyrightDefamatoryObscenityIn regards to copyright, it is OK to publish in this case because the works are covered by parody or satire as the pieces have a focussed angle, or subject (John Laws).Defamation is more complicated. Firstly, we have to establish if the usual person could identify the defamed person. If yes, we need to establish what imputations there are, i.e. homophobic tendencies, pedophilia, etc. For each imputation, we need to establish if there is a defense. Typical defenses are honest opinion, expressed as one’s view, or truth. Honest Opinion needs to have a base to relate it to and not just a rant – i.e. John Laws was caught in the Cash for Comments scandal but there is no evidence to suggest he is a pedophile (unless the artists knows a truth – which becomes complicated again).Obscenity comes under classification, and since Pool does not have a rating system in place, we cannot offer this as a way to avoid publishing. A standard example of this relates to a younger audience member having the same access to an obscene piece of content (as guided by Pool’s Guidelines Section 4.1 a and b).These rules are premised by how do I read it/hear it. This is how a jury of citizens will approach the same piece of content. Risk management is also present when we ask how will John Laws hear about it, and what will the community think about it.(Fieldnotes, 2011) The suggestions the legal team returned are significant in highlighting the position of a media institution that facilitates remix. What is relevant here is a public service media organisation is a specific type of media organisation that is responsible for facilitating increased citizenry through its activities (Cunningham). Martin builds on the work of Jacka and Hartley to highlight how the ABC should be encouraging ‘DIY citizenry’. She says the combination of the core Reithian values of educate, inform and entertain can be combined with new media technologies that enable a “semiotic self determination model” to construct a “national semiosis model” (Hartley 161). However, there is a clear misalignment between the values of the PSM and the remix artist. What was required was the presence of a cultural intermediary to assist in calibrating those values and engaging in a negotiation phase between the two stakeholders. A cultural intermediary is a human or non-human actor that is located between the production and consumption of cultural artifacts and aids in facilitating the negotiation space between different expertise disciplines. In this case, it was the role of the community manager to attempt to connect the two approaches and enable remix practice to continue under the auspices of the ABC. The ABC had shifted its approach towards some of the Main$treaM material, but given its regulatory framework was unable to facilitate all of his contributions. Unfortunately in this case, Main$treaM did not align with the requirements of the ABC, left the Pool community and did not continue his practice of remix within the ABC any further. Conclusion Remixed texts that are published on PSM platforms demonstrate high levels of dependency on existing mass media texts, aligning them with the approach of the media dependency theory (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur). Remixed texts are also cultural products of artists that live in media and not with media, as noted by Deuze (Media Industries, Work and Life) and are the result of mass cultural practice that manipulates the meaning of multiple cultural artefacts (Lessig). Remix as a form of online activism is also representative of Hall’s oppositional reading of texts which enable the practitioner to deepen their involvement within the social construction of reality (Adoni & Mane). Convergence cultures represent the audience’s ever-increasing desire to participate in the production of media and not merely consume it (Jenkins). The theoretical alignment of remix with these theories suggests remixed texts have a deeper and richer cultural representation than that of its institutionally produced parent text. However, collaboratively produced cultural artefacts via remix are problematised by the digital divide debate, specifically through the access of tools and knowledge for this practice. Lin terms this problem as ‘techno-elite’ where only certain individuals have access and knowledge and tools to engage in these types of cultural activities facilitated by PSM. Further, Carpentier challenges this type of participation by asking if we have access and can interact, are we really participating in a democratising activity, given the promises of online activism? Given that PSM is pursuing the concept of the audience as user, which positions the audience as a producer of content across online environments, facilitating the practice of remix should align with its core values to inform, educate and entertain (Martin). However as we have seen with the Main$treaM case, this is problematic when attempting to align the focus of a remix artist with that of PSM. In these instances the work of the cultural intermediary as the disciplinary expertise negotiator becomes critical to increase the societal representation within the production and consumption of cultural artefacts produced through the activity of remix. A public service broadcaster that is supportive of both institutionally produced texts, along with socially informed text production through remix, will be a rigorous media organisation that supports a better informed citizenry, or as Hartley suggests a self determined national semiosis model. References Adoni, Hanna, and Sherrill Mane. "Media and the Social Construction of Reality: Toward and Integration of Theory and Research." Communication Research 11.3 (1984): 323-40. Ball-Rokeach, Sandra, and DeFluer, Melvin. "A Dependency Model of Mass Media Effects." Communication Research 3 (1976): 3-21. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Carpentier, Nico. "The Concept of Participation. If They Have Access and Interact, Do They Really Participate?" Communication Management Quarterly 21 (2011): 13-36. Cunningham, Stuart. Hidden Innovation: Policy, Industry and the Creative Sector. Creative Economy and Innovation Culture. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2013. Deuze, Mark. Media Work. London: Polity Press, 2007. Deuze, Mark. "Media Industries, Work and Life." European Journal of Communication 24 (2009): 467. Enli, Gunn Sara. "Redefining Public Service Broadcasting." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14.1 (2008): 105 - 20. González-Bailón, Sandra, et al. "The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network." Scientific Reports 1.197 (2011). Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Council of Europe Colloquy on "Training In The Critical Reading of Television Language". 1973. Hartley, John. "Communicative Democracy in a Redactional Society: The Future of Journalism Studies." Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 1.1 (2001): 39-48. Jacka, Liz. "'Good Democracy': The Role of Public Service Broadcasting." The Centre for Culture and History (2001). 2 Feb. 2013 < http://www.cmchnyu.org/pdfs/jacka.pdf >. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture - Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Johnson, Rob. Cash for Comment: The Seduction of Journo Culture. Media.Culture Series. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000. Jones, Christopher. "Activism or Slacktivism? The Role of Social Media in Effecting Social Change." Research Paper. School of Engineering and Applied Science: University of Virginia, 2013. Knobel, Michele, and Colin Lankshear. "Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridization." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52.1 (2008): 22-33. Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008. Lin, Yu-Wei. "The Emergence of the Techno-Elite Audience and Free/Open Source Content: A Case Study on Bbc Backstage." Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 9.2 (2012): 597-613. Long, Paul, and Tim Wall. "Investigating Audiences: What Do People Do with Media?" Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. Eds. P. Long et al. Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2009. 240-72. Martin, Fiona. "Beyond Public Service Broadcasting? ABC Online and the User/Citizen." Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture 35.1 (2002): 42-62. Rosen, Jay. "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." Pressthink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine (2006). 2 Feb. 2013 < http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/apr/25/bbc.broadcasting >. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations. New York: Allen Lane, 2008.

Introduction Children are not only born digital, they are fashioned toward a lifestyle that needs them to be digital all the time (Palfrey and Gasser). They click, tap, save, circulate, download, and upload the texts of their lives, their friends’ lives, and the anonymous lives of the people that surround them. They are socialised as Internet consumers ready to participate in digital services targeted to them as they age such as Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But they are also fashioned as producers, whereby their lives are sold as content on these same markets. As commodities, the minutiae of their lives become the fodder for online circulation. Paradoxically, we also celebrate these digital behaviours as a means to express identity. Personal profile-building for adults is considered agency-building (Beer and Burrows), and as a consequence, we praise children for mimicking these acts of adult lifestyle. This article reflects on the Kids, Creative Storyworlds, and Wearables project, which involved an ethnographic study with five young children (ages 4-7), who were asked to share their autobiographical stories, creative self-narrations, and predictions about their future mediated lives (Atkins et al.). For this case study, we focus on commercialised forms of children’s automedia, and we compare discussions we had with 6-year old Cayden, a child we met in the study who expresses the desire to make himself famous online, with videos of Jacob, a child vlogger on YouTube’s Kinder Playtime, who clearly influences children like Cayden. We argue that child social influencers need consideration both as autobiographical agents and as child subjects requiring a sheltered approach to their online lives.Automedia Automedia is an emergent genre of autobiography (Smith and Watson Reading 190; “Virtually Me” 78). Broadcasting one’s life online takes many forms (Kennedy “Vulnerability”). Ümit Kennedy argues “Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, construct[ing] their identity online” (“Exploring”). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write that “visual and digital modes are projecting and circulating not just new subjects but new notions of subjectivity through the effects of automediality” with the result that “the archive of the self in time, in space and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized” (Reading 190). Emma Maguire addresses what online texts “tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate ‘real’ life through media” naming one tool, “automedia”. Further, Julie Rak calls on scholars “to rethink ‘life’ and ‘writing’ as automedia” to further “characterize the enactment of a personal life story in a new media environment.” We define automedia as a genre that involves the practices of creating, performing, sharing, circulating, and (at times) preserving one’s digital life narrative meant for multiple publics. Automedia revises identity formation, embodiment, or corporealities in acts of self-creation (Brophy and Hladki 4). Automedia also emphasizes circulation. As shared digital life texts now circulate through the behaviours of other human subjects, and automatically via algorithms in data assemblages, we contend that automediality currently involves a measure of relinquishing control over perpetually evolving mediatised environments. One cannot control how a shared life narrative will meet a public in the future, which is a revised way of thinking about autobiography. For the sake of this paper, we argue that children’s automedia ought to be considered a creative, autobiographical act, in order to afford child authors who create them the consideration they deserve as agents, now and in the future. Automedial practices often begin when children receive access to a device. The need for a distraction activity is often the reason parents hand a young child a smartphone, iPad, or even a wearable camera (Nansen). Mirroring the lives of parents, children aspire to share representations of their own personal lives in pursuit of social capital. They are often encouraged to use technologies and apps as adults do–to track aspects of self, broadcast life stories and eventually “live share” them—effectively creating, performing, sharing, and at times, seeking to preserve a public life narrative. With this practice, society inculcates children into spheres of device ubiquity, “socializing them to a future digital lifestyle that will involve always carrying a computer in some form” (Atkins et al. 49). Consequently, their representations become inculcated in larger media assemblages. Writing about toddlers, Nansen describes how the “archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito)” (Nansen). Children, like adult citizens, are increasingly faced with choices “not structured by their own preferences but by the economic imperatives of the private corporations that have recently come to dominate the internet” (Andrejevic). Recent studies have shown that for children and youth in the digital age, Internet fame, often characterized by brand endorsements, is a major aspiration (Uhls and Greenfield, 2). However, despite the ambition to participate as celebrity digital selves, children are also mired in the calls to shield them from exposure to screens through institutions that label these activities detrimental. In many countries, digital “protections” are outlined by privacy commissioners and federal or provincial/state statutes, (e.g. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). Consequently, children are often caught in a paradox that defines them either as literate digital agents able to compose or participate with their online selves, or as subjectified wards caught up in commercial practices that exploit their lives for commercial gain.Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables ProjectBoth academic and popular cultural critics continually discuss the future but rarely directly engage the people who will be empowered (or subjugated) by it as young adults in twenty years. To address children’s lack of agency in these discussions, we launched the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables project to bring children into a dialogue about their own digital futures. Much has been written on childhood agency and participation in culture and mediated culture from the discipline of sociology (James and James; Jenks; Jenkins). In previous work, we addressed the perspective of child autobiographical feature filmmakers to explore issues of creative agency and consent when adult gatekeepers facilitate children in film production (Pedersen and Aspevig “My Eyes”; Pedersen and Aspevig “Swept”). Drawing on that previous work, this project concentrates on children’s automediated lives and the many unique concerns that materialize with digital identity-building. Children are categorised as a vulnerable demographic group necessitating special policy and legislation, but the lives they project as children will eventually become subsumed in their own adult lives, which will almost certainly be treated and mediated in a much different manner in the future. We focused on this landscape, and sought to query the children on their futures, also considering the issues that arise when adult gatekeepers get involved with child social media influencers. In the Storyworlds ethnographic study, children were given a wearable toy, a Vtech smartwatch called Kidizoom, to use over a month’s timeframe to serve as a focal point for ethnographic conversations. The Kidizoom watch enables children to take photos and videos, which are uploaded to a web interface. Before we gave them the tech, we asked them questions about their lives, including What are machines going to be like in the future? Can you imagine yourself wearing a certain kind of computer? Can you tell/draw a story about that? If you could wear a computer that gave you a super power, what would it be? Can you use your imagination to think of a person in a story who would use technology? In answering, many of them drew autobiographical drawings of technical inventions, and cast themselves in the images. We were particularly struck by the comments made by one participant, Cayden (pseudonym), a 6-year-old boy, and the stories he told us about himself and his aspirations. He expressed the desire to host a YouTube channel about his life, his activities, and the wearable technologies his family already owned (e.g. a GroPro camera) and the one we gave him, the Kidizoom smartwatch. He talked about how he would be proud to publically broadcast his own videos on YouTube, and about the role he had been allowed to play in the making of videos about his life (that were not broadcast). To contextualize Cayden’s commentary and his automedial aspirations, we extended our study to explore child social media influencers who broadcast components of their personal lives for the deliberate purpose of popularity and the financial gain of their parents.We selected the videos of Jacob, a child vlogger because we judged them to be representative of the kinds that Cayden watched. Jacob reviews toys through “unboxing videos,” a genre in which a child tells an online audience her or his personal experiences using new toys in regular, short videos on a social media site. Jacob appears on a YouTube channel called Kinder Playtime, which appears to be a parent-run channel that states that, “We enjoy doing these things while playing with our kids: Jacob, Emily, and Chloe” (see Figure 1). In one particular video, Jacob reviews the Kidizoom watch, serving as a child influencer for the product. By understanding Jacob’s performance as agent-driven automedia, as well as being a commercialised, mediatised form of advertising, we get a clearer picture of how the children in the study are coming to terms with their own digital selfhood and the realisation that circulated, life-exposing videos are the expectation in this context.Children are implicated in a range of ways through “family” influencer and toy unboxing videos, which are emergent entertainment industries (Abidin 1; Nansen and Nicoll; Craig and Cunningham 77). In particular, unboxing videos do impact child viewers, especially when children host them. Jackie Marsh emphasizes the digital literacy practices at play here that co-construct viewers as “cyberflâneur[s]” and she states that “this mode of cultural transmission is a growing feature of online practices for this age group” (369). Her stress, however, is on how the child viewer enjoys “the vicarious pleasure he or she may get from viewing the playing of another child with the toy” (376). Marsh writes that her study subject, a child called “Gareth”, “was not interested in being made visible to EvanHD [a child celebrity social media influencer] or other online peers, but was content to consume” the unboxing videos. The concept of the cyberflâneur, then, is fitting as a mediatising co-constituting process of identity-building within discourses of consumerism. However, in our study, the children, and especially Cayden, also expressed the desire to create, host, and circulate their own videos that broadcast their lives, also demonstrating awareness that videos are valorised in their social circles. Child viewers watch famous children perform consumer-identities to create an aura of influence, but viewers simultaneously aspire to become influencers using automedial performances, in essence, becoming products, themselves. Jacob, Automedial Subjects and Social Media InfluencersJacob is a vlogger on YouTube whose videos can garner millions of views, suggesting that he is also an influencer. In one video, he appears to be around the age of six as he proudly sits with folded hands, bright eyes, and a beaming, but partly toothless smile (see Figure 2). He says, “Welcome to Kinder Playtime! Today we have the Kidi Zoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech” (Kinder Playtime). We see the Kidi Zoom unboxed and then depicted in stylized animations amid snippets of Jacob’s smiling face. The voice and hands of a faceless parent guide Jacob as he uses his new wearable toy. We listen to both parent and child describe numerous features for recording and enhancing the wearer’s daily habits (e.g. calculator, calendar, fitness games), and his dad tells him it has a pedometer “which tracks your steps” (Kinder Playtime). But the watch is also used by Jacob to mediate himself and his world. We see that Jacob takes pictures of himself on the tiny watch screen as he acts silly for the camera. He also uses the watch to take personal videos of his mother and sister in his home. The video ends with his father mentioning bedtime, which prompts a “thank you” to VTech for giving him the watch, and a cheerful “Bye!” from Jacob (Kinder Playtime). Figure 1: Screenshot of Kinder Playtime YouTube channel, About page Figure 2: Screenshot of “Jacob,” a child vlogger at Kinder Playtime We chose Jacob for three reasons. First, he is the same age as the children in the Storyworlds study. Second, he reviews the smart watch artifact that we gave to the study children, so there was a common use of automedia technology. Third, Jacob’s parents were involved with his broadcasts, and we wanted to work within the boundaries of parent-sanctioned practices. However, we also felt that his playful approach was a good example of how social media influence overlaps with automediality. Jacob is a labourer trading his public self-representations in exchange for free products and revenue earned through the monetisation of his content on YouTube. It appears that much of what Jacob says is scripted, particularly the promotional statements, like, “Today we have the Kidizoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech. It’s the smartest watch for kids” (Kinder Playtime). Importantly, as an automedial subject Jacob reveals aspects of his self and his identity, in the manner of many child vloggers on public social media sites. His product reviews are contextualised within a commoditised space that provides him a means for the public performance of his self, which, via YouTube, has the potential to reach an enormous audience. YouTube claims to have “over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the Internet—and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views” (YouTube). Significantly, he is not only filmed by others, Jacob is also a creative practitioner, as Cayden aspired to become. Jacob uses high-tech toys, in this case, a new wearable technology for self-compositions (the smart watch), to record himself, friends, family or simply the goings-on around him. Strapped to his wrist, the watch toy lets him play at being watched, at being quantified and at recording the life stories of others, or constructing automediated creations for himself, which he may upload to numerous social media sites. This is the start of his online automediated life, which will be increasingly under his ownership as he ages. To greater or lesser degrees, he will later be able to curate, add to, and remediate his body of automedia, including his digital past. Kennedy points out that “people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online” (“Exploring”). Her focus is on adult vloggers who consent to their activities. Jacob’s automedia is constructed collaboratively with his parents, and it is unclear how much awareness he has of himself as an automedia creator. However, if we don’t afford Jacob the same consideration as we afford adult autobiographers, that the depiction of his life is his own, we will reduce his identity performance to pure artifice or advertisement. The questions Jacob’s videos raise around agency, consent, and creativity are important here. Sidonie Smith asks “Can there be a free, agentic space; and if so, where in the world can it be found?” (Manifesto 188). How much agency does Jacob have? Is there a liberating aspect in the act of putting personal technology into the hands of a child who can record his life, himself? And finally, how would an adult Jacob feel about his childhood self advertising these products online? Is this really automediality if Jacob does not fully understand what it means to publicly tell a mediated life story?These queries lead to concerns over child social media influence with regard to legal protection, marketing ethics, and user consent. The rise of “fan marketing” presents a nexus of stealth marketing to children by other children. Stealth marketing involves participants, in this case, fans, who do not know they are involved in an advertising scheme. For instance, the popular Minecon Minecraft conference event sessions have pushed their audience to develop the skills to become advocates and advertisers of their products, for example by showing audiences how to build a YouTube channel and sharing tips for growing a community. Targeting children in marketing ploys seems insidious. Marketing analyst Sandy Fleisher describes the value of outsourcing marketing to fan labourers:while Grand Theft Auto spent $120 million on marketing its latest release, Minecraft fans are being taught how to create and market promotional content themselves. One [example] is Minecraft YouTuber, SkydoesMinecraft. His nearly 7 million strong YouTube army, almost as big as Justin Bieber’s, means his daily videos enjoy a lot of views; 1,419,734,267 to be precise. While concerns about meaningful consent that practices like this raise have led some government bodies, and consumer and child protection groups to advocate restrictions for children, other critics have questioned the limits placed on children’s free expression by such restrictions. Tech commentator Larry Magid has written that, “In the interest of protecting children, we sometimes deny them the right to access material and express themselves.” Meghan M. Sweeney notes that “the surge in collaborative web models and the emphasis on interactivity—frequently termed Web 2.0—has meant that children are not merely targets of global media organizations” but have “multiple opportunities to be active, critical, and resistant producers”...and ”may be active agents in the production and dissemination of information” (68). Nevertheless, writes Sweeney, “corporate entities can have restrictive effects on consumers” (68), by for example, limiting imaginative play to the choices offered on a Disney website, or limiting imaginative topics to commercial products (toys, video games etc), as in YouTube review videos. Automedia is an important site from which to consider young children’s online practices in public spheres. Jacob’s performance is indeed meant to influence the choice to buy a toy, but it is also meant to influence others in knowing Jacob as an identity. He means to share and circulate his self. Julie Rak recalls Paul John Eakin’s claims about life-writing that the “process does not even occur at the level of writing, but at the level of living, so that identity formation is the result of narrative-building.” We view Jacob’s performance along these lines. Kinder Playtime offers him a constrained, parent-sanctioned (albeit commercialised) space for role-playing, a practice bound up with identity-formation in the life of most children. To think through the legality of recognising Jacob’s automedial content as his life, Rak is also useful: “In Eakin’s work in particular, we can see evidence of John Locke’s contention that identity is the expression of consciousness which is continuous over time, but that identity is also a product, one’s own property which is a legal entity”. We have argued that children are often caught in the paradox that defines them either as literate digital creators composing and circulating their online selves or as subjectified personas caught up in commercial advertising practices that use their lives for commercial gain. However, through close observation of individual children, one who we met and questioned in our study, Cayden, the other who we met through his mediated, commercialized, and circulated online persona, Jacob, we argue that child social influencers need consideration as autobiographical agents expressing themselves through automediality. As children create, edit, and grow digital traces of their lives and selves, how these texts are framed becomes increasingly important, in part because their future adult selves have such a stake in the matter: they are being formed through automedia. Moreover, these children’s coming of age may bring legal questions about the ownership of their automedial products such as YouTube videos, an enduring legacy they are leaving behind for their adult selves. Crucially, if we reduce identity performances such as unboxing, toy review videos, and other forms of children’s fan marketing to pure advertisement, we cannot afford Jacob and other child influencers the agency that their self representation is legally and artistically their own.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society 3.2 (2017): 1-15.Andrejevic, Mark. “Privacy, Exploitation, and the Digital Enclosure.” Amsterdam Law Forum 1.4 (2009). <http://amsterdamlawforum.org/article/view/94/168>.Atkins, Bridgette, Isabel Pedersen, Shirley Van Nuland, and Samantha Reid. “A Glimpse into the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables Project: A Work-in-Progress.” ICET 60th World Assembly: Teachers for a Better World: Creating Conditions for Quality Education – Pedagogy, Policy and Professionalism. 2017. 49-60.Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.4 (2013): 47–71.Brophy, Sarah, and Janice Hladki. Introduction. Pedagogy, Image Practices, and Contested Corporealities. Eds. Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014. 1-6.Craig, David, and Stuart Cunningham. “Toy Unboxing: Living in a(n Unregulated) Material World.” Media International Australia 163.1 (2017): 77-86.Fleischer, Sandy. “Watch Out for That Creeper: What Minecraft Teaches Us about Marketing.” Digital Marketing Magazine. 30 May 2014. <http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/articles/watch-out-for-that-creeper-what-minecraft-teaches-us-about-marketing>.James, Allison, and Adrian James. Key Concepts in Childhood Studies. London: Sage, 2012.Jenkins, Henry. The Childhood Reader. New York: NYU P, 1998.Jenks, Chris. Childhood. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015.Kennedy, Ümit. "Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the 'The Power of MAKEUP!' Movement." M/C Journal 19.4 (2016). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1127>.———. “The Vulnerability of Contemporary Digital Autobiography” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 409-411.Kinder Playtime. “VTech Kidizoom Smart Watch DX Review by Kinder Playtime.” YouTube, 4 Nov. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaxCSjwZjcA&t=28s>.Magid, Larry. “Protecting Children Online Needs to Allow for Their Right to Free Speech.” ConnectSafely 29 Aug. 2014. <http://www.connectsafely.org/protecting-children-online-needs-to-allow-for-their-right-to-free-speech/>.Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website.” M/C Journal 17.3 (2014). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/821>.Marsh, Jackie. “‘Unboxing’ Videos: Co-construction of the Child as Cyberflâneur.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 37.3 (2016): 369-380.Nansen, Bjorn. “Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques.” M/C Journal 18.5 (2015). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1026>.———, and Benjamin Nicoll. “Toy Unboxing Videos and the Mimetic Production of Play.” Paper presented at the 18th Annual Conference of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Tartu, Estonia. 2017.Palfrey, John, and Urs Gasser. Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age. New York: Basic Books, 2016.Pedersen, Isabel, and Kristen Aspevig. “‘My Eyes Ended Up at My Fingertips, My Ears, My Nose, My Mouth’: Antoine, Autobiographical Documentary, and the Cinematic Depiction of a Blind Child Subject.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 34.4 (2011).Pedersen, Isabel, and Kristen Aspevig. “‘Swept to the Sidelines and Forgotten’: Cultural Exclusion, Blind Persons’ Participation, and International Film Festivals.” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 3.3 (2014): 29-52.Rak, Julie. “First Person? Life Writing versus Automedia.” International Association for Biography and Autobiography Europe (IABA Europe). Vienna, Austria. 30 Oct. – 3 Nov. 2013.Smith, Sidonie. “The Autobiographical Manifesto.” Ed. Shirely Neuman. Autobiography and Questions of Gender. London: Frank Cass, 1991.———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Sweeney, Meghan. “‘Where Happily Ever After Happens Every Day’: Disney's Official Princess Website and the Commodification of Play.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 3.2 (2011): 66-87.Uhls, Yalda, and Particia Greenfield. “The Value of Fame: Preadolescent Perceptions of Popular Media and Their Relationship to Future Aspirations.” Developmental Psychology 48.2 (2012): 315-326.YouTube. “YouTube for Press.” 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/press/>.

The first home video-gaming console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972. Its limited graphical capacities led Magnavox to ship it with a number of plastic overlays for the user's television that would admit a little variety into the then relatively crude gaming experience, limited to a built-in, Pong-like game. Computer and video games have come a long way since then, but it often seems as if critical approaches to gaming have continued shuffling through these plastic films, taking transformations of the screen, or on-screen events, for the whole of the gaming experience. It seems to me that reflection has been paralysed, becoming a discourse of regulation as it revolves around anxieties about gender, violence and narrative. I'd like to explore these anxieties as they've emerged in a few places, and then see if I can articulate the beginnings of an approach that might afford us a more complex, less pessimistic aesthetics of gaming. Anxieties around gender are partly premised upon an evident difference in the types, frequency and extent of gameplay on the part of boys and girls. Recent Australian research suggests that while 76% of boys use home computers for gameplay, the proportion of girls who do the same is around 60% (Cuppitt and Stockbridge 1996). In addition, similar Australian research suggests that while 98% of 12-17 year old boys play games regularly, only around 89% of girls do (Durkin and Aisbett 2000). There is evidence that girls and boys favour different gaming genres (Durkin and Aisbett 2000), and there is little doubt that the magazines and Websites that operate so integrally within gaming cultures tend to hail and attract a mostly male audience. Evidence of this kind of gender split can be seen across the extant research, and from it the argument is often made that this gender imbalance implies a lifelong advantage for boys proceeding from an early pleasurable familiarity with computers. In addressing this problem, rather than confronting questions of access, and parental or teacherly responsibilities to guarantee equity of access for boys and girls, or even looking at issues of gender representation, many critics have instead argued that most games are fundamentally unsuited to the way girls play. In a recent anthology, From Barbie To Mortal Kombat (1998), essentialist discourses of gender are deployed in assembling a consensus around what is termed the 'girls games movement'. Time and again in most of the assembled articles and interviews, claims are made that girls' and boys' interests and styles of play are fundamentally different. While boys allegedly favour destructive play, with an emphasis on mastery, control and competition, girls -- it's constantly asserted -- require collaboration and co-operation, an emphasis on feelings and discussion, a less competitive framework for play, and, above all, narrative. Repeatedly in the anthology, its impugned that games now do not encompass the narrative complexity or richness that girls need, and that girls are alienated from the violent 'twitch and kill' dynamic that pervades gaming. Apart from the thoroughgoing essentialism -- which is brilliantly interrogated by the game-grrlz featured at the end of the anthology -- what troubles me about much of the anthology and much contemporary critical work on games is the implied moral demand that young people's game-culture begin to measure up to another generation's notions of 'appropriate' cultural experiences. A persistent trope in critical work on games -- from Jenkins's piece in the anthology (Jenkins 1998) to works like Marsha Kinder's Playing with Power (1991) -- is the parent-critic watching their children playing video games and becoming perplexed and worried about what is going on. The panic around the lack of 'girls games' -- apart from affording a lucrative opportunity to produce and market worthy material to concerned parents -- serves to authorise the 'correction' of young people's culture. The move from a critique of gaming -- one which rarely engages sympathetically with its pleasures -- to an attempt to inject strong, adult-devised narrative content into games is a move from speaking about gamers ('over their heads') to speaking for gamers. This speaking-for, this flutter of panic has, I think, more than a little to do with an anxiety around the dissipation of cultural power. Theorists of moral panic like John Springhall tell us that moral panics function as attempts to preserve the intergenerational status quo and the cultural-critical hierarchy of a particular period (Springhall 1998). Catharine Lumby argues that new media are like force-fields that reorganise social relations in their wake, and that the anxieties they can inspire can tell us a lot about who feels threatened by such re-organisations, and why (Lumby 1997). Gaming is disturbing in that although it shares some features with other, more familiar visual media, it seems finally, stubbornly unassimilable to the modes of criticism that have developed in relation to those forms. Entrenched critical narratives of spectatorship, or the relationship between viewers, texts, meaning and the economies of cultural production don't seem to find any useful or lasting purchase here. No-one would now argue that televisual or cinematic experiences are passive, but gaming's requirement in principle for the player's direct physical participation in the production of cultural experience means that the old separations underpinning mechanisms of identification or notions of consuming audiences seem irritatingly awkward. Faced with these and other difficulties, criticism has tended to become mesmerised with what is shared -- the screen -- and to be at once frustrated and provoked by the enormous differences still inscribed there. While the close scrutiny of gender representations in gaming has uncovered some serious problems, alongside the demand for narrative we can also see it as part of an older generation's attempt to adapt familiar, free-floating critical modes and models to a group of media with which it has no apparent deep or pleasurable engagement. Faced with a radical analytical and critical failure, the lack of any pleasure to account for or recover, and the need to preserve a cultural and critical hierarchy premised upon the study of other media, it is perhaps inevitable that a desire to alter gaming -- to make it more familiar -- has arisen, and with it a critical discourse of regulation. If we move beyond the screen, if we simply attend to what happens when we and others play games, we allow the possibility of a new aesthetics of gaming to emerge that moves beyond such desires for control. When we realise that what is almost never talked about in current critical work is the body of the player or the nature of machine-mediated play, a field begins to open that might allow us to talk about the uses and pleasures of gaming, and to see its various forms in a wider network of interactions. Paradigm-cases for beginning the sorts of investigations I'm thinking of are those amazing arcade games, like Dance Dance Revolution, that enable and even require public performance and public display. Often positioned at the street entrances of arcades, these games usually attract passing crowds to stop and watch (male and female) players dancing in time with thumping tunes and on-screen instructions. Points are scored by closely matching foot placement with the directional arrows thrown up onto the small screen, but what really attracts the onlookers is the undeniable, individual -- and, strictly, unnecessary -- flair with which the dancers often execute their moves. What at the level of programming, and from an analysis of the screen alone, is the most rudimentary of narratives nevertheless mediates a thrilling and spectacular playful-performative display. And this is where we begin to see that gaming pleasures do not, perhaps cannot, rely on finished or closed narratives. It seems to me that the undeniable popularity of gaming comes from the provision of endlessly recursive grammars and vocabularies for cyborg players to narrate performance, play and self. While many gaming genres and titles do include chunks of traditional narrative storytelling, it seems to me that these often simply embellish the distinctive pleasures of gaming, which require and enact the fundamental redistribution of authorial and narrative power. Gaming establishes a new relationship between perceptual fields and bodies -- a relationship fundamentally different from cinematic or televisual relationships. Associated with these pleasures and relationships is gaming's demand for an ontology -- a series of ontologies -- that can conceive of the moment of play as simultaneously social, mechanical, neither, both. Code and performance, programming and improvised play, when seen together in this way, make the demand for narrative -- ultimately premised upon the separation of consumer and product, spectator and image -- empty of any force. This is to say that when we begin to see the moment of gameplay as a hybrid one -- one where human and machine, play and code, text and reading, producer and consumer cannot be meaningfully distinguished -- we can then begin to see that its unfixed, unstriated forms of play demand a hybrid aesthetics. Such a hybrid aesthetics would move beyond the screen alone to consider gaming's involvement in multiple networks, and thus come to a consideration of its pleasures and possibilities that avoided discourses of morality and control. What it would consider is not only the relationship between gaming and other forms of 'visual culture', but simultaneously its technological artefacts, its involvement with transnational industry, the physical dexterities and epistemologies it demands, the differing shapes of its collectives as it proliferates, its interactions with urban spaces, and its production of different kinds and mixtures of spectators, players, narratives and machines. This kind of Latourean anthropology, with its refusal to bracket gaming as another form of 'soft' culture, is a critical approach that will allow us some traction on gaming's slippery surface, as it allows us to talk about its complexity all at once. If we begin to see games as 'mediators -- that is, actors endowed with the ability to translate what they transport', who in turn 'associate, combine and redeploy countless actors' (Latour 1993), if we look beyond the screen and instead, following Wittgenstein, look for the meaning of games in their everyday social use, we will have begun to look at games in a way that is more interested in what they do, than in what they allegedly do not do. Carrying out this kind of aesthetic project will require not only an attention to the involvement of players' bodies in gaming, but to the patterns of games' dissemination, and to what players themselves say about the games they play. Such an approach need not, in opposing the pessimism that goes with screen-fetishism, veer toward the utopianism of so much cyber-rhetoric. If we take arguments like Latour's seriously, we will say not that gaming represents a revolutionary moment, but that there has always been a deep involvement between humans and our technologies, such that machines and humans constitute collectives for social action. An aesthetics of gaming that takes cognisance of this will short-circuit conveniently polarised debates, and clear space for a more interesting consideration of the networks and uses of gaming. Perhaps those of us who have keenly felt the pleasures and possibilities of gaming can extend a conversation that is no longer sifting through the Odyssey's yellowing transparencies. References Cassell, Justine and Henry Jenkins, eds. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Cuppitt, Margaret, and Sally Stockbridge. Families and Electronic Entertainment. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1997. Douglas, Nikki, et al. "Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back." In Cassell and Jenkins. Durkin, Kevin, and Kate Aisbett. Computer Games and Australians Today. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 2000. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Jenkins, Henry. "'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces." In Cassell and Jenkins. Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993. Lumby, Catharine. "Panic Attacks: Old Fears in a New Media Era." Media International Australia, 85 (1997): 40-6. Springhall, John. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panic. Houndmills: MacMillan, 1998. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1951. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jason A. Wilson. "Odyssey Renewed: Towards a New Aesthetics of Video-Gaming." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/odyssey.php>. Chicago style: Jason A. Wilson, "Odyssey Renewed: Towards a New Aesthetics of Video-Gaming," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/odyssey.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jason A. Wilson. (2000) Odyssey renewed: towards a new aesthetics of video-gaming. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/odyssey.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionWhen a baby girl born in Britain was endowed with the topical name ‘Hashtag’, a social media post decried the naming, and a media storm followed. Before she was even home from hospital, headlines were at the ready: “Did a mother really just name her child Hashtag?” (Nye) and “Baby Hashtag: has the search for original names gone too far?” (Barkham). Trollers were also poised to react, offering: “The first name is REALLY dumb. And you're even dumber,” prompting a rejection of the baby’s name as well as her ostensibly ill-equipped parents (Facebook). Dubbed a “Public Figure” on her Facebook page, Hashtag Jameson accrued a particularly premature type of celebrity, where, with a handful of baby selfies, she declared via Twitter, and only hours after birth, that she was “already trending”.In this article, I consider the relationship between the infant child and the visual-digital economies in which it – as in the Hashtag hoax, above – performs. The infant child is brought into view with the very first sentence that frames John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. “Seeing comes before words”, he writes. “The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (1). Berger’s reference to the seeing child positions it as an active agent in cultures and practices of visuality, but also uses an idea of the child to position vision as the primary communicative means by which we “establish our place in the surrounding world” and in which we are enveloped “before” speech (7). Here, I explore the intensified relationship between the visual culture of infancy and the economised digital movement of vision that it produces in one highly specific image-genre: the baby selfie. In doing so I aim to characterise the depictive nature of this format in terms of how it compositionally documents – to further borrow the language of Berger, who was then discussing oil paintings – “a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange” (87).The new sociology of childhood has been concerned with the construction of the child figure as it has interfaced with new cultural and political realities since the early 1980s (Prout). These include “phenomena such as the flexibilization of production … expanding networks of knowledge … and shifts in labour market participation, work and the global economy” (Prout 5). I suggest here that the baby selfie can be seen as an unprecedented social marker of these transformations, signalling a heightened degree of priceless sentiment within which the child – as an animator of amateur affects, viral tendencies and algorithmic logics – is given to operate. I focus on the compositional propensities of the baby selfie in order to characterise how it visually construes a particular kind of self that is intrinsically entangled with the conception of the image as a form of capital exchange. That is, I suggest that in its intense and yet paradoxical self-performativity the baby selfie depicts a way of seeing that is predicated on, but also troubles, the conceit of a commodified social relation. What Does the Baby Selfie Say?“Should babies really be taking selfies?” yells a headline warning against the perceived dangers of youth digital cultures (Cox). The 2014 story references a phone app built by father Matthew Pegula that uses front-facing cameras to “unintentionally teac[h] your baby to take selfies of themselves” by generating “rattling sounds, pictures of cute animals, and more to get the baby’s attention.” The article explains that “[w]hen the baby reaches out to touch the screen, the camera snaps their selfie and saves it to the device”. While Pegula’s Baby Selfie App is available for purchase on Google Play’s app store for $1.09, a similar device named New Born Fame, featuring “Facebook and Twitter symbols that are activated when the youngster reaches for them” and inclusions such as “a pair of shoes with an internal pedometer that tracks kicks and posts the activity online, a squeezable GPS tracker and a ‘selfie-ball’ that photographs the baby and uploads the shot whenever the ball rotates” (Peppers), artistically interrogated this relatively new category of “insta-infa-fame”.In their article “What Does the Selfie Say?”, Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym argue that the selfie exists as the hallmark genre of a new kind of self-reflexive image-making, one that is formally characterised by the “self-generated” nature of the photographic portraiture it depicts, which is in turn conceived for its transmissibility, occurring “primarily via social media” (1589). Popularised in part by new technologies (the camera phone, the smart phone, and then the front-facing phone camera) and in part by new digital platforms (“Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Tumblr, WeChat, and Tinder”) (1589), Senft and Baym further explain that the selfie is simultaneously a photographic object which transmits human feeling, a practice of sending (as well as of depicting), and third, a monetized assemblage curated by nonhuman agents. It is this last factor which renders the objecthood of the selfie as it relates to the vernacular that it enacts as well as the practice of its making, political.Notions around the simultaneously constituting and yet virally distributed “self” of social media are not new. A now prominent literature around how the selfie graphically manifests and performs: intimate publics (Walsh and Baker), a normative or resistive image repertoire (Murray), and emotionalised, communicable affect (Bayer et al.), gives rise to a range of viewpoints that aim to characterise how the hyper self-reflexivity of the selfie depicts – visually as well as ontologically – the self as an agent of their own transmissibility (Holiday et al.). From these we understand that the selfie is distinct for its (i) self-representational image-format (it is an image made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identifiable for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition); ii) its methods of distribution (selfies are taken and distributed often instantaneously, and thereby are not only objects of, but active agents of, the reshaping of digitally communicative economies); iii) its idiomatic performance of a sociality and aesthetic of the amateur or vernacular (Abidin).The doubled glance both inwards and outwards that the selfie casts is further characterised for how it traces as well as points to a gestural self-awareness held within its compositional characteristics (Frosh). This moves us from a semiotic reading of the selfie to a reading of its “kineasthetic sociability” – that is, its embodied inception of new forms of autobiographical inscription which say “not only ‘see this, here, now,’ but also ‘see me showing you me’” (Frosh 1609-10). Here, the selfie is less a static object and more a gestural imprint of the communicative action in process: it is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of, among other things, the selfieness of the image)” (Frosh 1611). In this sense, its compositional logic offers a tracing of this very enactive, embodied tendency, which bears more than an indexical relationship to the field that it marks – it depicts itself as a constituting part of that field.While these characteristics are broadly accepted as being true of selfies, the “selfieness” of a baby selfie might be seen to offer a paradoxical reframing of these depictive qualities. That is, if a selfie is a self-depiction of a process of self-depiction, the baby selfie most usually performs this self-reflexivity with recourse to an external agent who is either present in the image frame or who is occluded from it but nonetheless implied by the very nature of the image (a parent or the image-facilitator, or indeed, a baby app). The baby selfie’s scene of self-depiction, then, might be thought of as a kind of self-depiction-by-proxy. At the same time, the baby selfie asks us to invest in the belief that the picture was knowingly self-taken, and in doing so, models a kind of aspirational autonomy for the child/baby figure who is depicted. In this sense, the baby selfie, by its very nature, disrupts the accepted distinguishing format of the selfie: that the picture is both self-depicting and is self-composed. Instead, the baby selfie can be seen to gesturally reincorporate into its visual scene the very question of this structural im/possibility.Depicting the Viral ChildThe figure of the child has been considered by a range of theorists as the organising principle of modernity. Philippe Aries’ foundational work has argued that the modern discovery of childhood is reflected in the rise of the nuclear family and consequential shifts from sociability to privacy. Viviana Zelizer similarly positions the emergence of the economically “useless” but sentimentally “priceless” child against comprehensive social and industrial transformations taking place across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that excluded the child as a labourer and instead situated it with the disciplinary regime of education. The hetero-normatively white child has since been shown to emblematise concepts of social futurity (Edelman) and myths of morality, humanity and the “ordering of time” (Pelligrini 98).Following Zelizer, the more recently ‘digitally’ visual cultures of childhood can be seen to spin the figure of the child around new socio-economic and discursive imperatives. Lisa Cartwright writes about photographs of waiting adoptee children, in which “children of poor countries become commodities and their images become advertisements in a global market” (83). Deborah Lupton similarly considers the coding of infant bodies in popular media for their “represent[ation] as helpless, vulnerable, uncontrolled, dirty and leaky in opposition to the idealised adult body that is powerful, self-regulated, autonomous, clean, its bodily boundaries sealed from the outside world” (349). More recently, children have been considered for how they either accidentally or volitionally interact with mediated technologies (Nansen) as well as for how they are increasingly digitally surveilled as the objects of a necessary – and increasingly normalised – parental “culture of care” (Leaver 2). These studies make clear that while children are increasingly positioned as the ‘viral’ agents of new kinds of visual markets, they are also infantilised as victims in need of unprecedented cyber-protection.In 1994 Douglas Rushkoff coined the term “media virus” to account for the rapid and uncontrollable ways that popular media texts performed to either coerce or awaken viewing publics. While Rushkoff’s medium of reference was television, Henry Jenkins et al. later reframed virality to instead encompass ideas of user-led agency by linking it with a logic of “stickiness” – evoking what he termed a “peanut butter” analogy to describe the “spreadable” (3) movement of ideas in more recent social media practices. Indeed, Liam French finds a strong parallel between the “phenomenal rise in user generated content” and the turn towards newer visual cultures within social media practices more broadly, noting that it is “ordinary people” (French’s term) who actively generate the very forms of visual cultural production that become key to communicatory circulation. The selfie, in this regard, becomes both a format and an icon of the new ways of seeing brought into perspective by social media practices.Given the political, social and industrial ecologies that constitute such image cultures, it is only recently that the “viral” child, as the next delineation of the sentimentally “priceless” child, has arrived into view. Here, the baby Hashtag hoax can be seen to critically narrate a specific cultural moment: one that is concerned with stabilising the figure of the child even as it constitutes the ground through which that figure also becomes undone. I refer to the way that Hashtag, as a figural baby, presents a tautological identity, where the digital grammar of # names the mechanism by which she would also search for herself. If Hashtag is emblematic of the algorithmic and affective assemblage of contemporary image-cultures of childhood – whose image-work shapes the new temporal dimensions of our watching and viewing practices – she also illustrates how the child has been become not only an object, but a medium of the economic logics of communicative capitalism. That is, the image-work of the baby selfie can be seen to point to the very question of autonomous agency that frames the figure of the child and in doing so, provides a disruptive counterpoint to the “peanut butter” logic of spreadable visual cultures of so-called “ordinary people” more broadly.It is this light that I ask (drawing on Senft and Baym): what does the baby selfie say about how we understand or construe the figure of the child? More specifically, I ask (via Berger) what culture of vision is brought into view by the rise of such visual cultures of the viral child? The “Gestural Gaze” of Digital Infant Agency Ellentv.com recently advertised a call for viewers to send in their favourite baby selfies: “If you've got a baby and a camera, it's time to take some selfies! Take a photo of you and your baby making the same face, and send it to us!” The legal disclaimer accompanying the callout additionally advised that “[b]y submitting Materials, … you … do not violate the right of privacy or publicity of, or constitute a defamation against, any person or entity; that the Materials will not infringe upon or violate the copyright or common law rights or any other rights of any person or entity” (Ellentv.com). From the outset, there appears within baby selfie culture a curious calibration of the agency of the child, who is at once a selfie-self-taker but who is also excluded from a legal right to privacy that concerns “any person or entity”. In this respect we might further ask – following Jacqueline Bhabha’s question “what sort of human is a child?” (1526) – what sort of human is a viral child, and how does the baby selfie depict this paradoxical configuration of infantile agency?While the formality of the baby selfie still demonstrates a range of configurations which often incorporate the figure of a parent and hence contradict the discreet self-composing parameters of the selfie, here I focus in closing on one specific baby selfie that I suggest is emblematic of an increasing prevalence of apparently “true” baby selfies which operate on a range of image-sharing platforms and meme sites. These baby selfies are distinguished by seeming to be (i) an image that is made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identified for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition; ii) an image that is construed for methods of often instantaneous distribution; iii) an image that puts forward an idiomatic performance of an amateur vernacular – or what Abidin has called “calibrated amateurism”.One compilation, “12 of the Cutest Baby Selfies You Will Ever See”, foregrounds the autonomy of the figure of the viral child as depicted by baby selfie culture, explaining that “These babies might be small, but they can do a lot more than just laugh, crawl, and play. It turns out they can also work their way around a camera and snap some amazing selfies. Talk about impressive!” (Campbell). While all the images in the selection depict the embodied gestural sociality of the selfie that Frosh characterises – that which is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of … the selfieness of the image)” (1611) – one in particular is arresting for its striking interpellation of the “innocent” figure of the child with what I will extend via Frosh to call the inherent mediality of her gestural gaze. In this iconic baby selfie, the gestural gaze is witnessed in the way that the baby’s outstretched hand seems to be extending towards us, the viewer, but is rather (we think we know) extended towards the phone camera, in order to better see herself.The infant in the image is coded female, wearing a pink bonnet, dummy clip and dummy. The dummy is centred defiantly in the baby’s mouth and doubly defiantly in the centre of the image frame as an infantile ‘technology’ that seems to undercut the technology of the phone camera apparatus. The dummy imbues the image with an iconic sense of the baby’s innate “baby-ness” which seems to directly contradict the strength of her gaze, which also appears, in following the outwards arc of her selfie-taking arm, to reach beyond the image frame and address her viewer directly. It seems to say – to paraphrase Frosh – see me here, now, showing you me. The ambivalent origins of the image are also key to how it is read and distributed here. The image in question can be found on the media site Woman’s World, which offers an untraceable credit to Instagram for its original source. The image has also, since, spread itself, appearing across a range of other multilingual sites and feeds, depicting the child at the centre of its frame as somewhat entangled in a further labour of self-duplication. The baby selfie in circulation says not only “‘see this, here, now,’” and “‘see me showing you me’,” but ‘see all of this here, and again, here and again, here.’John Berger writes of two related image genres that connect histories of vernacular depiction to histories of the evolution of the publicity image as a medium and sign of capital exchange. Writing on oil painting, he notes how the materiality of the medium signified the “thingness” of its depiction: “if you buy a painting you also buy a look of the thing that it represents” (83). He finds, therein, an “analogy between possessing and a way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting” (83) and which, as he later explains, becomes tied to “the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts” (88). The textural qualities of oil painting, which for Berger construe the “real” as that which can be materially conveyed or indexed as commodity, might be compared to the gestural residue that is contained within the selfie. While oil painting construed the materiality of things – and hence, the commodifiable nature of any particular relation – the selfie might be seen to depict the self in the process of its own self-labour: the material gesture of taking the image necessitates that the self becomes an agent who then becomes the immaterial self of transmission. The selfie is in this way a depiction of the self in a form of capital relation to itself.While the selfie – as a digital composition – is not materially “real” in the same way that oil painting is, the indexical nature of the arm that reaches out beyond the image frame to point to the inherent transmissibility – and hence capital value – of the image, might be. While the baby selfie imitates these capacities, I suggest here that it also traces a compositional logic that further complicates that which Frosh charts. This is because in the very moment that the spectator of the image is confronted with the baby selfie’s call to “see me showing you me” (1609-10), the spectator is also confronted with the figure of the infant as an autonomous agent capable of their own image-constitution. In essence, the baby selfie posits a question around the baby’s innate ability to knowingly generate its image-frame, even as that very image-frame is what casts the infant into the spreadable contexts within which it will then operate – or, indeed, become ‘knowable’.In its heightened self-referentiality but tenuously depicted sense of rhetorical agency, the baby selfie then faces us with what we think we know, or do not know, about the figure of the child. This central ambivalence inherent to the compositional makeup of the baby selfie in this way both depicts and disrupts the economics of circulation that are intrinsic to selfies more broadly, pointing to a decomposing of the parameters by which a selfie is interpreted and understood. Further, it enables us to question relationships between ways of seeing and ways of being – how does the baby selfie envision the figure of the chid? What sort of human does it become? While there are valid discussions to be had around the absence of “direct self-representational agency” (Leaver) and moral rights or wrongs of the parental management of children’s image-work in online spaces, the baby selfie also opens up questions around how we understand the very contours of infantile agency, how we perceive rhetorical knowingness, and what we mean to mean by the relentless circulation of this imagery of the viral child. Indeed, as Wendy S. Hesford writes, it can be helpful to shift an understanding of agency from being an “individual enterprise” to being understood as that which is “enabled and constrained by cultural discourses and material forces” that compel it into material circulation (156).Here, I am not aiming to foreclose debates about the role of infants (or children more broadly) living with and in digital cultures. Neither do I aim to cast judgement upon on those image practices which enfold child subjects within them. I rather aim to circumvent those important debates to find – following Berger – a trace of how the image cultures that co-constitute digital infancies operate to formulate as well as depict a new field of vision that is predicated upon a seemingly impossible but nonetheless compelling logic of the contradictory impulses of the viral child. That is, it challenges us to think more carefully about what we think we know about children as well as about how we come to know them.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society (Apr.-June 2017): 1–15.Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. 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The Dangling Mobile That Lets Newborns Post Selfies and Videos Online from the Crib.” Daily Mail Australia, 25 Oct. 2014. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2806761/Social-media-BABIES-dangling-mobile-lets-newborns-post-selfies-videos-online-crib.html>.Prout, Alan. “Taking a Step Away from Modernity: Reconsidering the New Sociology of Childhood.” Global Studies of Childhood 1.1 (2011): 4–14.Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus! New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.Senft, Theresa M., and Nancy K. Baym. “What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon.” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1588–1606.Walsh, Michael James, and Stephanie Alice Baker. ‘The Selfie and the Transformation of the Public–Private Distinction.” Information, Communication & Society 20.8 (2017): 1185–1203.Zelizer, Viviana. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1994.

Released in 2012 as an Android only open-beta, Ingress is an alternate-reality game for mobile devices. Developed by Niantic Labs, a subsidiary of Google, Ingress now has 7 million users worldwide (Ingress) on both Android and Apple operating systems. Players are aligned to one of two opposing factions, the Resistance (Blue) and the Enlightened (Green). Working on behalf of their faction, individual players interact with “portals” in order to establish dominance over material environments. Portals are located at places of educational or historical value, public artworks, “hyper-local” locations, public libraries, and also places of worship (Google, “Candidate Portal Criteria”). Players take on the role of portal creators, submitting potential portals to the game developers after confirming their location in the game (Google, “New Portal Submissions”).Portals become the primary point of interaction for players, bridging the digital world of the game with the players’ surrounding material environments. Players may gain inventory by hacking portals in order to destroy and (re)claim portals. Territories are claimed by forging links between fully developed portals in order to establish control fields. Portals play an important part not only of the game but in situating the practice of play within the larger sociocultural and material framework of the urban environment. Players navigate their material environment, using portals and digital representations of such spaces alongside their existing knowledge of local environments, to engage with their immediate location as efficiently as possible. While numerous public landmarks are currently used as portals, the primary interest of this paper is the role street art plays within the game, and within the larger practice of curating the city. This paper addresses the practice of playing Ingress as a form of situated play—that is, the notion that play is underscored by sociocultural and material circumstance, while simultaneously contributing to a new shared understanding of what constitutes urban play and the conditions that underscore it. In doing so, this paper firstly addresses the notion of play as a situated practice, mobilising concepts from the field of human–computer interaction as well as cultural studies analyses of games and gaming culture. This framework is applied to the practice of playing Ingress with specific focus on the role street art has in the practice of playing. The discussion of urban play as a means of exhibiting street art is extended to discuss the cultural practice of street art itself, with both occupying the liminal space struggle over the functionality of public space. Both practices occupy this liminal space between subversive use of urban environments and a form of legitimate art—a debate which has been central to forms of urban gaming. By focusing on the role of street art in urban mobile gaming, this paper addresses the cultural function of both practices, while addressing larger questions of curatorship within the urban environment. That is: how can the practice of play, as informed by the practice of street art, be thought of as a means of curating urban spaces? This paper goes on to argue that the practice of urban play may be viewed as a form of curation via the practice of re-reading, re-mixing, and re-mediating urban environments—establishing a new shared understanding of street art, urban environments, and urban play. In this paper I argue that urban mobile games such as Ingress are best thought of as a situated practice. The idea of situated practice is drawn from the fields of game studies and human–computer interaction, and the concept of situated learning. Firstly, situated practice draws from the concept of situated gaming, a term established by Yates and Littleton to understand the cultural niches in which video gaming takes place. For Yates and Littleton, these cultural niches arise from an interaction between gaming, gamers, and gaming culture—all of which are discursively constructed and culturally relative practices. Apperley (Gaming) expands on these ideas to define situated gaming as, firstly, an inclusion of the materiality of embodied gaming experiences and, secondly, an intersection of local gaming cultures and a larger global gaming ecology. Drawing from Suchman’s concept of situated actions, such interactions with technology must be understood as contextualised within specific sociocultural and material circumstances. Dourish expands on Suchman’s work and suggests thinking less about these contexts and more on the practice of technological engagement, of making meaning out of our interaction with technology. This use of “practice” is influenced by the work of Lave and Wenger, who situate learning within a social setting, what they term a “community of practice”. In short, then, the act of playing Ingress is not only an interaction with underlying sociocultural and material circumstance which constitute the urban and play but also a process of generating a shared understanding of both the urban and play within this specific context.Fig. 1: A view of Ingress’s map showing nearby portal using navigation function.Playing with Street Art Ingress functions foremost as a form of urban play; it is a mobile game with location-aware capabilities. The practice of playing games within urban environments is often compared to historically situated forms of urban exploration, such as the Situationist International practice of dérive—a form of urban drifting that is often compared to contemporary forms of mobile-mediated urban play (de Souza e Silva and Hjorth; Flanagan; Stevens). Ingress players, in their creation and constant interaction with portals, assist in the mapping of material environments—benefiting both communities of play and the game’s designers, Niantic Labs and parent company Google. Players are able to submit portals to the game’s developers if their proposed portal meets the satisfaction of the developer’s portal requirements. Portals may be erected at “a location with a cool story, a place in history or educational value … a cool piece of art or unique architecture … a hidden gem of hyper-local spot” (Google, Candidate Portal criteria). A large number of public marks form the basis of Ingress portals, alongside plaques and prominent signage. Significantly, through their submission of portals players are participating in legitimising the history of a number of locations, ensuring up-to-date mapping of locations and landmarks. While a number of other landmarks form the basis of Ingress’s dense map of material environments, this paper is primarily concerned with the role public art plays in the practice of urban play and the curatorial possibilities of urban play. Given the portal criteria put in place by the game’s developers, Ingress pays a certain amount of attention to the historical, sociocultural, and material circumstance which constitute specific locations. As a mobile game, Ingress occupies a certain place within the history of playing in urban environments. Such historical practices have been previously discussed at length, drawing comparisons between practices of urban mobility which are themselves situated in specific historical and sociocultural movements (de Souza e Silva and Hjorth; Flanagan; Stevens). Ingress, via its inclusion of street art as a potential anchor for digital portals, draws on this historical struggle over urban environments and the inherent questions of functionality and organisation which emerge from this struggle. For Stenros, Montola, and Mäyrä (262), pervasive gaming, a form of urban mobile gaming, occupies a similar cultural space to that of street art or graffiti. They argue that both practices are located within a larger struggle over public space—a struggle grounded in urbanisation, legislation, and cultural norms. Drawing comparisons between more contemporary forms of urban mobility, such as the practice/sport of parkour or skateboarding, and the historically situated flâneur or urban stroller, the authors suggest that pervasive forms of gaming and play occupy a similar liminal space and are grounded in questions of urban functionality. Similarly, the urban space may become a gallery or canvas, a space that may be subject to curatorship that is not bound to institutional bodies. The organisation and experience of urban environments then becomes deeply involved in a contested ownership and questions of functionality that are at the heart of urban play.Within the context of Australia, the struggle over the legitimacy of both street art and video games has been subject to ongoing legal discourses. The liminal relationship between gaming and street art is perhaps best illustrated by the 2006 game Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. The game was granted an MA15+ rating under the existing model of video game regulation but was later refused classification due to its depiction of antisocial behaviour. The game’s rating was appealed by the Queensland Local Government Association. Apperley (“Video”) provides further details on this issue, situating the legislative decision within the historical and political context of Australia at the time, and offering insight into the means in which Getting Up represented street art as a legitimate art form. The game’s narrative, a dystopian future where graffiti is mobilised as a form of social protest against authoritarian bodies, is similar to that of the 2002 game Jet Set Radio Future. However, unlike Jet Set, Getting Up was grounded in a detailed representation of graffiti subcultures. Getting Up’s refused classification is symbolic of the later Australian landscape in which video games and street art occupy a liminal space between art form and artistic practice. The key issue, that of antisocial behaviour, links to the notion of cultural norms and the functionality, organisation, and representations within urban spaces and, moreover, within spaces of play. This struggle for legitimacy is key to understanding the relationship between street art and urban play. Despite the struggle to overcome the functionality of urban environments, street art retains levels of value as a form of cultural heritage. Both Merrill and MacDowall discuss the cultural functions of graffiti and street art, focusing on what Merrill terms a turn towards “post-graffiti”—a shift from the historical and cultural roots of street art and the practice of tagging (373). Such a turn is exemplified by an increased public interest: a legitimisation of artistic practices. Perhaps the most notable figure of such a shift is the Bristol artist Banksy, who is most famous for stencil based art. Graffiti and street art have arguably moved beyond their function as a subversive and subcultural movement, occupying a more legitimate space within urban environments and general public discourse. Within the context of Ingress, street art holds the potential to exist as a digital node of equal value to historical plaques, public libraries, or large commissioned public artworks. This shift, argues Merrill (385) allows for street art and graffiti to be viewed as a form of alternative heritage to urban environments and cultural movements within specific locations. For MacDowell (476), graffiti may be viewed as a form of folk art, subject to new-found romanticism within the context of this “post-graffiti” turn. That is, as a form of alternative heritage, graffiti and street art signify historically situated sociocultural movements and the roots of the practice itself. Games such as Ingress, then, not only legitimate street art as a form of cultural heritage via their inclusion in a non-hierarchical network alongside longstanding institutionalised buildings and artworks but also allow players to participate in an archiving of street art through interactive cartography. The practice of playing Ingress, then, is not only a means of viewing and exploring existing street art but also a direct process in achieving and curating historically situated works of art. Fig. 2: Portal information illustrating possible actions, portal level, and resonator information. Urban Play and “the New Curatorship”Having considered the role of graffiti or street art within urban play as a form of cultural heritage, as a means of linking to the roots of the practice itself and signifying a struggle over the urban environment as a space of predetermined functions, the question then is: what role does the practice of curatorship have within this mesh of interconnected practices? For Bennett and Beudel, the work of the curator, as a caretaker of cultural heritage, is often institutionalised. Within the context of the city, such institutionalisation is itself a symptom of the city as a spectacle. The authors argue that there is the potential for art to be present on a range of surfaces within the urban environment, and call into question the role of the curator within this process.As Groys notes, since Duchamp, the ontological division between the labour of making art and displaying art has collapsed. Public urban spaces, as designed spaces regulated by institutional bodies, are subject to the changing practice of audiences. That is, those who inhabit and experience the urban environment itself now have the possibility to participate or subvert traditional curatorial structures. Drawing on the etymology of the word “curate” as related to “cure,” Groys (53) suggests that the exhibition practice is thus a cure to the powerlessness of the image—a contextualisation of the image within new institutionalised frameworks for a viewing public. Who, then, in the network of relations that is urban play, constitutes this public? Ingress players function as one faction of a public who view, inhabit, move through, and experience the urban environment and any subsequent street art within. As such, they have the potential to take on a curatorial role within the organisation of street art—recontextualising such artworks and generating a new shared understanding of the sociocultural and material conditions which contribute to a broad understanding of the urban and urban play. As such, these forms of digitally mediated urban play blur boundaries between production, consumption, and play. Players, regardless of whether they had a hand in submitting portals to the game’s developers, are articulating a collectively organised database of public art. The practice of curation, as described by Potter, is essential for contemporary digital gaming practices. Players are constantly participating in transmedia landscapes, articulating their literacies through the practice of arranging, assembling, cataloguing, collecting, distributing, and disassembling digital media (Apperley “Glitch” 240; Potter 175). Within Apperley’s example of Minecraft, play unites creativity and the curatorial as one activity. Within the context of Ingress, the practice of play brings together the practice of cartography and of the curatorial. Players, as individuals and as larger localised or global factions, participate in a global mapping of material space, expanding Google’s already extensive collection of cartographic data. Players are more concerned with exploring and territorialising within the context of local spaces, at the level of the national or regional. Such practices are an articulation of localised bodies of knowledge and often of local histories and contexts. Street art forms an integral part of this sociocultural and material fabric which underscores the practice of play. Thus, urban spaces are not subject to a transformative process, but rather to a collective curatorship whereby street art, and its embedded cultural heritage, form a key foundation of how play is performed within urban environments. Through the practice of arranging, assembling, cataloguing, collecting, distributing, and disassembling, the practices of urban play may be thought of as what Potter terms “new curatorship.” Potter’s notion of curatorship is grounded in the identity formation of young children through their use of social media and articulation of digital literacy practices. With playful urban practices such as Ingress, this practice is an articulation of urban literacies: of understanding the rich cultural heritage of specific locations, and of constituting the player’s identity as tied to these specific locations. Players no longer perform merely as an audience for existing forms of urban or street art. Alongside the technological infrastructures put in place by the game’s developers, Niantic Labs and Google, players may be viewed as actively participating in a curatorial process. Players, in their articulation of complex systems and archives of street art, through the ability to constantly update, document, and construct urban narratives with street art at their core, may be viewed as co-curating urban environments. Working together with developers, street artists, and urban planners, players are constantly re-developing and sharing a new shared understanding of urban environments and the complex network of relations which constitutes the urban environment and the practice of urban play.Fig. 3: Players may vote on and contribute new photographs to maintain accurate records of art.Conclusion To play Ingress is to participate in a situated practice of play. Here, play is grounded in material and sociocultural circumstance, with street art and graffiti representing just one of many practices which inform contemporary urban play. Within the context of Ingress, street art is played with as an object within the game (a portal), but it also occupies a similar liminal space. Both urban games and street art have been subject to ongoing debates about the functionality of urban spaces and appropriate behaviour within these spaces. Ingress also taps into street art as a form of cultural heritage; it represents shifts in power dynamics, local histories, and a range of other significant local histories. To play with street art is to acknowledge its roots, both on an international and local level. With the ability to digitally archive these histories and locations, as well as engage in the cartographic practice of urban play, Ingress players can thus be thought of as curators of the city. Through the lens of new curatorship, urban play can be thought of as a form of re-reading of urban environments, as a process of exhibiting a new-found shared understanding of specific locations and public artworks. Street art and graffiti are just one of many sociocultural and material circumstances which inform the practice of urban play. During play, there is a critical reflection on the role street art has, not only during the current context of play but also more broadly as a key component of contemporary urban landscapes. Street art functions as a form of cultural heritage, as an element of urban exploration, and as a point of reference for navigating city spaces. Ingress brings together these interrelated forms of organising and sharing experiences of urban environments, through the practice of curation. Such practices are reflexively intertwined with playing urban mobile games as such Ingress. As such, the act of playing Ingress is, in essence, a form of urban literacy, as a practice of understanding the rich and complex sociocultural conditions which contribute to our understanding of urban environments. It is a practice of collecting, assembling, and exhibiting a range of locations. The practice of playing Ingress is a collective curation of city spaces on a global scale.References Apperley, Thomas. “Glitch Sorting: Minecraft, Curation, and the Post Digital.” Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design. Ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 232–44.———. “Video Games in Australia.” The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf. USA: Greenwood P, 2008. 22–29.———. Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009.Bennett, Jill, and Saskia Beudel. Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future. Sydney: UNSW P, 2014.De Souza e Silva, Adriana, and Larissa Hjorth. “Playful Urban Spaces: A Historical Approach to Mobile Games.” Simulation & Gaming 40.5 (2009): 602–25. Dourish, Paul. “What We Talk about When We Talk about Context.” Personal Ubiquitous Computing 8.1 (2004): 19–30.Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009.———. “Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16.2–3 (2008). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/perthDAC/MFlanagan_LEA160203.pdf›.Groys, Boris. Going Public. Ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.Google. “Candidate Portal Criteria.” 2015. 5 June 2015 ‹https://support.google.com/ingress/answer/3066197?hl=en›. ———. “New Portal Submissions.” 2015. 5 June 2015 ‹https://support.google.com/ingress/answer/2808254?hl=en›. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.MacDowall, Lachlan. “In Praise of 70K: Cultural Heritage and Graffiti Style.” Continuum 20.4 (2006): 471–84.Merrill, Samuel. “Keeping It Real? Subcultural Graffiti, Street Art, Heritage and Authenticity.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21.4 (2015): 369–89.Niantic Labs. Ingress. Android Mobile Application. 2012.Potter, John. Digital Media and Learner Identity: The New Curatorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.Stenros, Jaakko, Markus Montola, and Frans Mäyrä. “Pervasive Games in Media Culture.” Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. Eds. Markus Montola, Jakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. Amsterdam: CRC P, 2009.Stevens, Quentin. The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces. New York: Routledge, 2007.Suchman, Lucy. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.———. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Yates, Simeon J., and Karen Littleton. “Understanding Computer Game Cultures: A Situated Approach.” Information, Communication & Society 2.4 (1999): 566–83.

She leant lazily across the picnic hamper and reached for my hearing aid in my open-palmed hand. I jerked away from her, batting her hand away from mine. The glare of the summer sun blinded me. I struck empty air. Her tendril-fingers seized the beige seashell curve of my hearing aid and she lifted the cargo of sound towards her eyes. She peered at the empty battery-cage before flicking it open and shut as if it was a cigarette lighter, as if she could spark hearing-life into this trick of plastic and metal that held no meaning outside of my ear. I stared at her. A band of horror tightened around my throat, strangling my shout: ‘Don’t do that!’ I clenched my fist around the new battery that I had been about to insert into my hearing aid and imagined it speeding like a bullet towards her heart. This dream arrived as I researched my anthology of memoir-style essays on deafness, The Art of Being. I had already been reflecting and writing for several years about my relationship with my deaf-self and the impact of my deafness on my life, but I remained uneasy about writing about my deaf-life. I’ve lived all my adult life entirely in the hearing world, and so recasting myself as a deaf woman with something pressing to say about deaf people’s lives felt disturbing. The urgency to tell my story and my anxiety to contest certain assumptions about deafness were real, but I was hampered by diffidence. The dream felt potent, as if my deaf-self was asserting itself, challenging my hearing persona. I was the sole deaf child in a family of five muddling along in a weatherboard war commission house at The Grange in Brisbane during the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. My father’s resume included being in the army during World War Two, an official for the boxing events at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games and a bookie with a gift for telling stories. My mother had spent her childhood on a cherry orchard in Young, worked as a nurse in war-time Sydney and married my father in Townsville after a whirlwind romance on Magnetic Island before setting up home in Brisbane. My older sister wore her dark hair in thick Annie-Oakley style plaits and my brother took me on a hike along the Kedron Brook one summer morning before lunchtime. My parents did not know of any deaf relatives in their families, and my sister and brother did not have any friends with deaf siblings. There was just me, the little deaf girl. Most children are curious about where they come from. Such curiosity marks their first foray into sexual development and sense of identity. I don’t remember expressing such curiosity. Instead, I was diverted by my mother’s story of her discovery that I was deaf. The way my mother tells the story, it is as if I had two births with the date of the diagnosis of my deafness marking my real arrival, over-riding the false start of my physical birth three years earlier. Once my mother realized that I was deaf, she was able to get on with it, the ‘it’ being to defy the inevitability of a constrained life for her deaf child. My mother came out swinging; by hook or by crook, her deaf daughter was going to learn to speak and to be educated and to take her place in the hearing world and to live a normal life and that was that. She found out about the Commonwealth Acoustics Laboratory (now known as Australian Hearing Services) where, after I completed a battery of auditory tests, I was fitted with a hearing aid. This was a small metal box, to be worn in a harness around my body, with a long looping plastic cord connected to a beige ear-mould. An instrument for piercing silence, it absorbed and conveyed sounds, with those sounds eventually separating themselves out into patterns of words and finally into strings of sentences. Without my hearing aid, if I am concentrating, and if the sounds are made loudly, I am aware of the sounds at the deeper end of the scale. Sometimes, it’s not so much that I can hear them; it’s more that I know that those sounds are happening. My aural memory of the deep-register sounds helps me to “hear” them, much like the recollection of any tune replays itself in your imagination. With and without my hearing aids, if I am not watching the source of those sounds – for example, if the sounds are taking place in another room or even just behind me – I am not immediately able to distinguish whether the sounds are conversational or musical or happy or angry. I can only discriminate once I’ve established the rhythm of the sounds; if the rhythm is at a tearing, jagged pace with an exaggerated rise and fall in the volume, I might reasonably assume that angry words are being had. I cannot hear high-pitched sounds at all, with and without my hearing aids: I cannot hear sibilants, the “cees” and “esses” and “zeds”. I cannot hear those sounds which bounce or puff off from your lips, such as the letters “b” and “p”; I cannot hear that sound which trampolines from the press of your tongue against the back of your front teeth, the letter “t”. With a hearing-aid I can hear and discriminate among the braying, hee-hawing, lilting, oohing and twanging sounds of the vowels ... but only if I am concentrating, and if I am watching the source of the sounds. Without my hearing aid, I might also hear sharp and sudden sounds like the clap of hands or crash of plates, depending on the volume of the noise. But I cannot hear the ring of the telephone, or the chime of the door bell, or the urgent siren of an ambulance speeding down the street. My hearing aid helps me to hear some of these sounds. I was a pupil in an oral-deaf education program for five years until the end of 1962. During those years, I was variously coaxed, dragooned and persuaded into the world of hearing. I was introduced to a world of bubbles, balloons and fingers placed on lips to learn the shape, taste and feel of sounds, their push and pull of air through tongue and lips. By these mechanics, I gained entry to the portal of spoken, rather than signed, speech. When I was eight years old, my parents moved me from the Gladstone Road School for the Deaf in Dutton Park to All Hallows, an inner-city girls’ school, for the start of Grade Three. I did not know, of course, that I was also leaving my world of deaf friends to begin a new life immersed in the hearing world. I had no way of understanding that this act of transferring me from one school to another was a profound statement of my parents’ hopes for me. They wanted me to have a life in which I would enjoy all the advantages and opportunities routinely available to hearing people. Like so many parents before them, ‘they had to find answers that might not, for all they knew, exist . . . How far would I be able to lead a ‘normal’ life? . . . How would I earn a living? You can imagine what forebodings weighed on them. They could not know that things might work out better than they feared’ (Wright, 22). Now, forty-four years later, I have been reflecting on the impact of that long-ago decision made on my behalf by my parents. They made the right decision for me. The quality of my life reflects the rightness of their decision. I have enjoyed a satisfying career in social work and public policy embedded in a life of love and friendships. This does not mean that I believe that my parents’ decision to remove me from one world to another would necessarily be the right decision for another deaf child. I am not a zealot for the cause of oralism despite its obvious benefits. I am, however, stirred by the Gemini-like duality within me, the deaf girl who is twin to the hearing persona I show to the world, to tell my story of deafness as precisely as I can. Before I can do this, I have to find that story because it is not as apparent to me as might be expected. In an early published memoir-essay about my deaf girlhood, I Hear with My Eyes (in Schulz), I wrote about my mother’s persistence in making sure that I learnt to speak rather than sign, the assumed communication strategy for most deaf people back in the 1950s. I crafted a selection of anecdotes, ranging in tone, I hoped, from sad to tender to laugh-out-loud funny. I speculated on the meaning of certain incidents in defining who I am and the successes I have enjoyed as a deaf woman in a hearing world. When I wrote this essay, I searched for what I wanted to say. I thought, by the end of it, that I’d said everything that I wanted to say. I was ready to move on, to write about other things. However, I was delayed by readers’ responses to that essay and to subsequent public speaking engagements. Some people who read my essay told me that they liked its fresh, direct approach. Others said that they were moved by it. Friends were curious and fascinated to get the inside story of my life as a deaf person as it has not been a topic of conversation or inquiry among us. They felt that they’d learnt something about what it means to be deaf. Many responses to my essay and public presentations had relief and surprise as their emotional core. Parents have cried on hearing me talk about the fullness of my life and seem to regard me as having given them permission to hope for their own deaf children. Educators have invited me to speak at parent education evenings because ‘to have an adult who has a hearing impairment and who has developed great spoken language and is able to communicate in the community at large – that would be a great encouragement and inspiration for our families’ (Email, April 2007). I became uncomfortable about these responses because I was not sure that I had been as honest or direct as I could have been. What lessons on being deaf have people absorbed by reading my essay and listening to my presentations? I did not set out to be duplicitous, but I may have embraced the writer’s aim for the neatly curved narrative arc at the cost of the flinty self-regarding eye and the uncertain conclusion. * * * Let me start again. I was born deaf at a time, in the mid 1950s, when people still spoke of the ‘deaf-mute’ or the ‘deaf and dumb.’ I belonged to a category of children who attracted the gaze of the curious, the kind, and the cruel with mixed results. We were bombarded with questions we could either not hear and so could not answer, or that made us feel we were objects for exploration. We were the patronized beneficiaries of charitable picnics organized for ‘the disadvantaged and the handicapped.’ Occasionally, we were the subject of taunts, with words such as ‘spastic’ being speared towards us as if to be called such a name was a bad thing. I glossed over this muddled social response to deafness in my published essay. I cannot claim innocence as my defence. I knew I was glossing over it but I thought this was right and proper: after all, why stir up jagged memories? Aren’t some things better left unexpressed? Besides, keep the conversation nice, I thought. The nature of readers’ responses to my essay provoked me into a deeper exploration of deafness. I was shocked by the intensity of so many parents’ grief and anxiety about their children’s deafness, and frustrated by the notion that I am an inspiration because I am deaf but oral. I wondered what this implied about my childhood deaf friends who may not speak orally as well as I do, but who nevertheless enjoy fulfilling lives. I was stunned by the admission of a mother of a five year old deaf son who, despite not being able to speak, has not been taught how to Sign. She said, ‘Now that I’ve met you, I’m not so frightened of deaf people anymore.’ My shock may strike the average hearing person as naïve, but I was unnerved that so many parents of children newly diagnosed with deafness were grasping my words with the relief of people who have long ago lost hope in the possibilities for their deaf sons and daughters. My shock is not directed at these parents but at some unnameable ‘thing out there.’ What is going on out there in the big world that, 52 years after my mother experienced her own grief, bewilderment, anxiety and quest to forge a good life for her little deaf daughter, contemporary parents are still experiencing those very same fears and asking the same questions? Why do parents still receive the news of their child’s deafness as a death sentence of sorts, the death of hope and prospects for their child, when the facts show – based on my own life experiences and observations of my deaf school friends’ lives – that far from being a death sentence, the diagnosis of deafness simply propels a child into a different life, not a lesser life? Evidently, a different sort of silence has been created over the years; not the silence of hearing loss but the silence of lost stories, invisible stories, unspoken stories. I have contributed to that silence. For as long as I can remember, and certainly for all of my adult life, I have been careful to avoid being identified as ‘a deaf person.’ Although much of my career was taken up with considering the equity dilemmas of people with a disability, I had never assumed the mantle of advocacy for deaf people or deaf rights. Some of my early silence about deaf identity politics was consistent with my desire not to shine the torch on myself in this way. I did not want to draw attention to myself by what I did not have, that is, less hearing than other people. I thought that if I lived my life as fully as possible in the hearing world and with as little fuss as possible, then my success in blending in would be eloquence enough. If I was going to attract attention, I wanted it to be on the basis of merit, on what I achieved. Others would draw the conclusions that needed to be drawn, that is, that deaf people can take their place fully in the hearing world. I also accepted that if I was to be fully ‘successful’ – and I didn’t investigate the meaning of that word for many years – in the hearing world, then I ought to isolate myself from my deaf friends and from the deaf culture. I continued to miss them, particularly one childhood friend, but I was resolute. I never seriously explored the possibility of straddling both worlds, despite the occasional invitation to do so. For example, one of my childhood deaf friends, Damien, visited me at my parents’ home once, when we were both still in our teens. He was keen for me to join him in the Deaf Theatre, but I couldn’t muster the emotional dexterity that I felt this required. Instead, I let myself to be content to hear news of my childhood deaf friends through the grape-vine. This was, inevitably, a patchy process that lent itself to caricature. Single snippets of information about this person or that person ballooned into portrait-size depictions of their lives as I sketched the remaining blanks of their history with my imagination as my only tool. My capacity to be content with my imagination faltered. * * * Despite the construction of public images of deafness around the highly visible performance of hand-signed communication, the ‘how-small-can-we-go?’ advertorials of hearing aids and the cochlear implant with its head-worn speech processor, deafness is often described as ‘the invisible disability.’ My own experience bore this out. I became increasingly self-conscious about the singularity of my particular success, moderate in the big scheme of things though that may be. I looked around me and wondered ‘Why don’t I bump into more deaf people during the course of my daily life?’ After all, I am not a recluse. I have broad interests. I have travelled a lot, and have enjoyed a policy career for some thirty years, spanning the three tiers of government and scaling the competitive ladder with a reasonable degree of nimbleness. Such a career has got me out and about quite a bit: up and down the Queensland coast and out west, down to Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Hobart, and to the United Kingdom. And yet, not once in those thirty years did I get to share an office or a chance meeting or a lunch break with another deaf person. The one exception took place in the United Kingdom when I attended a national conference in which the keynote speaker was the Chairman of the Audit Commission, a man whose charisma outshines his profound deafness. After my return to Australia from the United Kingdom, a newspaper article about an education centre for deaf children in a leafy suburb of Brisbane, prompted me into action. I decided to investigate what was going on in the world of education for deaf children and so, one warm morning in 2006, I found myself waiting in the foyer for the centre’s clinical director. I flicked through a bundle of brochures and newsletters. They were loaded with images of smiling children wearing cochlear implants. Their message was clear: a cochlear implant brought joy, communication and participation in all that the world has to offer. This seemed an easy miracle. I had arrived with an open mind but now found myself feeling unexpectedly tense, as if I was about to walk a high-wire without the benefit of a safety net. Not knowing the reason for my fear, I swallowed it and smiled at the director in greeting upon her arrival. She is physically a small person but her energy is large. Her passion is bracing. That morning, she was quick to assert the power of cochlear implants by simply asking me, ‘Have you ever considered having an implant?’ When I shook my head, she looked at me appraisingly, ‘I’m sure you’d benefit from it’ before ushering me into a room shining with sun-dappled colour and crowded with a mess of little boys and girls. The children were arrayed in a democracy of shorts, shirts, and sandals. Only the occasional hair-ribbon or newly pressed skirt separated this girl from that boy. Some young mothers and fathers, their faces stretched with tension, stood or sat around the room’s perimeter watching their infant children. The noise in the room was orchestral, rising and falling to a mash of shouts, cries and squeals. A table had been set with several plastic plates in which diced pieces of browning apple, orange slices and melon chunks swam in a pond of juice. Some small children clustered around it, waiting to be served. When they finished their morning fruit, they were rounded up to sit at the front of the room, before a teacher poised with finger-puppets of ducks. I tripped over a red plastic chair – its tiny size designed to accommodate an infant’s bottom and small-sausage legs – and lowered myself onto it to take in the events going on around me. The little boys and girls laughed merrily as they watched their teacher narrate the story of a mother duck and her five baby ducks. Her hands moved in a flurry of duck-billed mimicry. ‘“Quack! Quack! Quack!” said the mother duck!’ The parents trilled along in time with the teacher. As I watched the children at the education centre that sunny morning, I saw that my silence had acted as a brake of sorts. I had, for too long, buried the chance to understand better the complex lives of deaf people as we negotiate the claims and demands of the hearing world. While it is true that actions speak louder than words, the occasional spoken and written word must surely help things along a little. I also began to reflect on the apparent absence of the inter-generational transfer of wisdom and insights born of experience rather than academic studies. Why does each new generation of parents approach the diagnosis of their newborn child’s disability or deafness with such intensity of fear, helplessness and dread for their child’s fate? I am not querying the inevitability of parents experiencing disappointment and shock at receiving unexpected news. I accept that to be born deaf means to be born with less than perfect hearing. All the same, it ought not to be inevitable that parents endure sustained grief about their child’s prospects. They ought to be illuminated as quickly as possible about all that is possible for their child. In particular, they ought to be encouraged to enjoy great hopes for their child. I mused about the power of story-telling to influence attitudes. G. Thomas Couser claims that ‘life writing can play a significant role in changing public attitudes about deafness’ (221) but then proceeds to cast doubt on his own assertion by later asking, ‘to what degree and how do the extant narratives of deafness rewrite the discourse of disability? Indeed, to what degree and how do they manage to represent the experience of deafness at all?’ (225). Certainly, stories from the Deaf community do not speak for me as my life has not been shaped by the framing of deafness as a separate linguistic and cultural entity. Nor am I drawn to the militancy of identity politics that uses terms such as ‘oppression’ and ‘oppressors’ to deride the efforts of parents and educators to teach deaf children to speak (Lane; Padden and Humphries). This seems to be unhelpfully hostile and assumes that deafness is the sole arbitrating reason that deaf people struggle with understanding who they are. It is the nature of being human to struggle with who we are. Whether we are deaf, migrants, black, gay, mentally ill – or none of these things – we are all answerable to the questions: ‘who am I and what is my place in the world?’ As I cast around for stories of deafness and deaf people with which I could relate, I pondered on the relative infrequency of deaf characters in literature, and the scarcity of autobiographies by deaf writers or biographies of deaf people by either deaf or hearing people. I also wondered whether written stories of deafness, memoirs and fiction, shape public perceptions or do they simply respond to existing public perceptions of deafness? As Susan DeGaia, a deaf academic at California State University writes, ‘Analysing the way stories are told can show us a lot about who is most powerful, most heard, whose perspective matters most to society. I think if we polled deaf/Deaf people, we would find many things missing from the stories that are told about them’ (DeGaia). Fighting my diffidence in staking out my persona as a ‘deaf woman’ and mustering the ‘conviction as to the importance of what [I have] to say, [my] right to say it’ (Olsen 27), I decided to write The Art of Being Deaf, an anthology of personal essays in the manner of reflective memoirs on deafness drawing on my own life experiences and supported by additional research. This presented me with a narrative dilemma because my deafness is just one of several life-events by which I understand myself. I wanted to find fresh ways of telling stories of deaf experiences while fashioning my memoir essays to show the texture of my life in all its variousness. A.N.Wilson’s observation about the precarious insensitivity of biographical writing was my guiding pole-star: the sense of our own identity is fluid and tolerant, whereas our sense of the identity of others is always more fixed and quite often edges towards caricature. We know within ourselves that we can be twenty different persons in a single day and that the attempt to explain our personality is doomed to become a falsehood after only a few words ... . And yet ... works of literature, novels and biographies depend for their aesthetic success precisely on this insensitive ability to simplify, to describe, to draw lines around another person and say, ‘This is she’ or ‘This is he.’ I have chosen to explore my relationship with my deafness through the multiple-threads of writing several personal essays as my story-telling vehicle rather than as a single-thread autobiography. The multiple-thread approach to telling my stories also sought to avoid the pitfalls of identity narrative in which I might unwittingly set myself up as an exemplar of one sort or another, be it as a ‘successful deaf person’ or as an ‘angry militant deaf activist’ or as ‘a deaf individual in denial attempting to pass as hearing.’ But in seeking to avoid these sorts of stories, what autobiographical story am I trying to tell? Because, other than being deaf, my life is not otherwise especially unusual. It is pitted here with sadness and lifted there with joy, but it is mostly a plateau held stable by the grist of daily life. Christopher Jon Heuer recognises this dilemma when he writes, ‘neither autobiography nor biography nor fiction can survive without discord. Without it, we are left with boredom. Without it, what we have is the lack of a point, a theme and a plot’ (Heuer 196). By writing The Art of Being Deaf, I am learning more than I have to teach. In the absence of deaf friends or mentors, and in the climate of my own reluctance to discuss my concerns with hearing people who, when I do flag any anxieties about issues arising from my deafness tend to be hearty and upbeat in their responses, I have had to work things out for myself. In hindsight, I suspect that I have simply ignored most of my deafness-related difficulties, leaving the heavy lifting work to my parents, teachers, and friends – ‘for it is the non-deaf who absorb a large part of the disability’ (Wright, 5) – and just got on with things by complying with what was expected of me, usually to good practical effect but at the cost of enriching my understanding of myself and possibly at the cost of intimacy. Reading deaf fiction and memoirs during the course of this writing project is proving to be helpful for me. I enjoy the companionability of it, but not until I got over my fright at seeing so many documented versions of deaf experiences, and it was a fright. For a while there, it was like walking through the Hall of Mirrors in Luna Park. Did I really look like that? Or no, perhaps I was like that? But no, here’s another turn, another mirror, another face. Spinning, twisting, turning. It was only when I stopped searching for the right mirror, the single defining portrait, that I began to enjoy seeing my deaf-self/hearing-persona experiences reflected in, or challenged by, what I read. Other deaf writers’ recollections are stirring into fresh life my own buried memories, prompting me to re-imagine them so that I can examine my responses to those experiences more contemplatively and less reactively than I might have done originally. We can learn about the diversity of deaf experiences and the nuances of deaf identity that rise above the stock symbolic scripts by reading authentic, well-crafted stories by memoirists and novelists. Whether they are hearing or deaf writers, by providing different perspectives on deafness, they have something useful to say, demonstrate and illustrate about deafness and deaf people. I imagine the possibility of my book, The Art of Being Deaf, providing a similar mentoring role to other deaf people and families.References Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disablity, and Life Writing. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Heuer, Christopher Jon. ‘Deafness as Conflict and Conflict Component.’ Sign Language Studies 7.2 (Winter 2007): 195-199. Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York: Random House, 1984 Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence. 1978. Padden, Carol, and Tom Humphries. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Schulz, J. (ed). A Revealed Life. Sydney: ABC Books and Griffith Review. 2007 Wilson, A.N. Incline Our Hearts. London: Penguin Books. 1988. Wright, David. Deafness: An Autobiography. New York: Stein and Day, 1969.

I want to argue here that the use of terms like “disabled” has very concrete and practical consequences; such language choices are significant and constitutive, not simply the abstract subject of a theoretical debate or a “politically correct” storm in a teacup. In this paper I want to examine some significant moments of conflict over and resistance to definitions of “disability” in an arts project, “In the Picture”, run by one of the UK’s largest disability charities, Scope. In the words of its webpages, this project “aims to encourage publishers, illustrators and writers to embrace diversity - so that disabled children are included alongside others in illustrations and story lines in books for young readers” (http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/aboutus.htm). It sought to raise awareness of “ableism” in the book world and through its webpage, offer practical advice and examples of how to include disabled children in illustrated children’s books. From 2005 to 2007, I tracked the progress of the project’s Stories strand, which sought to generate exemplary inclusive narratives by drawing on the experiences of disabled people and families of disabled children. My research drew on participant observation and interviews, but also creative audience research — a process where, in the words of David Gauntlett, “participants are asked to create media or artistic artefacts themselves.” Consequently, when I’m talking here about definitions of “disability’, I am discussing not just the ways people talk about what the word “disabled” might mean, but also the ways in which such identities might appear in images. These definitions made a real difference to those participating in various parts of the project and the types of inclusive stories they produced. Scope has been subject to substantial critique from the disability movement in the past (Benjamin; Carvel; Shakespeare, "Sweet Charity"). “In the Picture” was part of an attempt to resituate the charity as a campaigning organization (Benjamin; O’Hara), with the campaign’s new slogan “Time to get Equal” appearing prominently at the top of each page of the project’s website. As a consequence the project espoused the social model of disability, with its shift in focus from individual peoples’ bodily differences, towards the exclusionary and unequal society that systematically makes those differences meaningful. This shift in focus generates, some have argued, a performative account of disability as an identity (Sandhal; Breivik). It’s not simply that non-normative embodiment or impairment can be (and often is) acquired later in life, meaning that non-disabled people are perhaps best referred to as TABs — the “temporarily able bodied” (Duncan, Goggin and Newell). More significantly, what counts as a “disabled person” is constituted in particular social, physical and economic environments. Changing that environment can, in essence, create a disabled person, or make a person cease to be dis-abled. I will argue that, within the “In the Picture” project, this radically constructionist vision of disablement often rubbed against more conventional understandings of the term “disabled people”. In the US, the term “people with disabilities” is favoured as a label, because of its “people first” emphasis, as well as its identification of an oppressed minority group (Haller, Dorries and Rahn, 63; Shakespeare, Disability Rights). In contrast, those espousing the social model of disability in the UK tend to use the phrase “disabled people”. This latter term can flag the fact that disability is not something emanating from individuals’ bodily differences, but a social process by which inaccessible environments disable particular people (Oliver, Politics). From this point of view the phrase “people with disabilities” might appear to ascribe the disability to the individual rather than the society — it suggests that it is the people who “have” the disability, not the society which disables. As Helen Meekosha has pointed out, Australian disability studies draws on both US civil rights languages and the social model as understood in the UK. While I’ve chosen to adopt the British turn of phrase here, the broader concept from an Australian point of view, is that the use of particular sets of languages is no simple key to the perspectives adopted by individual speakers. My observations suggest that the key phrase used in the project — “ disabled people” — is one that, we might say, “passes”. To someone informed by the social model it clearly highlights a disabling society. However, it is a phrase that can be used without obvious miscommunication to talk to people who have not been exposed to the social model. Someone who subscribes to a view of “disability” as impairment, as a medical condition belonging to an individual, might readily use the term “disabled people”. The potentially radical implications of this phrase are in some ways hidden, unlike rival terms like “differently abled”, which might be greeted with mockery in some quarters (eg. Purvis; Parris). This “passing” phrase did important work for the “In the Picture” project. As many disability activists have pointed out, “charity” and “concern” for disabled people is a widely espoused value, playing a range of important psychic roles in an ableist society (eg. Longmore; Hevey). All the more evocative is a call to support disabled children, a favoured object of the kinds of telethons and other charitable events which Longmore discusses. In the words of Rosemarie Garland Thomson, the sentimentality often used in charity advertising featuring children “contains disability’s threat in the sympathetic, helpless child for whom the viewer is empowered to act” (Garland Thomson, 63). In calling for publishers to produce picture books which included disabled children, the project had invested in this broad appeal — who could argue against such an agenda? The project has been successful, for example, in recruiting support from many well known children’s authors and illustrators, including Quentin Blake and Dame Jackie Wilson. The phrase “disabled children”, I would argue, smoothed the way for such successes by enabling the project to graft progressive ideas —about the need for adequate representation of a marginalized group — onto existing conceptions of an imagined recipient needing help from an already constituted group of willing givers. So what were the implications of using the phrase “disabled children” for the way the project unfolded? The capacity of this phrase to refer to both a social model account of disability and more conventional understandings had an impact on the recruitment of participants for writing workshops. Participants were solicited via a range of routes. Some were contacted through the charity’s integrated pre-school and the networks of the social workers working beside it. The workshops were also advertised via a local radio show, through events run by the charity for families of disabled people, through a notice in the Disabled Parents site, and announcements on the local disability arts e- newsletter. I am interested in the way that those who heard about the workshops might have been hailed by —or resisted the lure of — those labels “disabled person” or “parent of a disabled child” or at least the meaning of those labels when used by a large disability charity. For example, despite a workshop appearing on the programme of Northwest Disability Arts’ Deaf and Disability Arts Festival, no Deaf participants became involved in the writing workshops. Some politicised Deaf communities frame their identities as an oppressed linguistic minority of sign language users, rather than as disabled people (Corker; Ladd). As such, I would suggest that they are not hailed by the call to “disabled people” with which the project was framed, despite the real absence of children’s books drawing on Deaf culture and its rich tradition of visual communication (Saunders; Conlon and Napier). Most of those who attended were (non-disabled) parents or grandparents of disabled children, rather than disabled people, a fact critiqued by some participants. It’s only possible to speculate about the reasons for this imbalance. Was it the reputation of this charity or charities in general (see Shakespeare, "Sweet Charity") amongst politicised disabled people that discouraged attendance? A shared perspective with those within the British disabled peoples’ movement who emphasise the overwhelming importance of material changes in employment, education, transport rather than change in the realm of “attitudes” (eg Oliver, Politics)? Or was it the association of disabled people undertaking creative activities with a patronising therapeutic agenda (eg Hevey, 26)? The “pulling power” of a term even favoured by the British disability movement, it seems, might be heavily dependent on who was using it. Nonetheless, this term did clearly speak to some people. In conversation it emerged that most of those who attended the workshops either had young family members who were disabled or were imbricated in educational and social welfare networks that identified them as “disabled” — for example, by having access to Disability Living Allowance. While most of the disabled children in participants’ families were in mainstream education, most also had an educational “statement” enabling them to access extra resources, or were a part of early intervention programmes. These social and educational institutions had thus already hailed them as “families of disabled children” and as such they recognised themselves in the project’s invitation. Here we can see the social and institutional shaping of what counts as “disabled children” in action. One participant who came via an unusual route into the workshops provides an interesting reflection of the impact of an address to “disabled people”. This man had heard about the workshop because the local charity he ran had offices adjacent to the venue of one of the workshops. He started talking to the workshop facilitator, and as he said in an interview, became interested because “well … she mentioned that it was about disabilities and I’m interested in people’s disabilities – I want to improve conditions for them obviously”. I probed him about the relationship between his interest and his own experiences as a person with dyslexia. While he taught himself to read in his thirties, he described his reading difficulties as having ongoing impacts on his working life. He responded: first of all it wasn’t because I have dyslexia, it was because I’m interested in improving people’s lives in general. So, I mean particularly people who are disabled need more care than most of us don’t they? …. and I’d always help whenever I can, you know what I mean. And then thinking that I had a disability myself! The dramatic double-take at the end of this comment points to the way this respondent positions himself throughout as outside of the category of “disabled”. This self- identification points towards the stigma often attached to the category “disabled”. It also indicates the way in which this category is, at least in part, socially organised, such that people can be in various circumstances located both inside and outside it. In this writer’s account “people who are disabled” are “them” needing “more care than most of us”. Here, rather than identifying as a disabled person, imagined as a recipient of support, he draws upon the powerful discourses of charity in a way that positions him giving to and supporting others. The project appealed to him as a charity worker and as a campaigner, and indeed a number of other participants (both “disabled” and “non-disabled”) framed themselves in this way, looking to use their writing as a fundraising tool, for example, or as a means of promoting more effective inclusive education. The permeability of the category of “disabled” presented some challenges in the attempt to solicit “disabled peoples’” voices within the project. This was evident when completed stories came to be illustrated by design, illustration and multimedia students at four British universities: Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Wolverhampton, the University of Teeside and the North East Wales Institute. Students attending an initial briefing on the project completed a questionnaire which included an item asking whether they considered themselves to be disabled. While around eight of the eighty respondents answered “yes” to this question, the answers of these students and some others were by no means clear cut. A number of students identified themselves as dyslexic, but contested the idea that this diagnosis meant that they were disabled. One respondent commented along similar lines: “My boyfriend was very upset that the university considers him to be disabled because he is dyslexic”. How can we make sense of these responses? We could note again that the identity of “disabled” is highly stigmatised. Many disabled students believe that they are seen as lazy, demanding excessive resources, or even in the case of some students with non- visible impairments, lying (Kleege; Olney and Brockman). So we could view such responses as identity management work. From this point of view, an indicator of the success of the project in shifting some of the stigma attached to the label of “disabled” might be the fact that at least one of the students participants “came out” as dyslexic to her tutors in the course of her participation in the project. The pattern of answers on questionnaire returns suggests that particular teaching strategies and administrative languages shape how students imagine and describe themselves. Liverpool John Moores University, one of the four art schools participating in the project, had a high profile programme seeking to make dyslexic students aware of the technical and writing support available to them if they could present appropriate medical certification (Lowy). Questionnaires from LJMU included the largest number of respondents identifying themselves as both disabled and dyslexic, and featured no comment on any mismatch between these labels. In the interests of obtaining appropriate academic support and drawing on a view of dyslexia not as a deficit but as a learning style offering significant advantages, it might be argued, students with dyslexia at this institution had been taught to recognise themselves through the label “disabled”. This acknowledgement that people sharing some similar experiences might describe themselves in very different ways depending on their context suggests another way of interpreting some students’ equivocal relationship to labels like “dyslexia” and “disabled”. The university as an environment demanding the production of very formal styles of writing and rapid assimilation of a high volume of written texts, is one where particular learning strategies of people with dyslexia come to be disabling. In many peoples’ day to day lives – and perhaps particularly in the day to day lives of visual artists – less conventional ways of processing written information simply may not be disabling. As such, students’ responses might be seen less as resistance to a stigmatised identity and more an acknowledgement of the contingent nature of disablement. Or perhaps we might understand these student responses as a complex mix of both of these perspectives. Disability studies has pointed to the coexistence of contradictory discourses around disability within popular culture (eg, Garland-Thomson; Haller, Dorries and Rahn). Similarly, the friezes, interactive games, animations, illustrated books and stand-alone images which came out of this arts project sometimes incorporate rival conceptions of disability side by side. A number of narratives, for example, include pairs of characters, one of which embodies conventional narratives of disability (for example, being diagnostically labelled or ‘cured’), while the other articulates alternative accounts (celebrating diversity and enabling environments). Both students and staff reported that participation in the project prompted critical thinking about accessible design and inclusive representation. Some commented in interviews that their work on the project had changed their professional practice in ways they thought might have longer term impact on the visual arts. However, it is clear that in student work, just as in the project itself, alternative conceptions of what “disability” might mean were at play, even as reframing such conceptions are explicitly the aim of the enterprise. Such contradictions point towards the difficulties of easily labelling individual stories or indeed the wider project “progressive” or otherwise. Some illustrated narratives and animations created by students were understood by the project management to embody the definitions of “disabled children” within the project’s ten principles. This work was mounted on the website to serve as exemplars for the publishing industry (http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/stories.htm). Such decisions were not unreflective, however. There was a good deal of discussion by students and project management about how to make “disabled children” visible without labelling or pathologising. For example, one of the project’s principles is that “images of disabled children should be used casually or incidentally, so that disabled children are portrayed playing and doing things alongside their non- disabled peers” (see also Bookmark). Illustrator Jane Ray commented wryly in an article on the website on her experience of including disabled characters in a such a casual way in her published work that no-one notices it! (Ray). As I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere (Matthews, forthcoming), the social model, espoused by the project, with its primary focus on barriers to equality rather than individual impaired bodies, presented some challenges to such aims. While both fairytales and, increasingly, contemporary books for young people, do sometimes engage with violence, marginalisation and social conflict (Saunders), there is a powerful imperative to avoid such themes in books for very young children. In trying to re-narrativise disabled children outside conventional paradigms of “bravery overcoming adversity”, the project may have also pushed writers and illustrators away from engaging with barriers to equality. The project manager commented in an interview: “probably in the purest form the social model would show in stories the barriers facing disabled children, whereas we want to show what barriers have been knocked down and turn it round into a more positive thing”. While a handful of the 23 stories emerging from the writing workshops included narratives around bullying and or barriers to equal access, many of the stories chose to envisage more utopian, integrated environments. If it is barriers to inequality that, at least in part, create “disabled people”, then how is it possible to identify disabled children with little reference to such barriers? The shorthand used by many student illustrators, and frequently too in the “images for inspiration” part of the project’s website, has been the inclusion of enabling technologies. A white cane, a wheelchair or assistive and augmentative communication technologies can be included in an image without making a “special” point of these technologies in the written text. The downside to this shorthand, however, is the way that the presence of these technologies can serve to naturalise the category of “disabled children”. Rather than being seen as a group identity constituted by shared experiences of discrimination and exclusion, the use of such “clues” to which characters “are disabled” might suggest that disabled people are a known group, independent of particular social and environmental settings. Using this arts project as a case study, I have traced here some of the ways people are recognised or recognise themselves as “disabled”. I’ve also suggested that within this project other conceptions of what “disabled” might mean existed in the shadows of the social constructionist account to which it declared its allegiances. Given the critiques of the social model which have emerged within disability studies over the last fifteen years (e.g. Crowe; Shakespeare, Disability Rights), this need not be a damning observation. The manager of this arts project, along with writer Mike Oliver ("If I Had"), has suggested that the social model might be used strategically as a means of social transformation rather than a complete account of disabled peoples’ lives. However, my analysis here has suggested that we can not only imagine different ways that “disabled people” might be conceptualised in the future. Rather we can see significant consequences of the different ways that the label “disabled” is mobilised here and now. Its inclusion and exclusions, what it makes it easy to say or difficult to imagine needs careful thinking through. References Benjamin, Alison. “Going Undercover.” The Guardian, Society, April 2004: 8. Bookmark. Quentin Blake Award Project Report: Making Exclusion a Thing of the Past. The Roald Dahl Foundation, 2006. Breivik, Jan Kare. “Deaf Identities: Visible Culture, Hidden Dilemmas and Scattered Belonging.” In H.G. Sicakkan and Y.G. Lithman, eds. What Happens When a Society Is Diverse: Exploring Multidimensional Identities. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. 75-104. Carvel, John. “Demonstrators Rattle Scope.” The Guardian, Society section, 6 Oct. 2004: 4. Conlon, Caroline, and Jemina Napier. “Developing Auslan Educational Resources: A Process of Effective Translation of Children’s Books.” Deaf Worlds 20.2. (2004): 141-161. Corker, Mairian. Deaf and Disabled or Deafness Disabled. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998. Crow, Liz. “Including All of Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of Disability.” In Jenny Morris, ed. Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability. Women’s Press, 1996. 206-227. Davis, John, and Nick Watson. “Countering Stereotypes of Disability: Disabled Children and Resistance.” In Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, eds. Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. London: Continuum, 2002. 159-174. Duncan, Kath, Gerard Goggin, and Christopher Newell. “Don’t Talk about Me… like I’m Not Here: Disability in Australian National Cinema.” Metro Magazine 146-147 (2005): 152-159. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Bruggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, eds. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: MLAA, 2002. 56-75. Gauntlett, David. “Using Creative Visual Research Methods to Understand Media Audiences.” MedienPädagogik 4.1 (2005). Haller, Beth, Bruce Dorries, and Jessica Rahn. “Media Labeling versus the US Disability Community Identity: A Study of Shifting Cultural Language.” In Disability & Society 21.1 (2006): 61-75. Hevey, David. The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery. London: Routledge, 1992. Kleege, Georgia. “Disabled Students Come Out: Questions without Answers.” In Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, eds. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 308-316. Ladd, Paddy. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Longmore, Paul. “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemma: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal.” In David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. 134-158. Lowy, Adrienne. “Dyslexia: A Different Approach to Learning?” JMU Learning and Teaching Press 2.2 (2002). Matthews, Nicole. “Contesting Representations of Disabled Children in Picture Books: Visibility, the Body and the Social Model of Disability.” Children’s Geographies (forthcoming). Meekosha, Helen. “Drifting Down the Gulf Stream: Navigating the Cultures of Disability Studies.” Disability & Society 19.7 (2004): 720-733. O’Hara, Mary. “Closure Motion.” The Guardian, Society section, 30 March 2005: 10. Oliver, Mike. The politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan, 1990. ———. “If I Had a Hammer: The Social Model in Action.” In John Swain, Sally French, Colin Barnes, and Carol Thomas, eds. Disabling Barriers – Enabling Environments. London: Sage, 2002. 7-12. Olney, Marjorie F., and Karin F. Brockelman. "Out of the Disability Closet: Strategic Use of Perception Management by Select University Students with Disabilities." Disability & Society 18.1 (2003): 35-50. Parris, Matthew. “Choose Your Words Carefully If You Want to Be Misunderstood.” The Times 10 July 2004. Purves, Libby. “Handicap, What Handicap?” The Times 9 Aug. 2003. Ray, Jane. “An Illustrator’s View: Still Invisible.” In the Picture. < http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/au_illustrateview.htm >.Sandhal, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1-2 (2003): 25-56. Saunders, Kathy. Happy Ever Afters: A Storybook Guide to Teaching Children about Disability. London: Trenton Books, 2000. Shakespeare, Tom. “Sweet Charity?” 2 May 2003. Ouch! < (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/features/charity.shtml >. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge, 2006.

Introduction There is much to be said about house and home and about our media’s role in defining, enabling, as well as undermining it. […] For we can no longer think about home, any longer than we can live at home, without our media. (Silverstone, “Why Study the Media” 88) For lesbians, inhabiting the queer slant may be a matter of everyday negotiation. This is not about the romance of being off line or the joy of radical politics (though it can be), but rather the everyday work of dealing with the perception of others, with the “straightening devices” and the violence that might follow when such perceptions congeal into social forms. (Ahmed 107) Picture this. Once or twice a week a small, black, portable TV set goes on a journey; down from the lofty heights of the top shelf of the built in storage cupboard into the far corner of the living room. A few hours later, it is being stuffed back into the closet. Not far away across town, another small TV set sits firmly in the corner of a living room. Yet, it remains inanimate for days on end. What do you see? The techno-stories conveyed in this paper are presented through – and anchored to – the idea of the cultural biography of things (Kopytoff 1986), revealing how objects (more specifically media technologies) produce and become part of an articulation of particular and conflicting moral economies of households (Silverstone, “Domesticating Domestication”; Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Information and Communication”; Green). In this context, the concept of the domestication of ICTs has been widely applied in Media Studies during the 1990s and, more recently, been updated to account for the changes in technology, household composition, media regulation, and in fact the dislocation of domesticity itself (Berker, Hartmann, Punie and Ward). Remarkable as these mainstream techno-stories are in their elucidation of contemporary techno-practices, what is still absent is the consideration of how gender and sexuality intersect and are being done through ICT consumption at home, work and during leisure practices in alternative or queer households and families. Do lesbians ‘make’ house and home and in what ways are media and ICTs implicated in the everyday work of queer home-making strategies? As writings on queer subjects and cyberspace have proliferated in recent years, we can now follow a move to contextualize queer virtualities across on and offline experiences, mapping ‘complex geographies of un/belonging’ (Bryson, MacIntosh, Jordan and Lin) and a return to consider online media as part of a bigger ICT package that constitutes our queer everyday life-worlds (Karl). At the same time, fresh perspectives are now being developed with regards to the reconfiguration of domestic values by gay men and lesbians, demonstrating the ongoing processes of probing and negotiation of ‘home’ and the questioning of domesticity itself (Gorman-Murray). By aligning ideas and concepts developed by media theorists in the field of media domestication and consumption as well as (sexual) geographers, this paper makes a contribution towards our understanding of a queer sense of home and domesticity through the technological and more specifically television. It is based on two case studies, part of a larger longitudinal ethnographic study of women-centred households in Brighton, UK. Gill Valentine has identified the home and workplaces as spaces, which are encoded as heterosexual. Sexual identities are being constrained by ‘regulatory regimes’, promoting the normalcy of heterosexuality (4). By recounting the techno-stories of lesbian women, we can re-examine notions of the home as a stable, safe, given entity; the home as a particular feminine sphere as well as the leaky boundaries between public and private. As media and ICTs are also part of a (hetero)sexual economy where they, in their materiality as well as textual significance become markers of sexual difference, we can to a certain extent perceive them as ‘straightening devices’, to borrow a phrase from Sara Ahmed. Here, we will find the articulation of a host of struggles to ‘fight the norms’, but not necessarily ‘step outside the system completely, full-time’ (Ben, personal interview [all the names of the interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity]). In this sense, the struggle is not only to counter perceived heterosexual home-making and techno-practices, but also to question what kinds of practices to adopt and repeat as ‘fitting in’ mechanism. Significantly, these practices leave neither ‘homonormative’ nor ‘heteronormative’ imaginaries untouched and remind us that: In the case of sexual orientation, it is not simply that we have it. To become straight means that we not only have to turn towards the objects that are given to us by heterosexual culture, but also that we must “turn away” from objects that take us off this line. (Ahmed 21) In this sense then, we are all part of drawing and re-drawing the lines of belonging and un-belonging within the confines of a less than equal power-economy. Locating Dys-Location – Is There a Lesbian in the Home? In his effort to re-situate the perspective of media domestication in the 21st century, David Morley points us to ‘the process of the technologically mediated dislocation of domesticity itself’ (“What’s ‘home’” 22). He argues that ‘under the impact of new technologies and global cultural flows, the home nowadays is not so much a local, particular “self-enclosed” space, but rather, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, more and more a “phantasmagoric” place, as electronic means of communication allow the radical intrusion of what he calls the “realm of the far” (traditionally, the realm of the strange and potentially troubling) into the “realm of the near” (the traditional “safe space” of ontological security) (23). The juxtaposition of home as a safe, ‘given’ place of ontological security vis a vis the more virtual and mediated realm of the far and potentially intrusive is itself called into question, if we re-consider the concepts of home and (dis)location in the light of lesbian geographies and ‘the production and regulation of heterosexual space’ (Valentine 1). The dislocation of home and domesticity experienced through consumption of (mobile) media technologies has always already been under-written by the potential feeling of dys-location and ‘trouble’ by lesbians on the grounds of sexual orientation. The lesbian experience disrupts the traditionally modern and notably western ideal of home as a safe haven and refuge by making visible the leaky boundaries between private seclusion and public surveillance, as much as it may (re)invest in the production of ideas and ideals of home-making and domesticity. This is illustrated for example by the way in which the heterosexuality of a parental home ‘can inscribe the lesbian body by restricting the performative aspects of a lesbian identity’, which may be subverted by covert acts of resistance (Johnston and Valentine 111; Elwood) as well as by the potentially greater freedoms of lesbian identity within a ‘lesbian home’, which may nevertheless come under scrutiny and ‘surveillance of others, especially close family, friends and neighbours’ (112). Nevertheless, more recently it has also been demonstrated how even overarching structures of familial heteronormativity are opportune to fissures and thereby queered, as Andrew Gorman-Murray illustrates in his study of Australian gay, lesbian and bisexual youth in supportive family homes. So what is, or rather, what can constitute a ‘lesbian home’ and how is it negotiated through everyday techno-practices? In and Out of the Closet – The Straight-Speaking ‘Telly’ As places go, the city of Brighton and Hove in the south-east of England fetches the prize for the highest ratio of LGBT people amongst its population in the UK, sitting at about 15%. In this sense, the home-making stories to which I will refer, of a white, lesbian single mother in her early 40s from a working-class background and a white lesbian/dyke couple in their 30s (from middle-/working-class backgrounds), are already engendered in the sense that Brighton (to them) represented in part a kind of ‘home-coming’ in itself. Helen and Ben, a lesbian butch-femme couple (‘when it takes our fancy’, Helen), had recently bought a terraced 1930s three-bedroom house with a sizeable garden in a soon to be up and coming residential area of Brighton. The neighbours are a mix of elderly, long-standing residents and ‘hetero’ families, or ‘breeders’, as Ben sometimes referred to them. Although they had lived together before, the new house constituted their first purchase together. This was significant especially for Helen, as it made their lives more ‘equal’ in terms of what goes where and the input on the overall interior decoration. Ben had shifted from London to Brighton a few years previously for a ‘quieter life’, but wished to remain connected to a queer community. Helen had made the move to Brighton from Germany – to study and enjoy the queer feel, and never left. Both full-time professionals, Helen worked in the publishing industry and Ben as a social worker. Already considering Brighton their ‘home’ town, the house purchase itself constituted another home-making challenge: as a lesbian/dyke couple on equal footing they were prepared to accept to live in a pre-dominantly straight neighbourhood, as it afforded them more space for money compared to the more visibly gay male living areas in the centre of town. The relative invisibility of queer women (and their neighbourhoods) compared to queer men in Brighton may, as it does elsewhere, be connected to issues of safety (Elwood) as well as the comparative lack of financial capacity (Bell and Valentine). Walking up to this house on the first night of my stay with them, I am struck by just how inconspicuous it appears – one of many in a long street, up a steep hill: ‘Most housing in contemporary western societies is “designed, built, financed and intended for nuclear families”’ (Bell in Bell and Valentine 7). I cannot help but think – more as a reflection on myself than of what I am about to experience – is this it? Is this the ‘domesticated lesbian’? What I see appears ‘familiar’, ‘tamed’, re-tracing the straight lines of heterosexual culture. Helen opens the door and orders me directly into the kitchen. She says ‘Ben is in the living room, watching television… Ben takes great pleasure in watching “You’ve been Framed”’. (Fieldnotes) In this context, it is appropriate to focus on the television and its place within their home-making strategies. Television, in its historical and symbolic significance, could be deemed the technological co-terminus to the ideal nuclear family home. Lynn Spigel has shown through her examination of the cultural history of TV’s formative years in post World War America how television became central to providing representations of family life, but also how the technology itself, as an object, informed material and symbolic transformations within the domestic sphere and beyond. Over the past fifty years as Morley points out, the TV has moved from its fixed place in the living room to become more personalised and encroach on other spaces in house and home and has now, in fact, re-entered the public realm (see airports and shopping malls) where it originated. At present, ‘the home itself can seen as having become … the “last vehicle”, where comfort, safety and stability can happily coexist with the possibility of instantaneous digitalised “flight” to elsewhere – and the instantaneous importation of desired elements of the “elsewhere” into the home’ (Morley, “Media, Modernity” 200). Importantly, as Morley confirms, today’s high-tech discourse is often still framed by a nostalgic vision of ‘family values’. There was only one TV set in Helen and Ben’s house: a black plastic cube with a 16” screen. It was decidedly ‘unglamorous’ as Helen pointed out. During the first round of ‘home-making’ efforts, it had found its way into a corner in the front room, with the sofa and armchair arranged in viewing distance. It was a very ‘traditional’ living room set-up. During my weeklong stay and for some weeks after, it was mostly Ben on her own ‘watching the telly’ in the early evenings ‘vegging out’ after work. Helen, meanwhile, was in the kitchen with the radio on or a CD playing, or in her ‘ICT free’ bedroom, reading. Then, suddenly, the TV had disappeared. During one of our ‘long conversations’ (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Listening”, 204) it transpired that it was now housed for most of the time on the top shelf of a storage cupboard and only ‘allowed out’ ever so often. As a material object, it had easily found its place as a small, but nevertheless quite central feature in the living room. Imbued with the cultural memory of their parents’ and that of many other living rooms, it was ‘tempting’ and easy for them to ‘accept’ it as part of a setting up home as a couple. Ben explained that they both fell into a habit, an everyday routine, to sit around it. However, settling into their new home with too much ‘ease’, they began to question their techno-practice around the TV. For Helen in particular, the aesthetics of the TV set did not fit in with her plans to re-decorate the house loosely in art deco style, tethered to her femme identity. They did not envisage creating a home that would potentially signal that a family with 2.4 children lives here. ‘The “normality” of [working] 9-5’ (Ben), was sufficient. Establishing a perceived visual difference in their living room, partly by removing the TV set, Helen and Ben aimed to ‘draw a line’ around their home and private sphere vis a vis the rest of the street and, metaphorically speaking, the straight world. The boundaries between the public and private are nevertheless porous, as it is exactly that the public perceptions of a mostly private, domesticated media technology prevent Helen and Ben from feeling entirely comfortable in its presence. It was not only the TV set’s symbolic function as a material object that made them restrict and consciously control the presence of the TV in their home space. One of Helen and Ben’s concerns in this context was that TV, as a broadcast medium, is utterly ‘conservative’ in its content and as such, very much ‘straight speaking’. To paraphrase Helen – you can only read so much between the lines and shout at the telly, it can get tiring. ‘I like watching nature programmes, but they somehow manage even here to make it sound like a hetero narrative’. Ben: ‘yeah – mind the lesbian swans’. The employment of the VCR and renting movies helps them to partly re-dress this perceived imbalance. At the same time, TV’s ‘water-cooler’ effect helps them to stay in tune with what is going on around them and enables them, for example, to participate and intervene in conversations at work. In this sense, watching TV can turn into home-work, which affords a kind of entry ticket to shared life-worlds outside the home and as such can be controlled, but not necessarily abandoned altogether. TV as a ‘straightening device’ may afford the (dis)comfort of a sense of participation in mainstream discourses and the (dis)comfort of serving as a reminder of difference at the same time. ‘It just sits there … apart from Sundays’ – and when the girls come round… Single-parent households are on the rise in the US (Russo Lemor) as well as in the UK. However, the attention given to single-parent families so far focuses pre-dominantly on single mothers and fathers after separation or divorce from a heterosexual marriage (Russo Lemor; Silverstone, “Beneath the Bottom Line”). As (queer) sociologists have began to map the field of ‘families of choice and other life experiments’ (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan), a more concerted effort to bring together the literatures and to shed more light on the queer techno-practices of alternative families seems necessary. Liz and her young son Tim had moved to Brighton from London. As a lesbian working single mother, she raises Tim pre-dominantly on her own: ‘we are a small family, and that’s fine’. Liz’s home-making narrative is very much driven by her awareness of what she sees as her responsibilities as a mother, a lesbian mother. The move to Brighton was assessed by being able to keep her clients in London (she worked as a self-employed communication and PR person for various London councils) – ‘this is what feeds us’, and the fact that she did not want Tim to go to a ‘badly performing’ school in London. The terraced three-bedroom house she found was in a residential area, not too far from the station and in need of updating and re-decorating. The result of the combined efforts of builders, her dad (‘for some of the DIY’) and herself produced a ‘conventional’ set-up with a living room, a kitchen-diner, a small home-office (for tele-working) and Tim’s and her bedroom. Inconspicuous in its appearance, it was clearly child-oriented with a ‘real jelly bean arch’ in the hallway. The living room is relatively bare, with a big sofa, table and chairs, ‘an ancient stereo-system’ and a ‘battered TV and Video-recorder’ in the corner. ‘We hardly use it’, Liz exclaims. ‘We much rather spend time out and about if there is a chance … quality time, rather than watching TV … or I read him stories in bed. I hate the idea of TV as a baby sitter … I have very deliberately chosen to have Tim and I want to make the most of it’. For Liz, the living room with the TV set in it appears as a kind of gesture to what family homes ‘look like’. As such, the TV and furniture set-up function as a signal and symbol of ‘normality’ in a queer household – perhaps a form of ‘passing’ for visitors and guests. The concern for the welfare of her son in this context is a sign and reflection of a constant negotiation process within a pre-dominantly heterosexual system of cultural symbols and values, which he, of course, is already able to ‘compare’ and evaluate when he is out and about at school or visiting friends in their homes. Unlike in Helen and Ben’s home, the TV is therefore allowed to stay out of the closet. Still, Liz rarely watches TV at all, for reasons not dissimilar to those of Helen and Ben. Apart from this, she shares a lack of spare time with many other single parents. Significantly, the living room and TV do receive a queer ‘make-over’ now and then, when Tim is in bed or with his father on a weekend and ‘the girls’ come over for a drink, chat and video viewing (noticeably, the living room furniture and TV get pushed around and re-arranged to accommodate the crowd). In this sense, Liz, in her home-making practices, carefully manages and performs ‘object relationships’ that allow her and her son to ‘fit in’ as much as to advocate ‘difference’ within the construction of ‘normalcy’. The pressures of this negotiation process are clearly visible. Conclusion – Re-Engendering Home and Techno-Practices As women as much as lesbians, Helen, Ben and Liz are, like so many others, part of a historical and much wider struggle regarding visibility, equality and justice. If this article had been dedicated to gay/queer men and their techno- and home-making sensibilities, it would have read somewhat differently to be sure. Of course, questions of gender and sexual identities would have remained equally paramount, as they always should, enfolding questions of class, race and ethnicity (Pink 2004). The concept and practice of home have a deeply engendered history. Queer practices ‘at home’ are always already tied up with knowledges of gendered practices and spaces. As Morley has observed, ‘space is gendered on a variety of scales … the local is often associated with femininity and seen as the natural basis of home and community, into which an implicitly masculine realm intrudes’ (“Home Territories” 59). As the public and private realms have been gendered masculine and feminine respectively, so have media and ICTs. Although traditional ideas of home and gender relations are beginning to break down and the increasing personalization and mobilization of ICTs blur perceptions of the public and private, certain (idealized, heterosexualized and gendered) images of home, domesticity and family life seem to be recurring in popular discourse as well as mainstream academic writing. As feminist theorists have illustrated the ways in which gender needs to be seen as performative, feminist and queer theorists also ought to work further on finding vocabularies and discourses that capture and highlight diversity, without re-invoking the spectre of the nuclear family (home) itself (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan). What I found was not the ‘domesticated’ lesbian ‘at home’ in a traditional feminine sphere. Rather, I experienced a complex set of re-negotiations and re-inscriptions of the domestic, of gender and sexual values and identities as well as techno-practices, leaving a trace, a mark on the system no matter how small (Helen: ‘I do wonder what the neighbours make of us’). The pressure and indeed desire to ‘fit in’ is often enormous and therefore affords the re-tracing of certain trodden paths of domesticity and ICT consumption. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the day when even Liz can put that old telly into the closet as it has lost its meaning as a cultural signifier of a particular kind. References Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology – Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. “Introduction: Orientations.” mapping desire. Eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine. London: Routledge, 1995. 1-27. Berker, Thomas, Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie and Katie J. Ward, eds. Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2006. Bryson, Mary, Lori MacIntosh, Sharalyn Jordan, Hui-Ling Lin. “Virtually Queer?: Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.3 (2006). Elwood, Sarah A.. “Lesbian Living Spaces: Multiple Meanings of Home.” From Nowhere to Everywhere – Lesbian Geographies. Ed. Gill Valentine. New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 2000. 11-27. 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Citation reference for this article MLA Style Karl, Irmi. "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>. APA Style Karl, I. (Aug. 2007) "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>.

Introduction It is now commonplace for babies to begin their lives inhabiting media environments characterised by the presence, distribution, and mobility of digital devices and screens. Such arrangements can be traced, in part, to the birth of a new regime of mobile and touchscreen media beginning with the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, which stimulated a surge in household media consumption, underpinned by broadband and wireless Internet infrastructures. Research into these conditions of ambient mediation at the beginnings of life, however, is currently dominated by medical and educational literature, largely removed from media studies approaches that seek to understand the everyday contexts of babies using media. Putting aside discourses of promise or peril familiar to researchers of children’s media (Buckingham; Postman), this paper draws on ongoing research in both domestic and social media settings exploring infants’ everyday encounters and entanglements with mobile media and communication technologies. The paper identifies the ways infants’ mobile communication is assembled and distributed through touchscreen interfaces, proxy parent users, and commercial software sorting. It argues that within these interfacial, intermediary, and interactive contexts, we can conceptualise infants’ communicative agency through an emerging repertoire of techniques: accidental, assisted and automated. This assemblage of infant communication recognises that children no longer live with but in media (Deuze), which underscores the impossibility of a path of media resistance found in medical discourses of ‘exposure’ and restriction, and instead points to the need for critical and ethical responses to these immanent conditions of infant media life. Background and Approach Infants, understandably, have largely been excluded from analyses of mobile mediality given their historically limited engagement with or capacity to use mobile media. Yet, this situation is undergoing change as mobile devices become increasingly prominent in children’s homes (OfCom; Rideout), and as touchscreen interfaces lower thresholds of usability (Buckleitner; Hourcade et al.). The dominant frameworks within research addressing infants and media continue to resonate with long running and widely circulated debates in the study of children and mass media (Wartella and Robb), responding in contradictory ways to what is seen as an ever-increasing ‘technologization of childhood’ (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Education research centres on digital literacy, emphasising the potential of mobile computing for these future digital learners, labourers, and citizens (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Alternatively, health research largely positions mobile media within the rubric of ‘screen time’ inherited from older broadcast models, with paediatric groups continuing to caution parents about the dangers of infants’ ‘exposure’ to electronic screens (Strasburger and Hogan), without differentiating between screen types or activities. In turn, a range of digital media channels seek to propel or profit from infant media culture, with a number of review sites, YouTube channels and tech blogs promoting or surveying the latest gadgets and apps for babies. Within media studies, research is beginning to analyse the practices, conceptions and implications of digital interfaces and content for younger children. Studies are, for example, quantifying the devices, activities, and time spent by young children with mobile devices (Ofcom; Rideout), reviewing the design and marketing of children’s mobile application software products (e.g. Shuler), analysing digital content shared about babies on social media platforms (Kumar & Schoenebeck; Morris), and exploring emerging interactive spaces and technologies shaping young children’s ‘postdigital’ play (Giddings; Jayemanne, Nansen and Apperley). This paper extends this growing area of research by focusing specifically on infants’ early encounters, contexts, and configurations of mobile mediality, offering some preliminary analysis of an emerging repertoire of mobile communication techniques: accidental, assisted, and automated. That is, through infants playing with devices and accidentally activating them; through others such as parents assisting use; and through software features in applications that help to automate interaction. This analysis draws from an ongoing research project exploring young children’s mobile and interactive media use in domestic settings, which is employing ethnographic techniques including household technology tours and interviews, as well as participant observation and demonstrations of infant media interaction. To date 19 families, with 31 children aged between 0 and 5, located in Melbourne, Australia have participated. These participating families are largely homogeneous and privileged; though are a sample of relatively early and heavy adopters that reveal emerging qualities about young children’s changing media environments and encounters. This approach builds on established traditions of media and ethnographic research on technology consumption and use within domestic spaces (e.g. Mackay and Ivey; Silverstone and Hirsch), but turns to the digital media encountered by infants, the geographies and routines of these encounters, and how families mediate these encounters within the contexts of home life. This paper offers some preliminary findings from this research, drawing mostly from discussions with parents about their babies’ use of digital, mobile, and touchscreen media. In this larger project, the domestic and family research is accompanied by the collection of online data focused on the cultural context of, and content shared about, infants’ mobile media use. In this paper I report on social media analysis of publicly shared images tagged with #babyselfie queried from Instagram’s API. I viewed all publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, and collected the associated captions, comments, hashtags, and metadata, over a period of 48 hours in October 2014, resulting in a dataset of 324 posts. Clearly, using this data for research purposes raises ethical issues about privacy and consent given the posts are being used in an unintended context from which they were originally shared; something that is further complicated by the research focus on young children. These issues, in which the ease of extracting online data using digital methods research (Rogers), needs to be both minimised and balanced against the value of the research aims and outcomes (Highfield and Leaver). To minimise risks, captions and comments cited in this paper have been de-identified; whist the value of this data lies in complementing and contextualising the more ethnographically informed research, despite perceptions of incompatibility, through analysis of the wider cultural and mediated networks in which babies’ digital lives are now shared and represented. This field of cultural production also includes analysis of examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores that support baby image capture and sharing, and in particular in this paper discussion of the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. The rationale for drawing on these multiple sources of data within the larger project is to locate young children’s digital entanglements within the diverse places, platforms and politics in which they unfold. This research scope is limited by the constraints of this short paper, however different sources of data are drawn upon here in order to identify, compare, and contextualise the emerging themes of accidental, assisted, and automated. Accidental Media Use The domestication and aggregation of mobile media in the home, principally laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers has established polymediated environments in which infants are increasingly surrounded by mobile media; in which they often observe their parents using mobile devices; and in which the flashing of screens unsurprisingly draws their attention. Living within these ambient media environments, then, infants often observe, find and reach for mobile devices: on the iPad or whatever, then what's actually happening in front of them, then naturally they'll gravitate towards it. These media encounters are animated by touchscreens interfaces that are responsive to the gestural actions of infants. Conversely, touchscreen interfaces drive attempts to swipe legacy media screens. Underscoring the nomenclature of ‘natural user interfaces’ within the design and manufacturer communities, screens lighting up through touch prompts interest, interaction, and even habituation through gestural interaction, especially swiping: It's funny because when she was younger she would go up the T.V. and she would try swiping to turn the channel.They can grab it and start playing with it. It just shows that it's so much part of their world … to swipe something. Despite demonstrable capacities of infants to interact with mobile screens, discussions with parents revealed that accidental forms of media engagement were a more regular consequence of these ambient contexts, interfacial affordances and early encounters with mobile media. It was not uncommon for infants to accidentally swipe and activate applications, to temporarily lock the screen, or even to dial contacts: He didn't know the password, and he just kept locking it … find it disabled for 15 minutes.If I've got that on YouTube, they can quite quickly get on to some you know [video] … by pressing … and they don't do it on purpose, they're just pushing random buttons.He does Skype calls! I think he recognizes their image, the icon. Then just taps it and … Similarly, in the analysis of publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, there were instances in which it appeared infants had accidentally taken photos with the cameraphone based on the image content, photo framing or descriptions in the caption. Many of these photos showed a baby with an arm in view reaching towards the phone in a classic trope of a selfie image; others were poorly framed shots showing parts of baby faces too close to the camera lens suggesting they accidentally took the photograph; whilst most definitive was many instances in which the caption of the image posted by parents directly attributed the photographic production to an infant: Isabella's first #babyselfie She actually pushed the button herself! My little man loves taking selfies lol Whilst, then, the research identified many instances in which infants accidentally engaged in mobile media use, sometimes managing to communicate with an unsuspecting interlocutor, it is important to acknowledge such encounters could not have emerged without the enabling infrastructure of ambient media contexts and touchscreen interfaces, nor observed without studying this infrastructure utilising materially-oriented ethnographic perspectives (Star). Significantly, too, was the intermediary role played by parents. With parents acting as intermediaries in household environments or as proxy users in posting content on their behalf, multiple forms of assisted infant communication were identified. Assisted Media Use Assisted communication emerged from discussions with parents about the ways, routines, and rationale for making mobile media available to their children. These sometimes revolved around keeping their child engaged whilst they were travelling as a family – part of what has been described as the pass-back effect – but were more frequently discussed in terms of sharing and showing digital content, especially family photographs, and in facilitating infant mediated communication with relatives abroad: they love scrolling through my photos on my iPhone …We quite often just have them [on Skype] … have the computers in there while we're having dinner … the laptop will be there, opened up at one end of the table with the family here and there will be my sister having breakfast with her family in Ireland … These forms of parental mediated communication did not, however, simply situate or construct infants as passive recipients of their parents’ desires to make media content available or their efforts to establish communication with extended family members. Instead, the research revealed that infants were often active participants in these processes, pushing for access to devices, digital content, and mediated communication. These distributed relations of agency were expressed through infants verbal requests and gestural urging; through the ways parents initiated use by, for example, unlocking a device, preparing software, or loading an application, but then handed them over to infants to play, explore or communicate; and through wider networks of relations in which others including siblings, acted as proxies or had a say in the kinds of media infants used: she can do it, once I've unlocked … even, even with iView, once I'm on iView she can pick her own show and then go to the channel she wants to go to.We had my son’s birthday and there were some photos, some footage of us singing happy birthday and the little one just wants to watch it over and over again. She thinks it's fantastic watching herself.He [sibling] becomes like a proxy user … with the second one … they don't even need the agency because of their sibling. Similarly, the assisted communication emerging from the analysis of #babyselfie images on Instagram revealed that parents were not simply determining infant media use, but often acting as proxies on their behalf. #Selfie obsessed baby. Seriously though. He won't stop. Insists on pressing the button and everything. He sees my phone and points and says "Pic? Pic?" I've created a monster lol. In sharing this digital content on social networks, parents were acting as intermediaries in the communication of their children’s digital images. Clearly they were determining the platforms and networks where these images were published online, yet the production of these images was more uncertain, with accidental self-portraits taken by infants suggesting they played a key role in the circuits of digital photography distribution (van Dijck). Automated Media Use The production, archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito). Here, software automates process of sorting and shaping information, and in doing so both empowers and governs forms of infant media conduct. The final theme emerging from the research, then, is the identification of automated forms of infant mobile media use enabled through software applications and algorithmic operations. Automated techniques of interaction emerged as part of the repertoire of infant mobile mediality and communication through observations and discussions during the family research, and through surveying commercial software applications. Within family discussions, parents spoke about the ways digital databases and applications facilitated infant exploration and navigation. These included photo galleries stored on mobile devices, as well as children’s Internet television services such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s catch-up online TV service, iView, which are visually organised and easily scrollable. In addition, algorithmic functions for sorting, recommending and autoplay on the video-sharing platform YouTube meant that infants were often automatically delivered an ongoing stream of content: They just keep watching it [YouTube]. So it leads on form the other thing. Which is pretty amazing, that's pretty interactive.Yeah, but the kids like, like if they've watched a YouTube clip now, they'll know to look down the next column to see what they want to play next … you get suggestions there so. Forms of automated communication specifically addressing infants was also located in examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores: the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. These applications are designed to support baby image capture and sharing, promising to “allow your baby to take a photo of him himself [sic]” (Giudicelli), based on automated software features that use sounds and images to capture a babies attention and touch sensors to activate image capture and storage. In one sense, these applications may appear to empower infants to participate in the production of digital content, namely selfies, yet they also clearly distribute this agency with and through mobile media and digital software. Moreover, they imply forms of conduct, expectations and imperatives around the possibilities of infant presence in a participatory digital culture. Immanent Ethic and Critique Digital participation typically assumes a degree of individual agency in deciding what to share, post, or communicate that is not typically available to infants. The emerging communicative practices of infants detailed above suggests that infants are increasingly connecting, however this communicative agency is distributed amongst a network of ambient devices, user-friendly interfaces, proxy users, and software sorting. Such distributions reflect conditions Deuze has noted, that we do not live with but in media. He argues this ubiquity, habituation, and embodiment of media and communication technologies pervade and constitute our lives becoming effectively invisible, negating the possibility of an outside from which resistance can be mounted. Whilst, resistance remains a solution promoted in medical discourses and paediatric advice proposing no ‘screen time’ for children aged below two (Strasburger and Hogan), Deuze’s thesis suggests this is ontologically futile and instead we should strive for a more immanent relation that seeks to modulate choices and actions from within our media life: finding “creative ways to wield the awesome communication power of media both ethically and aesthetically” ("Unseen" 367). An immanent ethics and a critical aesthetics of infant mediated life can be located in examples of cultural production and everyday parental practice addressing the arrangements of infant mobile media and communication discussed above. For example, an article in the Guardian, ‘Toddlers pose a serious risk to smartphones and tablets’ parodies moral panics around children’s exposure to media by noting that media devices are at greater risk of physical damage from children handling them, whilst a design project from the Eindhoven Academy – called New Born Fame – built from soft toys shaped like social media logos, motion and touch sensors that activate image capture (much like babyselfie apps), but with automated social media sharing, critically interrogates the ways infants are increasingly bound-up with the networked and algorithmic regimes of our computational culture. Finally, parents in this research revealed that they carefully considered the ethics of media in their children’s lives by organising everyday media practices that balanced dwelling with new, old, and non media forms, and by curating their digitally mediated interactions and archives with an awareness they were custodians of their children’s digital memories (Garde-Hansen et al.). I suggest these examples work from an immanent ethical and critical position in order to make visible and operate from within the conditions of infant media life. Rather than seeking to deny or avoid the diversity of encounters infants have with and through mobile media in their everyday lives, this analysis has explored the ways infants are increasingly configured as users of mobile media and communication technologies, identifying an emerging repertoire of infant mobile communication techniques. The emerging practices of infant mobile communication outlined here are intertwined with contemporary household media environments, and assembled through accidental, assisted, and automated relations of living with mobile media. Moreover, such entanglements of use are both represented and discursively reconfigured through multiple channels, contexts, and networks of public mediation. Together, these diverse contexts and forms of conduct have implications for both studying and understanding the ways babies are emerging as active participants and interpellated subjects within a continually expanding digital culture. Acknowledgments This research was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735). I would like to express my appreciation to the children and families involved in this study for their generous contribution of time and experiences. References Buckingham, David. 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