Journal articles on the topic 'Self-regulation Global thinking'

21st century students are required to have critical thinking and problem solving skills, creativity and innovation, communication, collaboration to train students to have social skills and global insight. In addition, self-direction (crom), global connections, local connections and the use of technology as a learning tool support Higher Order Thinking Skills. The application of appropriate learning models can support the achievement of these skills. The purpose of this research is to analyze the effect of Problem Based Learning model on the ability of Higher Order Thinking Skills and analyze the effect of Problem Based Learning model on Self Regulation. The research method used quasi experimental with nonequivalent control group design. The sampling technique used was purposive sampling. The instruments used were interviews, test questions, Self Regulation questionnaire and documentation. Hypothesis testing using Anacova test. The results showed a difference in Higher Order Thinking Skills on the application of the Problem Based Learning model with a significance value of 0,000<0,05, indicating the Problem Based Learning learning model affects Higher Order Thinking Skills. There is a difference in Self Regulation in the application of the Problem Based Learning learning model with a significance value of 0,000<0,05.

Although research indicates that self-reported interoception is associated with deficits in identifying and describing emotional experience, and externally oriented thinking styles (alexithymia), this relationship appears moderated by how interoception is measured. A systematic review and meta-analyses examined the association between self-reported interoception and alexithymia, investigating how different interoceptive questionnaires relate to alexithymia at global and facet levels. PsychINFO, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases were searched with predefined terms related to self-reported interoception and alexithymia. Three reviewers independently assessed articles, extracted data, and undertook risk of bias assessment. Thirty-two cross-sectional studies published between 1996 and 2023 were included. Random-effects meta-analyses and narrative synthesis indicated that global alexithymia was positively associated with measures of interoceptive confusion, autonomic nervous system reactivity, and heightened interoceptive attention, and inversely associated with interoceptive accuracy and adaptive interoception, indexed by composite Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness scores, but particularly interoceptive trusting, self-regulation, and attention regulation. These patterns were observed for alexithymic facets and stronger in magnitude for difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings, relative to externally oriented thinking. Overall, results suggested that the association between self-reported interoception and alexithymia differs as a function of the interoceptive self-report. The review highlighted issues with construct definition and operationalisation and determined that existing interoceptive self-reports broadly capture maladaptive and adaptive sensing, attention, interpretation, and memory. The findings underscore the importance of specifying interoceptive constructs and using appropriate assessments to improve convergence between constructs and measurements, further suggesting potential clinical utility in using existing self-reports to measure interoception and alexithymia, facilitating interventions targeting mind-body connections.

Metacognition is, thinking about one’s thinking. It refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. It includes a critical awareness of a) one’s thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and a learner. It also includes knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or problem-solving. The two components of metacognition are: (1) knowledge about cognition and (2) regulation of cognition. Metacognition encompasses the study of memory-monitoring and self-regulation, metareasoning, consciousness/awareness and autonoetic consciousness/self-awareness. The purpose of this research was to examine the metacognitive strategies used by EFL learners in writing the research proposal and also to identify their attitude towards metacognitive strategies in doing the task. The participants of the study constituted 85 undergraduate female students of level 8, English Department, Samtah University College, Jazan University. A metacognition inventory and an attitude scale were adapted to meet the requirements of the study. The study results will help the teachers to support, facilitate and train the students to become autonomous learners so that the students will be able to achieve academic/research writing skills based on critical thinking skills. Summing up this study, the researcher has observed that university students should enrich their metacognitive abilities. It also indicated that English teachers should take up the responsibility to train Saudi students in enhancing metacognitive abilities to prepare them for future to meet personal, professional, communicative, and global challenges.

The Critical thinking is important in education because it encourages students to gain an understanding of more complex information. High critical thinking skills will lead students to find and conclude their understanding. The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic has made global changes in the implementation of learning. Until now, the learning process is still directed at the online learning model with the help of various Learning Management System (LMS) platforms. Conditions like this have implications for the decline in students' critical thinking skills in various aspects, such as inference, interpretation, explanation, analysis, evaluation, and self-regulation. This study aims at proposing an alternative learning approach, namely the enhanced-open learning model which is used to empower and improve students' critical thinking skills. This learning model was developed using the Research and Development (R&D) method and implemented with an adaptive hypermedia learning application media designed with the Luther development model. The sampling technique used was cluster random sampling on 98 students of informatics education in Surakarta City. The data were analyzed with the prerequisites for normality and homogeneity of the data before the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and Mann Whitney U test was carried out to determine the effectiveness of the model. The results of the increase in the gain score obtained from the experiment are in the aspect of interpretation of 93.18%, inference 76.74%, explanation 96.33%, analysis 97, 87%, evaluation 63.01%, and self-regulation 98.13%. Based on the experiments conducted, it is proven that the adaptive open learning approach has a very significant impact on improving students' critical thinking aspects so that it can be concluded that the model is effective in improving students' critical thinking skills.

Inventive thinking is one of the constructs in 21st century skills. The 21st century skills are the skills needed by future workforce in the new global economy that driven by knowledge, technology and innovation. Inventive thinking comprises of six elements which are flexibility, self-regulation, curiosity, creativity, risk taking and higher order thinking. This study aimed to measure the level of inventive thinking among preparatory course science students at two MARA colleges. Besides, this study has also examined the effect of gender and previous school location on the level of inventive thinking. This quantitative approach study employed 21st century skills instrument. Total of 240 respondents of first year students that attended to these colleges have answered the questionnaires. Findings revealed that the levels of all subconstructs in inventive thinking were high except for creativity that revealed a moderate level. Meanwhile, there were no effects of gender and former school location on the levels of inventive thinking. However, these findings have given insight that the level of creativity should be enhanced. Science students should master all subconstructs in inventive thinking in order to become great innovators who can contribute to the nation’s prosperity.

Global virtual teams (GVT) have emerged as a valuable model for facilitating virtual exchange (VE) in business and educational settings. A comprehensive four-year longitudinal study spanning from 2018 to 2021 investigated a model of self-efficacy that include discernment, resourcefulness, diverse options, creative thinking, fairness, emotional regulation, and culture. Our sample consisted of participants surveyed before the GVT experience (n=584) and after the GVT experience (n=399), representing learners from six countries. The results of the study unveiled several key findings: (a) self-efficacy was influenced by multiple factors, with fairness emerging as a more significant contributor after the GVT experience; (b) irrespective of the GVT experience, learners from individualist countries demonstrated higher levels of self-efficacy compared to those from collectivist countries, suggesting that cultural dimensions play a role in shaping learners' self-efficacy, regardless of their participation in GVT activities; and (c) when controlling for the pandemic, there was a specific impact to the learner as it related to self-efficacy and the experience of global learning. These insights contribute to our understanding of the intricate dynamics of self-efficacy in the realm of virtual exchange and provide valuable implications for educators, organizations, and policymakers seeking to enhance learner outcomes in global virtual team settings.

Critical and creative thinking skills are the core of 21st century skills that learners must have to face global challenges. The ability to interpret, analyze, evaluate, inference, explanation, self regulation, think fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration can shows the level of their critical and creative thinking ability. The research aims to develop e-portofolio for enchancing the critical and creative thinking ability of 8th level students at Junior High School by soil pollution and waste management education. The research used a one-group pretest-posttest experimental design. The validity of e-portfolios consists of construct and content validity. The practicality of e-portfolios was assessed based on student response questionnaires. The effectiveness of the e-portfolio was assessed through a test designed to measure their critical and creative thinking skills. After the e-portfolio trial, a test was conducted to enable the improvement of critical and creative thinking skills. This study used the Research and Development (R&D) method with the ADDIE model (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation) which is limited to three stages namely analysis, product design and development. The validity assessment used expert judgement. The design of e-portfolio learning media involves elements that are in accordance with the indicators of critical and creative thinking by providing feedback, self-assessment, peer assessment, self-reflection. The data generated in this study is the validity of e-portfolios to measure critical and creative thinking skills. Based on the profile analysis of critical and creative thinking skills of SMP Negeri 8 Purwosari students, it was found that there was an increase in the percentage of critical thinking skills of grade VIII students from 73.08% in the very low category (19 students) to 88.46% in the very high category (21 students). It was also found that the percentage of creative thinking ability of the largest VIII grade students was 69.23% in the very low category (18 students) to 46.15% in the very high category (12 students) after using e-portfolios. This research developed e-portfolios as an innovative instrument that not only measures critical or creative thinking ability separately, but also learns both critical and creative thinking ability . In its implementation, the e-portfolio is designed to integrate various learning components, such as problem-based assignments, case studies, experiments and self-reflection that are relevant to practising critical and creative thinking skills. Keywords: critical thinking ability, creative thinking ability, e-portfolio, pancasila student profile.

Previous studies agree on the benefits of improving the relevant competences in students by applying globalized learning methodologies and projects in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). However, few studies have focused on whether including other subjects in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) in these projects improves high school students’ perceptions on improvement in these skills. The objective of this work was to study the effect of participation in interdisciplinary teaching projects (STEM and HASS), which promote globalized and project-based learning, on the perception of self-efficacy of secondary school students in basic competences for learning. It also analyzes the modulating role of gender on said perception. High school students from Galicia participated in this study. Both before and after participating in teaching projects according to the MODEL of the ATS-STEM project, they completed a questionnaire on self-efficacy in the eight key competences for STEM learning defined in the model: disciplinary STEM competences, problem solving, innovation and creativity, communication, critical thinking, metacognitive skills, collaboration and self-regulation. The results showed an improvement in all the competences evaluated (although only the men showed an increase in collaboration). Nevertheless, there was a lower perception of competence in women than in men in discipline competences, problem solving and metacognitive skills. Therefore, the benefits of interdisciplinary ATS-STEM learning experiences on the self-efficacy perceived by high school students were confirmed, although the results continue to show a gender gap.

Personalized learning pathways based on the Felder-Silverman Learning Styles Model (FSLSM) have gained attention for their potential to enhance self-regulated learning and cognitive development. Estonia, a global leader in digital education and competency-based learning, has integrated adaptive learning technologies and student-centered instructional models to align with individual learning preferences. This study explores the impact of personalized learning pathways on students’ metacognitive regulation skills, focusing on curriculum integration, teacher training, and learning outcomes. Findings suggest that FSLSM-based personalized learning enhances student engagement, improves problem-solving skills, and strengthens metacognitive awareness. Estonia’s implementation of AI-driven adaptive learning tools, competency-based education, and digital feedback systems has contributed to higher student autonomy and improved critical thinking abilities. However, challenges remain, including teacher readiness, equity in technology access, and data privacy concerns. To optimize the effectiveness of personalized learning, future initiatives should emphasize advanced AI-driven learning analytics, teacher professional development, and stronger data governance frameworks. Additionally, ensuring equitable access to personalized education models, particularly in underserved regions, is crucial for scalability and long-term success. By addressing these challenges, Estonia can further establish itself as a global leader in innovative, student-centered education, equipping learners with the cognitive flexibility, self-regulation, and problem-solving skills needed for lifelong learning.

Self-efficacy determines the regulation of athletes' thinking patterns and how they will behave to achieve their goals in the face of adversity. The aim of this study was to analyze the relationship between volleyball self-efficacy and the performance efficacy of athletes from high-performance teams at distinct moments of the season. This descriptive correlational study included sixty-five athletes of both sexes (26.20 ± 5.51 years old) from four teams competing in the 2017/2018 Men's and Women's Superliga. The Volleyball Self-Efficacy Scale (VSES) measured athletes' self-efficacy, and notational analysis evaluated the efficacy of volleyball performance. The results showed strong or very strong self-efficacy in the game, defensive self-efficacy, offensive self-efficacy, and global self-efficacy, as well as relationships between defensive self-efficacy and defensive efficacy, and between offensive self-efficacy and offensive efficacy. The high-performance athletes across both variables investigated were partially susceptible to circumstantial issues inherent to the sport context, such as matches inside or outside home, with public for or against, with teams of different technical levels, with teams that have a history of confrontations with more wins or more defeats against their team.

To face challenges in the 21st century efficiently and effectively, a country needs students who have inventive thinking in addition to being innovative and creative. The low level of student mindset is an obstacle in the current global era. Therefore, this study aims to analyze students' inventive thinking skills in online learning at SMP Negeri 5 Ukui sub-district. The research method used is a survey method. The database of students' creative thinking abilities was collected through online questionnaires/questionnaires using Google Form, then analyzed descriptively using the SPSS version 23.00 program for Windows. The subjects used as research samples were 55 students of class IX SMP Negeri 5 Ukui. The results showed that the mastery of the elements of students' inventive thinking skills at SMP Negeri 5 Ukui had an average of 3.81 in the Good category. Obtaining the good category, seen from the respondents' responses, namely students have a high curiosity very well. Based on the results and discussion, it can be concluded that the inventive thinking ability of students with a total frequency of 55 students, overall shows that students of SMP Negeri 5 Ukui have good inventive thinking skills, where an average of 3.81 or 10 is also shown by the results of the category. in good presentation. From this research, it is hoped that students' inventive thinking skills will continue to develop both from flexibility and complexity, self-regulation, curiosity, creativity, being able to take risks and high-level thinking.

The global pandemic and sudden lack of face-to-face contact between teachers and students has accelerated interest in social-emotional learning (SEL). With greater numbers of people thinking about SEL, more confusion has emerged: How should we conceptualize SEL? Which constructs should be included? We propose a conceptualization of SEL that is anchored in the fundamental psychological needs of students. First, we describe these psychological needs—social connectedness, motivation, and self-regulation—that are prerequisites for optimizing student outcomes. Then, we outline several benefits that we hope this conceptualization offers to researchers and practitioners: clarity with respect to what SEL is and is not, an evaluative tool to help schools select SEL models and curricula, and practical guidance for educators helping students.

The situation in the world after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine can be characterized as an ever-increasing chaos, undermining the foundations of the global order that existed in the world before the start of this war. The theme of the inevitable change of the world order becomes one of the main ones in the world narrative space, actualizing the question — what can the new global order be? The paradigm of complexity as a methodological basis for the construction of the latest sociological concepts allows us to propose conceptual schemes and models of social changes that are able to work with the concepts of social chaos, bifurcation and social order. The basis of the proposed forecast of the expected possible scenarios of the development of events is a model of social changes built on the basis of the paradigm of complexity, which asserts the existence of two mechanisms for creating and maintaining social order — organizational and self-organizing. The organizational mechanism is based on human subjectivity, rational thinking, intelligence, classical scientific forecasting models, logic and evidence. Culturally legitimized during the Modern era. Self-organization is based on mythological thinking, irrationality, belief in a suprapersonal force that is the subject of order creation (God, gods, hero, charismatic leader, higher idea, etc.). The culture of Tradition was based on this. According to the chosen approach, it can be argued that the next arrangement can be predicted only in the form of several equally probable options for global social change. It is assumed that these options will be formed from different variations of the combination of organization and self-organization. There are three of them: 1). Hypermodernity, significant strengthening of organizational mechanisms, further marginalization of self-organization. 2). Neo-tradition (integral Tradition), dominance of self-organization, decline of organizational levers of regulation. 3). Tradomodern, a balanced dialectical unity of self-organization and organization. The points of possible growth of each of the options are indicated, which are currently in the margins of the world socio-cultural space, but at bifurcation points, the new always grows from the marginal. The unique example of the self-organization of the Ukrainian Maidans, volunteer and voluntary movement, which is an experience of combining organization and self-organization, reason and faith, which brings new meanings to the European semantic space, is emphasized. It was emphasized that there is no way to predict which option will be implemented. A small random event can decide everything, but knowing such patterns does not exclude the possibility of at least preparing for all the mentioned possibilities, and maybe working for one of them.

The integration of technology into daily human lives has become indispensable, shaping society and emphasizing the role of humans in the development of society. This indispensable integration is illustrated by the global rise of Web3, a decentralized application ecosystem that utilizes advanced technologies, such as crypto assets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and the Metaverse. These technologies offer significant benefits alongside unique risks and challenges, necessitating innovative regulatory strategies to address them. The inherent tension between promoting innovation and safeguarding citizens’ interests requires a flexible and comprehensive regulatory framework for Web3 in Kenya, capable of adapting to the rapidly evolving technological landscape while simultaneously managing emerging risks. This research aims to identify key principles for developing effective Web3 regulations and argues for Kenya’s regulatory recognition of Web3 technologies, emphasizing potential benefits such as increased innovation, digital sovereignty, financial independence, and economic development. It also explores different regulatory strategies, such as self-regulation, co-regulation, and the implementation of co-regulatory tools like public-private dialogue (PPD). The findings propose that Kenyan regulators should adopt flexible, forward-thinking regulatory strategies that can navigate the complexities introduced by these transformative technologies.

The gradual shift to online modes of learning in higher education institutions over the past 2 decades accelerated drastically on a global scale between 2020 and 2022. Students and educators, who have initially grappled with the shift, have now become accustomed to online teaching; however, there are concerns about the quality of learning that has resulted. To enable a sustainable and effective online pedagogy, educators may need to learn about fostering higher-order thinking skills, which can be challenging even for experienced educators. To conceptualise effective online pedagogy, the community of inquiry (CoI) framework emphasises cognitive presence (CP), which focuses on the higher-order thinking process. The CoI is the most widely researched framework in online pedagogy, yet contemporary CoI literature lacks collective evidence of factors that influence CP. This scoping review of the CoI literature explores the factors that influence the higher-order thinking that is indicative of CP. Inclusion criteria included evidence of CP in online learning contexts and published between January 2000 and March 2022, providing a total of 121 studies. Results suggest that teaching presence, structure of learning activities and student characteristics all influence CP. Implications for practice or policy: Higher education students enrolled in online courses should be taught how to learn effectively in an online mode. Online course educators must embed learning tasks that foster self-regulation and higher-order skills in students. Online course design should include authentic tasks for students to apply new knowledge to real-life scenarios. Educators must be offered ample professional development activities to build their skills in online pedagogy. Institutions should encourage translation of online educational research to practice.

In a dynamic world, pedagogically oriented universities which are educating future teachers for different types of schools (elementary, middle, high schools) must also adapt and be flexible to the fast-changing environment: cultural, social, religious, political, economic, etc. A new scientific discussion is therefore needed in order to reevaluate the methodologies and ways of collecting data in tertiary education in line with the internationalization of teacher training university education. In the current context of global unrest and uncertainty, it seems inevitable to leverage the potential of current generation of young people – the future teachers in our case and prepare experiential opportunities for them in order to support their global skills (critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration, self-regulation and wellbeing, digital literacies, etc.) and intercultural awareness together with soft skills. The aim of the contribution is to reflect on two virtual exchange programs (VEPs) and one blended intensive program (BIP) which were released at Matej Bel University and subsequent methodology that academics in charge used in order to collect and evaluate data from their projects. Multidisciplinary research is a challenging endeavor in pedagogically oriented disciplines, however, it can bring sustainability to initial teacher training. Virtual exchange programs (VEPs) require the teacher/researcher to apply new or modified approaches and gain knowledge which spans multiple research areas.

Introduction. The article analyzes the problem of psychological stability of the individual to socio-cultural threats and negative information impact. As social problems become more acute, the topic of personal security and resistance to emerging threats and risks takes an increasing place in the scientific literature. Today we can observe various violations of the processes of socio-cultural identification, which reduce the adaptive potential of the individual. The reverse side of accessibility in the global information environment is an increase in the degree of danger, the emergence of new risk factors and threats of information and psychological impact. Of particular concern are the facts of Russian youth joining terrorist groups, as well as the facts of youth involvement in destructive protest movements and actions.Materials and methods. The following methods were used for the preparation of this article; theoretical analysis of Russian and international literature, study of scientific articles and publications on the topic, overview of results from Russian and international studies, content analysis.Results. Approaches to determining the content of the category of psychological stability of a person and its various aspects are considered: emotional stability, moral stability, moral stability, stability of behavior forms, resistance to addictive factors, and socio-cultural stability. Identify invariant indicators that determine the psychological stability of the individual in various contexts of countering socio-cultural threats and negative information impact: socio-cultural identity based on views, beliefs, attitudes consistent with moral norms and spiritual values; motivation of the individual to self-actualization, success, openness and commitment to society; subjective well-being and resilience; critical thinking and the ability to predict risks and threats; possession of constructive coping strategies; adaptive personal potential expressed in mastering self-regulation methods that ensure successful adaptation to a changing socio-cultural environment.Discussion and Conclusions. The conducted theoretical research allowed us to conclude that the psychological stability of a person is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon, which is revealed in the moral, socio-psychological and system-activity perspective. It is concluded that the task of forming psychological stability and personal adaptive potential should be updated in the educational system, including the formation of knowledge about oneself as a person, about their psychological capabilities and mechanisms of self-regulation, and the explanation of moral norms and values.

Abstract. In the article the author analyzes the changes associated with the computerization and digitalization of modern society, which necessitate improving the quality of IT education. The author focuses on the necessity of educational transformations related to the development of a new widely available and multifunctional tool, such as generative artificial intelligence, and the importance of ensuring the harmonious development of higher mental functions, analytical abilities, critical thinking, imagination, creativity, self-regulation, and self-efficacy in the younger generation. The need to improve the process of organizing educational sessions, diversifying the methods of their conduct and ways of organizing educational interaction between students to ensure their qualified training in the dynamically changing conditions dictated by the modern labor market is substantiated. The article outlines the groups of skills, in addition to professional technical skills (hard skills), that need to be formed and developed in students of the branch of knowledge “Information Technology” for their qualified training. In particular, we are talking about soft skills, such as communication skills, problem solving, adaptability and stress resistance, ability to cooperate (teamwork), curiosity and readiness for continuous learning, customer focus, emotional intelligence, time management, leadership, etc. As part of an integrated approach to education, it is also important to develop environmentally responsible skills and skills for sustainable development for future IT professionals. It is important that tech workers understand global ecological challenges, realize the impact of technology on the environment, integrate ecological principles into their work, and be able to work in a changing world.

While responding to the challenges of globalization, the system of modern education often reduces the range of humanitarian disciplines, forming utilitarian programs in universities, but at the same time preserves such a vestige of the past as the priority of the academic format over the heuristic one. At the same time, the global world, a multiplex of events and opportunities, contributes to the emergence of a special type of a student in the educational discourse – a multipotential (MPL), who is capable of succeeding in several activities at once. The philosophical and methodological key to the reorganization of education within this context may be the idea of ​​a “transversal self” of a student in the dynamics of diversity and creative self-development. In light of the theory of generations and multipotentiality, a balance of academism and new forms of university communication is becoming necessary because in the life of millennials and representatives of generation Z, reality and virtual space, modular thinking and multitasking, the dislike for reading and creativity, and independent judgments merge. Interactive, visual, virtual and performative forms of learning are the most effective solutions for them. Social cataclysms of the beginning of the 21st century also require special stress resistance, emotional intelligence, auto-reflection, and media literacy from participants of the educational process. This actualizes the resources of practical philosophy, psychology, sociology and other humanitarian disciplines for the comprehensive development, awareness and self-regulation of a person. A very constructive educational discourse is the communication of a multi-potential teacher with gifted students. One example can be the scientific and creative activities of Vanya Angelova, a professor at Velikotyrnovsky University. St. Cyril and Methodius, who emphasizes the value of the "return" of the book, the co-creation of teachers and students, and wide international cooperation within the context of the topic of multi-potentials.

Generative AI is an emerging tool in higher education; however, its connection with transversal competencies, as well as their sustainable adoption, remains underexplored. The study aims to analyze the scientific and conceptual development of generative artificial intelligence in higher education to identify the most relevant transversal competencies, strategic processes for its sustainable implementation, and global trends in academic production. A systematic literature review (PRISMA) was conducted on the Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, analyzing 35 studies for narrative synthesis and 897 publications for bibliometric analysis. The transversal competencies identified were: Academic Integrity, Critical Thinking, Innovation, Ethics, Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, AI Literacy, Responsibility, Digital Literacy, AI Ethics, Autonomous Learning, Self-Regulation, Flexibility, and Leadership. The conceptual framework connotes the interdisciplinary nature and five key processes were identified to achieve the sustainable integration of Generative AI in higher education oriented to the development of transversal competencies: (1) critical and ethical appropriation, (2) institutional management of technological infrastructure, (3) faculty development, (4) curricular transformation, and (5) pedagogical innovation. On bibliometric behavior, scientific articles predominate, with few systematic reviews. China leads in publication volume, and social sciences are the most prominent area. It is concluded that generative artificial intelligence is key to the development of transversal competencies if it is adopted from a critical, ethical, and pedagogically intentional approach. Its implications and future projections in the field of higher education are discussed.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a prevalent mental illness affecting over 320 million people, equivalent to 4.4% of the global population (World Health Organization, 2017). MDD is primarily characterized by feelings of sadness, indifference, hopelessness, and persistent thoughts (Kanter et al., 2008; Otte et al., 2016). In recent years, there has been growing interest in identifying the cognitive aspects linked to MDD. There’s mounting evidence suggesting that impaired metacognition, the ability to assess and evaluate one’s own thought processes and actions, plays a significant role (Hoven et al., 2019; Rouault, Seow, et al., 2018; Trauelsen et al., 2016). Several theories, including the Self-Regulatory Executive Function (S-REF, Wells & Matthews, 1994), propose that dysfunctional metacognitive processes contribute to the onset and persistence of mental disorders. According to the S-REF theory, certain forms of metacognitive beliefs may predispose individuals with depression to adopt counterproductive responses to their thoughts and inner experiences, resulting in ineffective coping strategies (Wells, 2011). One particular response pattern, known as the Cognitive-Attention Syndrome (CAS), involves excessive engagement in worry, rumination, heightened focus on threats and negative information, and excessive self-focus. CAS also includes ineffective regulation strategies such as avoidance and thought suppression (Sun et al., 2017). This syndrome gradually emerges due to metacognitive beliefs, such as the idea that worrying and ruminating serve a purpose, or that thoughts and emotions are inherently negative and uncontrollable and should be avoided and suppressed (Sun et al., 2017). Over time, CAS ensnares individuals with depression in prolonged emotional turmoil, leading to persistent thinking patterns and contributing to the onset and perpetuation of the clinical disorder.

This research aims to look at the character profile of Pancasila students in the traditional dragon snake game. The Pancasila student profile implemented in several schools needs to be more optimal for the learning environment for students. As in the growth of children's character, habituation, and obedience in character education has yet to be carried out optimally in learning. Of the six dimensions, namely Faith, Devotion to God Almighty, Noble Character, Global Diversity, Mutual Cooperation, Independence, Critical Reasoning, and Creativity, which must be possessed by competent students, have character, and behave according to the basic values of Pancasila. Therefore, to develop the student profile of Pancasila among students, they should play very fun games, namely traditional games, one of which is dragon snake, because dragons can develop the character of a Pancasila student profile. Therefore, this research uses a qualitative design with a case study method to find out how much of the principles of the Pancasila student profile exist in the traditional dragon game by collecting data using observation, FGD, interviews, and documentation. Participants in this study were 111 students and 1 sports teacher. So the results of playing the traditional snake and dragon game are that students can have the character of a Pancasila student profile with the dimensions of religious morals, personal morals, recognizing and appreciating culture, collaboration, caring, self-regulation, obtaining and processing information and ideas, reflecting on thoughts and thinking processes and generating ideas original.

This action research aimed to investigate the efficacy of employing the Select-Order-Systematize (SOS) method and Triangulation-Degree-Actuality (TDA) system in developing academic writing skills, specifically in addressing IELTS essay questions. The study was conducted in an 11th-grade classroom where students were undergoing intensive preparation for the IELTS exam. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses of student performance and feedback, the research identified educational difficulties and designed a lesson plan targeting the analysis of essay questions and identification of relevant arguments. The lesson implementation involved concept-based learning, collaborative group work, and peer assessment. Assessment instruments included IELTS Writing band descriptors and checklists for self-regulation. Results indicated improvements in students' ability to unpack essay questions, select effective arguments, and provide logical development, thus contributing to the overarching goal of academic writing skill enhancement.

In the context of intensifying processes of building global information society, which is characterised by a high degree of dynamism and changeability of basic processes in all spheres of social life, the representatives of pedagogical community are facing the objective necessity of forming the new type of the future foreign language teacher&rsquo;s self-concept, who will be motivated and prepared for continuous linguistic self-education. This task can be implemented by means of organising the process of future foreign languages teachers&rsquo; linguistic self-educational activities on the basis of acmeological approach. <strong>Purpose</strong>. The paper is aimed at disclosing the essence of acmeological approach in education and analysing the peculiarities of its implementation in the course of future foreign languages teachers&rsquo; linguistic self-educational activities. <strong>Methods</strong>. Such methods as analysis, synthesis, comparison, systematisation and generalisation of theoretical and methodological aspects of building the process of future foreign languages teachers&rsquo; linguistic self-educational activities by means of acmeological approach form the basis of this research. <strong>Results</strong>. At present, the acmeological approach, which consists in integral studying the student&rsquo;s personality as the subject of learning; in providing pedagogical conditions for stimulating motivation of success and actualisation the aspiration for creative achievements; in evaluating the quality of education from the perspective of self-development and self-perfection criteria of both students and teachers, is one of the most promising for higher school development. The advantages of pedagogical impact, based on acmeological approach, will be as follows: raising the level of anticipation and degree of self-regulation; self-determination concerning one&rsquo;s own activities; forming the ability of independent conscious decision-making; pushing the level of reflexive culture; mastering the special methods and techniques of self-actualisation one&rsquo;s personality and professional self. The educational process, organised by means of the above mentioned approach, will result in forming acmeological thinking of future foreign languages teachers, thanks to which continuous linguistic self-education will become their internal need, as well as constant aspiration for creative reconsideration and innovative transforming the reality will be the purport of life. <strong>Originality</strong>. In the research the essence of pedagogical and psychological aspects of organising the process of future foreign languages linguistic self-educational activities with the use of ideas and principles of acmeological approach have been disclosed for the first time. <strong>Conclusion</strong>. On the basis of conducted research we can affirm that, due to understanding the importance and implementing in the course of future foreign languages teachers&rsquo; linguistic self-educational activities the main points of acmeological approach with the focus on the highest achievements in harmonious development of the personality, the teacher will be able to make the most optimal algorithm of students&rsquo; foreign languages self-instruction, which will favour their maximal self-realisation and self-actualisation. Within the further research we are planning to study the basic principles of creating conditions for effective future foreign languages teachers&rsquo; linguistic self-educational activities.

The Philippines abruptly shifted from traditional to emergency remote education in response to the threats brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergency remote education is an umbrella term to refer to online learning. Literature on traditional learning suggests that selfregulation correlates positively with well-being, which suggests that students who are autonomous in their learning activities tend to be satisfied with their lives. Research also suggests that academic performance mediates this relationship, which suggests that students tend to become satisfied with their lives when they achieve successful learning outcomes. This research explores the relationship between online self-regulation, academic performance, and well-being of 379 senior high school students from selected public and private schools who hold classes using the online learning modality in the National Capital Region (NCR) using a quantitative approach specifically the explanatory cross-sectional design. The participants completed the online survey on self-regulated learning and well-being (i.e., Online Self-Regulated Learning Questionnaire and Satisfaction With Life Scale), while their academic performance was based on their self-reported third quarter grade point average. Results showed that online self-regulated learning predicted well-being, however, academic performance did not mediate the positive relationship between online self-regulated learning and well-being. Our findings suggest that, in the context of online learning, senior high school students who regulate their learning may experience satisfaction with their lives even if they do not achieve academic success.ReferencesAppana, S. (2008). A review of benefits and limitations of online learning in the context of the student, the instructor, and the tenured faculty. International Journal of E-Learning, 7(1), 5–22.Bailey, T. H., &amp; Phillips, L. J. (2016). 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The development of ecological behaviour and the management of the emotional consequences of the climate crisis among primary school pupils require an interdisciplinary approach that integrates educational, psychotherapeutic, and developmental strategies. In response to the growing manifestations of eco-anxiety in children, a psycho-pedagogical model based on bibliotherapy has been developed by Dr. Abner. The author's model, entitled “The Language of the Forest”, consists of four sequential stages: recognising anxiety, establishing a connection with nature, transforming fear into engagement, and fostering reflective thinking. Each stage utilises a set of carefully selected activities designed to address specific emotional and cognitive needs. Recognising anxiety involves creating a safe space where children can articulate their fears through storytelling and metaphor. Establishing a connection with nature uses immersive literary experiences and symbolic play to build empathy towards the environment. Transforming fear into engagement employs narrative-based role-play and creative projects that empower children to envision themselves as protectors of nature. Fostering reflective thinking integrates dialogue and expressive arts to encourage internalisation of ecological values. Central to this process is the use of ecologically themed literature, which enables emotional identification, self-regulation, and the development of a sense of belonging to the natural world. A number of recent studies confirm the effectiveness of bibliotherapy in supporting children experiencing anxiety, adjustment difficulties, and eco-anxiety. The model combines reading, role-play, creative expression, and hands-on environmental care, creating a multimodal learning environment that nurtures both emotional well-being and cognitive understanding. Practical examples include the use of children's books depicting endangered ecosystems, guided imaginary journeys into forests, and collaborative projects for environmental stewardship. The model provides a safe space for sharing, processing, and transforming negative emotions while encouraging active participation and personal responsibility. The proposed framework is applicable in both formal and non-formal educational settings, including schools, libraries, and community centres, and contributes to the integration of environmental education with mental health support within contemporary pedagogy. By addressing the emotional dimension of ecological awareness, the model lays the groundwork for the formation of long-term attitudes towards sustainability, strengthens the child's capacity for resilience in the face of global environmental challenges, and fosters a sense of empowerment and agency in young learners.

Abstract Introduction: Executive functioning (EF) is a set of cognitive abilities that includes working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control. EF has been linked to medication adherence in different pediatric populations (e.g., asthma, diabetes, transplant recipients), with greater EF associated with better adherence. The purpose of this study was to examine ethnic and racial differences in EF and medication adherence in a sample of pediatric patients with cancer. Methods: Participants were 39 pediatric cancer patients ages 2-18 years who were in active treatment (Mage = 11.03). Twenty patients (51.3%) identified as non-Hispanic, White; while the remaining 19 (48.7%) identified as other minority status (e.g., non-Hispanic, Black; Hispanic). Parents completed the Behavior Rating of Executive Functioning (BRIEF) at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months. The BRIEF yields an overall Global Executive Composite score (GEC) composed of two indexes: the Behavioral Regulation Index (BRI) and the Metacognition Index (MI). The BRI is composed of the Inhibit, Shift, and Emotional Control scales. The MI is composed of the Initiate, Working Memory, Plan/Organize, Organization of Materials, and Monitor scales. Adherence was measured across the same timepoints using the Medication Event Monitoring System (MEMS), which is an objective measure of daily adherence to medication. Results: When identifying ethnic and racial differences in EF over time, there were no significant effects of time or minority status on MI and GEC scores. For the BRI overall, there was no significant main effect of time (p=0.5), or minority status (p=0.66). However, there was a significant interaction between time and minority status on BRI, F(2,56)=5.26, p=0.01, ηp 2=0.16), with parents of non-minoritized patients observing more executive functioning deficits over time, and parents of minoritized patients observing improvements in executive functioning across 1-year. Finally, when examining EF and adherence, MI at Month 6 was significantly correlated with cumulative adherence at Month 6, even when controlling for minority status and age, r(27) = -0.45, p=0.01. Conclusions: Parents of minoritized patients observed improvements in behavioral regulation over time; whereas parents of non-Hispanic White patients reported worsening behavioral regulation. Additionally, MI was significantly correlated with medication adherence at 6 months, even when controlling for minority status and age. This suggests that deficits in a child’s ability to initiate, plan, organize, self-monitor, and sustain working memory can result in lower adherence regardless of minority status and age. Culturally-sensitive psychological interventions targeting meta-cognition domains may ameliorate nonadherence for pediatric patients with cancer, ultimately improving health outcomes. Citation Format: Clara Ko, Andrea Jewell, Evrosina Isaac, Tanvi Verma, Jennifer M. Rohan. Longitudinal patterns of executive functioning and adherence in an ethnically diverse sample of pediatric patients with cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr B070.

Computers have evolved over the course of history through successive generations. The impact of this technology on society has revolutionised the way we communicate, participate in the political life of a country or access education. The potential of the computer in the field of education has been highlighted by last year's global event. The objective of the study is to analyze the literature on the term computer in the field of education (COMPU-EDU) in the Web of Science database. For this, a bibliometric methodology based on a scientific mapping of the publications on the state of the question has been used. It has worked with an analysis unit of 10939 documents. The results indicate that research related to "computer" in education is mainly presented in English and in research articles. In addition, the journal with the most manuscripts on this line of research is Computer &amp;amp; Education. The analysis of the scientific evolution of this line of research shows that studies are mainly focused on teaching and learning processes, as well as on students' attitudes towards computer use. It can be concluded that the COMPU-EDU investigations are currently at an inflection point, given that there is a downward trend, as far as production volume is concerned. The scientific community is beginning to focus its research on other more specific branches of computer, such as augmented reality or robotics. In addition, the scientific production of COMPU-EDU in the 21th century focuses mainly on the attitudes of the members involved in the pedagogical act, on gender differences, on the elements of the teaching and learning processes - pedagogical methods and evaluation - and in the attention of students with special educational needs. Probably in the future the lines of research will begin to focus on self-regulation of learning, computational-thinking and gamification.

Introduction. In the modern world, where the information environment is saturated with informational noise and mass means of communication, media culture acquires an important status in the formation of public opinion. This is especially true for small towns, as they may be remote from global media streams. Relevance and purpose. Media culture becomes a key tool for understanding and analyzing information included in public discourse and influences the formation of people’s consciousness and views. The purpose of the article is to study media culture as an important element of public opinion formation in small towns of Ukraine through the prism of identifying perspectives of influence and control. Methodology. Conceptual foundations for the study of modern media culture and its impact on the cultural and social structure of society were laid in foundational theories such as Marshall McLuhan’s «global village» and Alvin Toffler’s «future shock». Content analysis of scientific literature was also used as the main research method. Results. The influence of media culture on the formation of public opinion in small towns is extremely significant, especially due to the limited media space, which makes its influence even more significant. In such conditions, the media play a decisive role in the coverage of events at the local and national levels, as well as in the formation of the cultural and social identity of the community. The study emphasizes the importance of media self-regulation and the development of professional ethics to ensure objectivity and credibility of information. Financial support for independent media, local media and ensuring the confidentiality of sources are identified as critical factors for ensuring the quality of information services in small towns. Also, raising the level of media literacy is an important element, key to critical thinking and fact-checking. Therefore, initiatives and programs aimed at improving media literacy among residents of small towns are recognized as essential. Conclusions. Media culture is an important part of the socio-cultural development of small towns. Mass media play a key role in covering local or national events. For this reason, mechanisms of control over the manipulation of mass media are of particular importance. The work emphasizes the importance of media literacy among the population of small towns. Therefore, individual programs and initiatives can contribute to increasing the level of media literacy among residents of small towns.

IntroductionAccording to modern scholars (N. Maslova, B. Astafiev), one of the important reasons for the global planetary crisis, including modern educational system in particular, is violation of the conformity of nature principles in the process of perception and cognition of the world, which is conditioned by the advantages of the development of logical and rational thinking and insufficient development of figurative, spiritual-intuitive thinking in the contemporary school of all levels.The modern system of education at all levels (school, higher education, postgraduate studies, and doctorate) is aimed primarily at the development of mechanisms of the left hemisphere that are rational, logical thinking, and analytical perception of reality.Such a one-way orientation leads to inhibition of right-sided processes, does not contribute to the development of creativity, disclosure and activation of the spiritual and intuitive capabilities of the individual, as well as to alienation of individual from the World, loss of personal sense of integrity, unity with the World; that is, to the disharmony of individual with his/her own nature and environment.Personal development of an individual in modern conditions takes the form of "Homo technicus" ("technical person"), "Homo informaticus" (“informational and technogenic person”), "Нomо соnsumens" (“person who consumes”), "Reified man" ("material surplus person"), "Nomo Festivus" ("person who has fun") (Butenko, 2017). As a result, a person with a technocratic, rational thinking, pragmatic and consumer attitude towards the world is brought up, and as a consequence, harmony in the "man-man", "man-nature", "man-society", "man-universe" systems, and correspondingly, the equilibrium in the integrated information-energy system interaction "Man – Society – Earth –Universe" are violated.Approach In contemporary education of all levels, high ontological and existential goals are not set, and not enough attention is paid to the spiritual and mental health of the individual, in particular to problems of spiritual self-knowledge, self-development, self-regulation and self-realization, thus leading to the formation of consumer psychology, dominance of pragmatic values, loss of spirituality, upbringing of a human – destroyer, a soulless person, but not a creator.One of the ways out from the planetary global crisis in the area of a contemporary education in particular, is the noosphereization of education, the imperative task of which is formation of the noospheric individual, actualization of his/her spiritual and intuitive potential, training of the noosphere integral harmonious bioadequate environmentally healthy mindset, which is based on a conscious total ownership of logical (left cerebral hemisphere) and creative, spiritual-intuitive (right cerebral hemisphere) thinking that, due to correspondence with both huamn nature and the laws of the cosmoplanetary world, will provide the individual with possibilities to adequately and fully (at the information and energy levels) perceive and recognize the surrounding world, and to interact with it on a spiritual basis.Results and Discussion The problem of intuition always remains relevant throughout the history of mankind. Among the scholars of the late XX century - beginning of the XXI century the problem of intuition and harmonization of the activity of the left and right hemispheres of the brain has been studied by such researchers as G. Kurmyshev, N. Maslova, Osho Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, I. Smokvina and others. Modern psychophysiological science explains the nature of intuitive thinking and cognition: the human mind combines the ability to integrate and develop both intellectual and intuitive knowledge that modern scientists associate with the activity of the left and right cerebral hemispheres. According to psychological science, the two hemispheres of the brain cognize and reflect the surrounding world differently and, thereafter transform information in their own ways. The left hemisphere "sees" objects as discrete, separated; it is responsible for logic and intellect, verbal thinking, application of sign information (reading, counting, language), and is characterized by the ability for logical, rational, mathematical, and scientific thinking. The right hemisphere binds objects into a single whole; it is responsible for emotions, creative thinking, intuition (unconscious processes). Thanks to the right hemisphere, a holistic image of the world is formed, and the left hemisphere gradually collects the model of the world from separate, but carefully studied details. "Left- hemisphered" thinking is associated with the ability for consistent, step-by-step cognition, which has respectively analytical rather than synthetic character. "Right- hemisphered" thinking is linked to the ability for integral, voluminous and complete cognition, space spatial immediate perception of the world in all of its information-energy interrelations and interactions.Logic and intuition, rational and intuitive paths – are different aspects of the unified process of cognition, and if the intellect can be regarded as the earthly beginning in humans, then intuition – is a spiritual primary source, a phenomenon of nonlinear, unearthly thinking, the logic of the Higher Being, the logic of the Almighty. As was very wittily pointed out by Osho Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, logic – the way our mind cognizes our reality, intuition – is how the spirit passes through the experience of reality (Maslova, 2006). Therefore, logic and intuition are two mutually conditioned mechanisms of scientific cognition that supplement and do not exist in isolation from one another. If the function of intuition in this interaction lies in creative discoveries, inventions, awareness of the true essence of things and phenomena, then the task of the scientific method, acting as an assistant of intuition, is to endeavor to comprehend new ideas, explain them from the point of view of earth science at the logical level, and "adapt" to our reality.Given this, rational and intuitive paths must complement, enrich and explain each other, interact in sync, in synthesis.Intuition is an organic component of the spiritual and psychic nature of the individual. Therefore, the problem of the development of intuition and harmonization of the discourse-logical and spiritual-intuitive components of thinking is extremely important at all levels of contemporary education. This is especially true for student youth, since students are the future spiritual and creative potential of the country, and therefore it is extremely important to reveal and develop their spiritual and intuitive abilities, to harmonize their mental-spiritual sphere, which promotes spiritual self-healing of both the individual and the environment, and harmonization of relations in the world. In the context of the modern information and energy paradigm, intuition is considered as a special mental state of a highly spiritual person, in which he/she deliberately initiates informational and energetic contact with any object of the Universe, in the physical or subtle world, "connects" to its information field, "reads out", "decrypts" and analyzes necessary information. This information-energy interaction is perceived by the individual as the process of connection, merging with the object being studied, which enables instant cognition of its true essence (Smokvina, 2013). As the analysis of the literature on the research problem testifies, if the activity mechanisms of the left hemisphere of the brain are relatively studied in modern science, the problems of the individual’s intuitive updating potential and harmonization of the activity of logical and intuitive cognitive processes are being investigated.According to many scholars, the ability for intuition is inborn in every human; however, unfortunately, in most people it is in a latent state. And only due to intense conscious work of the individual regarding their own spiritual self–cognition and self–perfection, one can discover and develop personal spiritual and intuitive abilities.According to the results of our theoretical study the general conditions contributing to the disclosure and development of intuition are as follows: (Tyurina, 2017) • Ability to cope with one’s own passions, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and achievement of the state of internal silence, voicelessness;• Formed self-motivation for spiritual self–cognition and self–perfection;• Achievement by the individual of the corresponding spiritual level: the higher the spirituality of the human, the more clearly his/her ability is expressed to obtain a higher spiritual knowledge: information and energy interaction, contact with higher levels of psychic reality;• Conscious desire, willingness of the individual to use intuitive cognition that helps overcome information-power resistance, the barrier that exists between a subject and an object, helps create harmony, assonance, interaction with the object being studied;• Intuitive human confidence: deep inner belief in personal intuitive capabilities and ability for intuitive cognition and self-cognition;• Humanistic orientation of the individual and his/her internal psychological properties such as: altruism, active love for all living beings on the Earth, empathy, ability to express compassion, care, and self-consecration, conscious desire to live in harmony with oneself and the world;• Nonjudgmental practice, which consists of the ability of a person to abandon assessments, classifications, analysis, which creates favorable conditions for immersion into the information space around us, makes it possible to connect to the information-energy field (biofield) of the object being studied;• Sense of inner unity with the world, awareness of oneself as a part of mankind, of the Earth, of the Universe, and a feeling of deep responsibility for the world and for ourselves in the world;• Striving for personal self-realization for the benefit of the cosmoplanetary world.In our opinion, the ways of actualization of intuition and harmonization of the activity of logical and intuitive components of the process of cognition should be attributed to the following (Tyurina, 2018):• Concentration, concentration of human consciousness of the subject being studied, deep and thorough knowledge of it.Psychological mood, deep concentration, focus of human consciousness on the subject of research lead to intuitive penetration into its essence, comprehension of the subject of study as if "from within." An intuitive act of cognition is the result of a huge concentration of all human efforts on a particular problem, deep and thorough knowledge of it, mobilization of all its potencies. In particular, for almost 20 years, D. Mandeleev worked continuously on the systematization of chemical elements, and only after that he "saw" his periodic system of elements in his dream. At academician M. Shchetynin school students spend 21 days (6 lessons daily) studying only one academic discipline for the purpose of deep penetration into its essence - information-energy merger, connection with the subject being studied, into a single whole, that is, achieving an intuitive level of comprehension.• Spiritual practices (prayer, meditation).Prayer and meditation are effective ways of spiritualizing a person, awakening and activating his/her intuitive potential. Through prayer, meditation a person learns to adjust to nature and Cosmos, eternity and infinity, the World Harmony, reaches consonance with the World, and permeates its inner essential depth with the heart.It is believed that it is prayer that promotes the spiritual purification of both the human soul and the surrounding world. During a heart-warming prayer a human comes to enlightenment and spiritual enlightenment, intuitive enlightenment.In the process of prayer, meditation, the right and left hemispheres of the brain begin to work synchronously, which makes the brain function in resonance with the Field of Consciousness or the Field of Information - Noosphere.• Spiritual processing of the corresponding religious, spiritual and philosophical sources, fine arts, classical music, information-energy interaction which raises the spiritual level of an individual, awakens his/her intuitive abilities.Spiritual literature is an important way of discovering and developing intuition and harmonizing the activity of intuitive and logical components of thinking, since information and energy interaction with spiritual literature contributes to individual’s spiritual growth, disclosure and development of intuition, and harmonization of personal intuitional and intellectual sphere.It should be noted that various forms of art, in particular, visual and musical, play a special role in the process of disclosure and development, intuition, harmonization of the logical and figurative, spiritual and intuitive perception of reality.The spiritual potential of art is, first of all, that in itself, creating spiritual values, spiritualizes a person, and interprets personality as a phenomenon of a global planetary-cosmic nature. True art has an ecumenical, cosmic dimension. The best masterpieces of world art transfer the idea of unity of humans with the world, their harmonious interaction.The creativity of great artists contributes to the disclosure and development of the personality's spirituality, the heart's perception of the world, the cultivation of the Cosmic Worldview, and directs the person to high ideals.Musical art is one of the most important means of revealing and developing intuition, harmonizing its spiritual and intuitive basis.The results of research by modern scholars show that classical, spiritual music activates the spiritual-intuitive sphere, harmonizes the person, gives a sense of joy and rest, and helps to restore spiritual and mental balance.It has been scientifically proven that classical musical compositions based on the perfection of harmony and rhythm, especially the works of J. Bach, L. Beethoven, J. Brahms, A. Vivaldi, G. Handel, F. List, F. Mendelssohn, A. Mozart, S. Rakhmaninov, O. Scriabin, P. Tchaikovsky, F. Chopin, F. Schubert, R. Schumann and others have a positive effect on the individual on the spiritual, mental and physiological levels, since classical music relates mainly to the natural rhythms of the human body. This music causes not only positive emotions, but also represents a powerful energy force that inspires humans and the world: makes a person more perfect and the world more beautiful.Consequently, fine arts, classical music, contribute to the disclosure and development of the spiritual and intuitive potential of the individual, to harmonization of his/her intuitive-intellectual sphere; they help the person to grow spiritually and be filled with high spiritual energy, accordingly, to change, and improve the natural and social environment.- Bioadequate REAL-methodology of noosphere education (N. Maslova), in which stages of relaxation (accumulation of information, work of the right creative hemisphere in a state of rest), alternating with stages of activity (training of the left hemisphere: logic, analysis, synthesis of information) are presented. As a result, the work of the left and right cerebral hemispheres is synchronized, which promotes harmonization of consciousness, carries a beneficial influence on the spiritual, mental, social and physical health of the student's personality.The fundamental characteristics of the bioadequate method of noospheric education are:1. Health preserving - does not violate the nature of perception, processing and preservation of information.2. Corrective - restores the natural genetic sequence of work with the information and health of the student and the teacher.3. Developing - improves the body's reserves.4. Harmonizing - integrates all systems of the body and personality (Vernadsky, 2002).According to studies of the neuropathologist I. Smokvinova, PhD, bioadequate methods of noosphere education, taking into account the physiological and informational and energy resources of the individual, contribute to the harmonization of the work of the left and right cerebral hemispheres, awaken higher feelings, recharge with life energy, teach the ability to direct vitality to the realization of one’s own higher potential, which also has a beneficial effect on the spiritual, mental and physical health of the individual. Moreover, due to the application of a bioadequate technique, psychological and physiological stress is eliminated, and a positive emotional mood is created that heals the body and the student's psychics (Osho, 2000). According to N. Maslova, holistic thinking contributes to the acquisition of basic energy, biologically adequate to livelihoods programs (Kurmyshev, 2013).Many independent groups of scientists (teachers, psychologists, physicians, biologists) have proved that noosphere education, harmonizing the left and right hemispheres thinking, has a healing effect on the body of both the student and the teacher, contributes to the development of natural creativity.Practical valueResults of our study can be used in lectures and practical classes with students in medical psychology, psychology of creativity, social, general, pedagogical psychology, pedagogy (sections of didactics, spiritual and moral education), sociology, philosophy, etc.ConclusionsThus, the actualization of the spiritual and intuitive potential of the individual and the harmonization of the activity of the left and right cerebral hemispheres stimulates the disclosure of spiritual and creative abilities of the individual, fills the individual with spiritual energy, and the person becomes a source of spiritualization of himself/herself and the world, thus contributing to the spiritual and psychological improvement of society, humanity, and civilization in general, since at the information-energy level, "Man - Society - Earth - Universe" this is the only cosmoplanetary organism, all parts of which are mutually interconnected, interact and stipulate with one another. We consider that it is important in the future to develop appropriate special disciplines for all the sections of modern school and keep working in the direction of developing and incorporating into the content of the curricula, relevant pedagogical technologies aimed at the disclosure and development of the intuitive-mental sphere of the individual

Introduction. Digital transformation is taking place gradually and in stages in Ukraine. However, the coronavirus pandemic and the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine strengthened digital transformation processes in society in almost all types of activities. It should be noted that Ukrainians are quickly mastering new digital technologies, which accelerates digital transformation. That is why constant research and analysis of modern trends and prospects of digital transformation in Ukraine in current conditions is quite relevant. The purpose of the article is the research process of modern trends and vectors of digital transformation in Ukraine. The results. It has been studied that Ukraine has significantly increased its ranking in Open Data in Europe over the past two years. It was noted that in 2021, Ukraine received the maximum value of 220 points for open data management, 160 points for portal use, and 134 points for portal stability. The analysis of modern trends in digital transformation showed insignificant changes in enterprises' digital transformation indicators in 2020, in some cases even smaller than the indicators of 2018. In general, for the years 2018-2020, there were positive changes regarding the increase in the number of enterprises that allowed e-commerce, the share of enterprises that conducted "big data" analysis, completed training in the field of ICT, used 3D printing, and found/attempted to see specialists in the field of ICT. On the other hand, a negative trend of decreasing indicators of the share of all enterprises that sent invoices and the number of enterprises that had vacancies for ICT specialists that were difficult to fill was determined. Conclusions. It is substantiated that in the conditions of global challenges and military aggression, digital transformation is most effective in three main areas, namely: scale, scope, and speed; property, assets, and economic value; relationships, markets, and ecosystems. Furthermore, it is emphasized that the number of vectors of digital transformation in Ukraine in the conditions of war and globalization challenges are: innovation management, self-service, digital business, shared services 4.0, economic regulation, thinking design, automation of business processes, modeling, knowledge base, innovation ecosystem, digital chain сost, future software, etc. Keywords: digital transformation, digitalization, vectors, open data, rating, Open Data in Europe.

The development of national and international biotechnology law in the context of new constitutional priorities, threats and challenges to life, public health and safety, is one of the current and yet under-researched topics in the scientific legal literature. Unfortunately, pro-gress in the life sciences is proceeding faster than the legal thinking that should accompany them. Breakthroughs in biology and medicine dictate the corresponding development of law, which today unfortunately lags chronically behind, resulting in gaps and contradictions between existing legal norms. As contemporary researchers have noted, and as is also evident in judicial practice, the issues of regulating the objects of bio-law - the body, life, procreation, self-identification, and ecology - mirror the contradictions of our society. The need to legally regulate the application of biotechnology has led to the formation of bioclaw as a new, integrated set of laws and, in the long term, as a branch of law of a new generation. As a response to the rapid introduction of advances in biotechnology into human life, we believe that bio-law must take into account the benefits and challenges associated with the impact of new technologies on the human body that may fundamentally alter the human condition as a physical individual. In this case, ethical issues, i. e. the requirements of bioethics, lead to a reflection on the content of bioethics in contemporary democracies and legal states. In particular, the introduction of technologies associated with gene editing, cloning, surrogacy, transplantation medicine, sex reassignment surgeries and other interventions into human nature, the consequences of which are not fully understood and threaten the physical and mental health of individuals, can cause irreparable harm to the spiritual, social, moral and ethical foundations of individuals, families, society, states and humanity as a whole. In our opinion, in the next few decades, bio-law will emerge as a global, integrated branch of law that simultaneously incorporates the norms of international law and national law. The main purpose of bio-law as a new branch of law is to counteract the global threat to humanity which consists in the emergence of a trend toward mass, large-scale changes to human nature and its unique natural qualities through the use of biotechnological advances. Therefore, the object of regulation and, accordingly, protection by this branch of law is not only the individual, his or her physical and spiritual health, but humanity as a whole, current and future generations. The uniqueness of bio-law as a new branch of law also lies in the fact that the individual, humanity, present and future generations are both the objects and subjects of law. The integrated nature of bioprinciples is manifested in the close connection of public and private interests with the obvious predominance of the public significance of their legal norms.

Abstract Background Yangqin was introduced into China in the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty. With the flow of musicians, it spread all over the world. It is not only used for folk God welcoming games, birthday celebrations, literati self entertainment or music clubs, but also the most eye-catching musical instrument in private collections, government and business and children's Museum music clubs. From the leisure and entertainment stage of “song” popular in the Qing Dynasty to the commercial rap of “selling medicine” and “sweeping the floor”, it absorbs the nutrition of performance forms such as car drum array, Siping opera, Tea Picking Opera and juggling, and adds the “opera in the play” of hand and foot dance to show the footprints of Yangqin. Xiangju opera, developed from Taiwan songs, is a mixture of Zhangzhou Xiangjiang generation folk music. Hunan Opera (Gezai Opera) is the only common local opera on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In 2005, Hunan opera was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list. It is deeply influenced by Southern Fujian culture and has distinctive Southern Fujian characteristics. It has played a positive role in promoting cross-strait cultural exchanges, which is reflected in the frequent exchanges between relevant researchers and troupes on both sides of the Strait. The excellent repertoire of Hunan opera has been widely praised at home and abroad. Research Objects and Methods This study adopts the methods of literature analysis and field investigation to collect and sort out the research data. Literature analysis is mainly the collection, comparison and classification of historical data. Fieldwork is the author's fieldwork for more than ten years and his contact with folk artists and musicians of Gezai Opera. Starting from the Yangqin proposition, the master's thesis began to study and collect data, collect and read Taiwan Local Chronicles, newspaper documents, Shengzhi diaries, oral history and fieldwork for more than ten years, and copy the existing music manuscripts, photos, sound recordings and audio materials in the public sector. At the same time, it is selected from the emotional experience report form compiled by Ekman, freisen and ancoli (1980), which has been modified many times by gross and widely used. There are 10 adjectives in the emotional experience report form. Each emotion was assessed by the 9-point Likert scale, “0” means no, “8” means very strong, and the subjects were required to choose the corresponding number according to their actual emotional experience. 2.2.4 questionnaire on the degree of implementation of guidance. The questionnaire consists of 6 questions. Using the 6-point Likert scale, “0” indicates complete non-compliance, and “5” indicates complete compliance. The purpose is to check whether the subjects adjust their emotions according to the instructions of the main test when watching emotional movie clips, and ask the subjects to answer truthfully according to their actual situation. Results Performance knowledge comes from objective analysis. Performers practice and change the objective world and themselves through psychological thinking such as perception, imagination and emotion. With the progress of the times, Hunan opera is facing the dual pressure of economic and cultural inheritance. Economically, the income of the troupe's actors is unstable, which gradually weakens the actors' enthusiasm for the cause of Hunan opera. In terms of cultural inheritance, the older generation of Hunan opera is relatively old. The emergence of new culture has reduced the interest of contemporary young people in Hunan opera and led to the crisis of the inheritance of Hunan opera. In the process of the influence of life events on anxiety, they play an intermediary role through economic response. The higher the economic level, the stronger the emotional regulation ability of the troupe personnel. Among them, the mediating effect of anxiety can be adjusted through psychological elasticity. That is, economic level can regulate the pressure of life events, and coping style can be used as an intermediary factor of emotional regulation to regulate the impact of life events on anxiety through coping style. Conclusion Facing the challenge of traditional art inheritance and survival, driven by the cultural environment and multicultural environment of the global village, this is a problem that many traditional arts must think about if they want to survive. The government needs to take various measures to change the current situation and make the excellent traditional culture of Hunan opera continue to flourish. Through more bilateral exchanges and communication, cross-strait cultural inheritance and innovation, strengthen cross-strait cultural and artistic exchanges and cooperation, jointly play the piano art for the opera troupe, and work together for the in-depth development of both sides. Acknowledgments This paper is the general project of Fujian Social Science Planning Project Art Fund in 2019: Fujian Taiwan Gezai Opera (Xiang Opera). Phased achievements of Yangqin Development Research (Project No.: fj2019b029).

Dear Authors and Readers, vol. 48, number 4 of “Zeszyty Teoretyczne Rachunkowości” (ZTR, “The Theoretical Journal of Accounting”) includes articles in English accepted for the special issue of ZTR in 2024, entitled Sustainable Development, Accounting, and Accountants. This issue also contains a review of the collective work entitled Handbook of Accounting, Accountability and Governance, edited by Garry D. Carnegie and Christopher J. Napier, as well as a list of reviewers of articles in ZTR in 2024. Starting in 2012, this marks the 13th thematic issue of ZTR in English. The papers featured in this issue focus on the theme of sustainable development. The shifting landscape, marked by recent sustainability reporting regulations such as the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), and the global standards introduced by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), has the potential to drive significant transformation in both the practice and teaching of accounting. Together, the papers in this Special Issue provide valuable insights into the intersection of accounting, sustainability, regulation, and education, highlighting the challenges and opportunities faced by those navigating the evolving landscape of sustainability reporting. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are central to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, which outlines a global framework for achieving sustainable development across economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Arleta Szadziewska, Anna Szychta, and Halina Waniak-Michalak examine how companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) communicate their commitment to the SDGs, using indicators proposed by the Intergovernmental Working Group of Experts on International Accounting and Reporting Standards (UNCTAD-ISAR). Through a content analysis of 235 reports from 2019 to 2022, their study reveals a gap between companies’ declared commitments to the SDGs and their actual disclosures. The research identifies company size, industry type, and the number of declared SDGs as key factors that influence the extent of SDG reporting. In contrast, the reporting standards used (e.g., GRI) did not significantly affect disclosure levels. Hanna Mysaka and Ivan Derun conducted a bibliometric analysis of the theoretical frameworks underlying sustainability reporting (SR) and non-financial reporting (NFR) within the context of EU regulatory changes. Their analysis shows that SR has become the dominant framework in shaping EU corporate reporting regulations, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Their study underscores the need for further development in the NFR domain, highlighting the underdevelopment of its theoretical framework as a key factor hindering the effectiveness of the EU’s non-financial reporting regulations. Materiality analysis serves as a fundamental pillar of sustainability reporting. Mohamed Anas Belidan and Halima Baghad provide a scoping review of the theoretical foundations of materiality in sustainability reporting, comparing single and double materiality approaches. Their findings highlight a growing emphasis on double materiality, driven by evolving stakeholder expectations and regulatory mandates. The authors argue that harmonizing reporting standards and fostering active stakeholder engagement are crucial for enhancing the quality and consistency of sustainability disclosures. Paweł Szalacha’s study also focuses on the concept of materiality, examining the implementation of double materiality by early adopters among Polish companies. Using 2023 sustainability reports as empirical data, he finds that integrating double materiality into sustainability reporting has brought changes to the content of reports and the disclosure of materiality determination processes. The study identifies key drivers behind these changes and highlights reporting gaps, offering valuable insights into the challenges companies face in implementing double materiality. The CSRD introduces mandatory sustainability assurance at a limited level; however, some companies already have experience in this area through voluntary practices. Małgorzata Macuda and Paweł Zieniuk analyze voluntary assurance practices in European companies’ sustainability reports prior to the CSRD’s implementation. Their research, based on a sample of 576 companies, shows that the decision to seek voluntary assurance was influenced by company-specific factors, prior experience in sustainability reporting, and the strength of auditing standards in the country. Their study provides valuable insights into the extent of voluntary assurance practices before the introduction of mandatory assurance requirements under the CSRD. Finally, a new approach to accounting education is needed to better align with this evolving context. The paper by Abdel K. Halabi, Alan Labas, and Craig Hurley explores whether introducing a transformative subject on sustainability, the environment, and the SDGs into a master’s accounting course can foster critical thinking and shift student attitudes. Using qualitative data from student reflective journals, analyzed thematically through NVIVO software, the findings reveal transformative outcomes, including changed atti-tudes, increased self-efficacy to drive positive change, enhanced critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of business impacts on the environ-ment. Most students expressed a preference for working in environmentally responsible businesses. The research addresses a gap by highlighting account-ing students’ perspectives on sustainability-related issues and supports calls to redefine accounting beyond technical practice. The Reviews section of this issue of ZTR contains a review of Handbook of Accounting, Accountability and Governance, a collective work published in the “Research Handbooks on Accounting” series by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2023. This comprehensive publication, edited by eminent professors of accounting Garry D. Carnegie and Christopher J. Napier, is a compendium of knowledge on the interconnections between accounting, accountability, and governance. It includes an Introduction and 21 chapters authored by 45 specialists in the fields of accounting, accountability, and governance. The Handbook is a valuable source of information for researchers and doctoral students about the history, present and possible future of the triad of issues expressed in the title of this work. We are pleased to announce that the Editorial Team of ZTR has completed a project under the “Development of scientific journals” program for the period 4 October 2022 – 4 October 2024 (Agreement RCN/SP/0062/2021/1; funding from the Ministry: PLN 80,000, total project amount: PLN 122,560). The final report was submitted to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in November 2024. All planned activities were completed on time. During the implementation of the project, eight issues of ZTR were prepared for publication and published, containing 77 articles: 41 in English and 36 in Polish. Of the 41 articles in English, 19 were published in two thematic issues (Vol. 46, No. 4 in 2022 and Vol. 47, No. 4 in 2023), while the remaining 22 articles were included in the six other issues of ZTR published in 2023 and 2024. The Editorial Team would like to thank all the reviewers of ZTR articles so far, especially the 71 specialists who provided anonymous reviews and insightful feedback in 2024. The list of Polish and foreign reviewers is included in this issue of ZTR and on the website of our journal https://ztr.skwp.pl/cms/reviewers. We would also like to thank all the authors of articles published in the four issues of ZTR in 2024 for their cooperation with the Editorial Team. We encourage authors and readers to visit ZTR’s website at https://ztr.skwp.pl/, where you can find a lot of information about the journal, including its objectives and scope, publication ethics, principles of reviewing, accepting, and preparing articles, and the procedures for submitting a paper to the journal. Polish and foreign authors are invited to submit interesting papers for future issues of ZTR, including a thematic issue in 2025 entitled Contemporary chal-lenges, conditions, and directions of development of accounting (for more, see Call for papers published in ZTR, Vol. 48, No. 2 and at https://ztr.skwp.pl/cms/CMS:647). On behalf of the entire ZTR Editorial Team, we wish all authors, reviewers, members of the Editorial Board, and readers of ZTR a lot of health, happiness, and peace, as well as numerous professional successes in 2025. We hope that all your plans come to fruition. Yours faithfully Joanna Krasodomska, Nadia Albu, Anna Szychta

By its very nature, fashion consumption assumes a diverse and updated relevance in light of social, cultural, and economic transformations. The global fashion industry is undergoing a paradigm shift driven by rapid technological advances (Bertola &amp; Teunissen, 2018; Lee, 2022), increased awareness of environmental sustainability (Heim &amp; Hopper, 2022; Mishra et al., 2020), and the changing values of individuals (Bürklin, 2018; Camacho-Otero et al., 2020; Domingos et al., 2022). These transformations are forcing creative, production, distribution and communication systems and, not least, the “end consumer” to critically reflect on the role and impacts of the fashion system (Luchs et al., 2015). Digital technologies, for example, have revolutionized how fashion is produced, distributed, and consumed. Digital platforms enable unprecedented levels of interaction between brands and consumers, fostering new forms of engagement and co-creation (Gielens &amp; Steenkamp, 2019). These are widespread, ubiquitous platforms that expand and fragment the fashion narrative (Sadler, 2021), creating a more interconnected, immediate ecosystem within which to experiment with new systems of relationship and mediation. In addition, the growing recognition of the fashion industry’s environmental and social impact has catalyzed a movement toward more sustainable practice. On the one hand, the fast fashion model, characterized by rapid production cycles and disposable garments, is being challenged by consumers and activists calling for greater accountability and transparency (Mazzarella et al., 2019). Conversely, sustainable fashion emphasizes ethical production, resource efficiency and circularity, seeking to minimize negative impacts and promote long-term well-being (Centobelli et al., 2022). Finally, European legislation has been proactive in promoting sustainability within the textile and fashion industries through several key legislative initiatives and strategies aimed at reducing the environmental and social impacts of textile production and consumption (European Commission, 2022; Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 Establishing a Framework for the Setting of Ecodesign Requirements for Sustainable Products, Amending Directive (EU) 2020/1828 and Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 and Repealing Directive 2009/125/ECText with EEA Relevance., 2024). The term “consumption” is inherently multivalent and nuanced. Its very etymology encompasses several facets: consumption means “transformation” of natural resources into fungible goods, but also of signs and symbols into systems of meaning and value. This dual nature of consumption underscores its complexity. On the one hand, it involves converting resources into products that satisfy human needs and desires (Boivin, 2008). On the other hand, it involves the symbolic process of attributing meanings to these products that resonate within cultural and social contexts (Davis, 1992). This duality is particularly evident in fashion, where clothing has both functional and self-expression purposes. Consumption also means “destruction”, that is, the reduction to nothingness of tangible or intangible elements, in turn rendering them unusable through the very act of use. This aspect of consumption highlights the inherent tension between use and waste. Every act of consumption carries with it a potential for depletion and degradation, whether physical goods or intangible experiences. In fashion, this is manifested in the life cycle of clothing, from creation and use to eventual disposal (Shirvanimoghaddam et al., 2020). The environmental cost of producing and discarding garments is significant and prompts a critical examination of consumption practices and their sustainability. Obviously, in its most common meaning, consumption stands for “use” or “utilization”, which consists of the activity of making use of a tangible or intangible item but also, in a broader sense, in the act of enjoying services, experiences or activities that do not involve transformation or destruction. This broader interpretation of consumption emphasizes the experiential dimension, where value derives from enjoyment and engagement with fashion as a social and cultural phenomenon (Woodward, 2007). Fashion consumption thus encompasses a wide range of activities, from the purchase and use of clothing to its enjoyment in cultural terms to the experience provided by virtual worlds. The fashion system has always intertwined its practices and processes with this multivalent universe that constitutes the landscape of the consumption system of both the creative, material and human resources along the entire fashion supply chain and the fashion object itself, its images and projections. The interaction between creation and consumption is a distinctive feature of the fashion industry. Designers and brands create products that are functional and charged with symbolic meanings, anticipating how consumers will interpret and interact with them. This relationship extends throughout the supply chain, influencing decisions about material sourcing, production processes, communication strategies, and retail experiences. In the current digital and sustainable transformation context, this intertwining opens up broad areas for thinking about consumption practices, processes and impacts with a more critical and responsible approach (Colombi &amp; D’Itria, 2023). Digital technologies have expanded the possibilities for creating, sharing and experiencing fashion. Virtual and augmented reality, for example, offer consumers new ways to interact with fashion products and brands, blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds (Zarantonello &amp; Schmitt, 2022). These innovations enable more personalized and immersive experiences, fostering deeper connections between consumers and fashion. On the one hand, focusing on more sustainable forms of natural resource use promotes new business models and circular forms of production, which involve reducing, recovering, and reusing finished products and their waste. Circular fashion models aim to extend the life cycle of garments, reducing the need for new resources and minimizing waste. Practices such as upcycling, recycling, and using sustainable materials are integral to this approach (de Aguiar Hugo et al., 2021). By designing long-lasting products and encouraging practices such as repair and resale, the fashion industry can reduce its environmental footprint and promote a more sustainable consumption pattern. On the other hand, new forms of collaborative consumption are emerging, aimed at extending the life cycle of products through the adoption of curation practices, re-signification and rethinking. These practices promote more active and conscious consumer participation, emphasizing the shift from passive consumption to an engaged and responsible use of fashion (McNeill &amp; Venter, 2019). Collaborative consumption models, such as clothing rental services, fashion exchanges, and peer-to-peer resale platforms, encourage consumers to share and reuse clothing, reducing demand for new products (Arrigo, 2021). These models not only promote sustainability but also create communities of individuals who share values and practices. The third issue of Fashion Highlight investigates the dynamics, practices, and impacts of fashion consumption in the light of the transformations taking place, questioning the role and potential that fashion industries, creative communities, consumers and education can express. The issue comprehensively covers the different declinations of contemporary fashion consumption, highlighting the trajectories that shape practices, processes and methods within the context of the - long and complex - fashion value chain. The contributions cover three relevant and promising macro-areas to understand the state of the art of fashion design, manufacturing and consumption and to get a preview of the near future: “Consumed fashion”, with a focus on the economic-productive dimension of fashion within a context for which digital and sustainable transformation is crucial, with necessary implications in terms of reconfiguring and updating processes and competences; “Consumer communities”, through the investigation of new and contemporary orientations towards more responsible and sustainable consumption practices; “Consumer culture”, concerning the dynamics, approaches and practices through which fashion is narrated, conveyed, and experienced. The first section, “Consumed Fashion”, brings together articles that critically explore the trajectories within which fashion manufacturing systems are evolving, highlighting both the criticalities and impacts of a socio-economic system dominated by hyper-production and hyper-consumption, and outlining and experimenting with new and more responsible approaches to design and manufacturing. Likewise, the selected articles highlight transformational dynamics involving the fashion “know-how”, delving into the implications needed to reconfigure and update processes and skills and emphasizing the need for continuous evolution in how fashion is understood and practiced. These dynamics require a shift in the sector’s knowledge base, leading to a re-examination of traditional practices and the development of new sustainable approaches that respond to contemporary transformations. Jacopo Battisti and Alessandro Spennato critically examine the profound impact of fast fashion on individuals and societies in the context of globalization and consumer capitalism. The study explores how the industry’s rapid replication of trends and profit motivations have transformed clothing consumption, leading to hyper-consumption and disposability, with negative impacts in terms of economic dependency and inequalities to the detriment of low labour-cost countries. The paper underscores the need to address these systemic injustices through collective action, stressing the importance of prioritizing social and environmental responsibility to envision a more ethical and equitable fashion industry. Erminia d'Itria and Chiara Colombi propose an examination of sustainable innovation dynamics within the fashion industry, scrutinizing various merchandising strategies through fashion companies’ case studies. The authors build a system model centered on refashioning, formulated from diverse strategies aimed at enhancing product longevity and curbing overconsumption and overmanufacturing. Through their analysis, they identify three thematic frameworks that encapsulate sustainable design approaches, responsible practices, and conscious consumption strategies, thus providing reference for future research to explore the implications, challenges, and benefits of a viable, eco-sustainable future scenario. Isabella Enrica Alevato Aires and Stefan Lie explore the integration of next-generation materials into products with psychological significance to improve consumer acceptance and achieve environmental benefits. The study hypothesizes that customizing products with users’ genetic material can better represent their environmental concerns and individuality. Focusing on biofabricated bags, the research moves from secondary research to materials testing and prototyping to investigate whether incorporating the user’s genetic material into a bag can symbolize self-extension and advances in materials design, thus supporting environmental sustainability. Gianni Denaro and Andrea Pruiti’s article delves into the evolution of production and consumption paradigms in the fashion industry, highlighting the growing emphasis on customising fashion products through local craftsmanship, an approach considered more environmentally, economically, socially and culturally sustainable. Beginning with a renewed interest in local craft traditions, particularly in Italy, where the “Made in Italy” label exemplifies a fusion of creative manual skills and taste rooted in local tradition, the article explores how designers are integrating these craft practices into industrial production, promoting a new dimension of “know-how” that combines local specificity with industrial processes. Ludovica Rosato, Alberto Calleo, Simona Colitti, Giorgio Dall’Osso e Valentina De Matteo present an interesting case study on a multidisciplinary, multistakeholder model designed for a hybrid research-education-business environment. This model shows how involving research and industry professionals in a collaborative learning model can produce results that address contemporary fashion industry challenges. The study emphasizes the importance of collective intelligence in design-led innovation, particularly in the framework of open innovation, and through the adoption of co-design processes, proposes new strategies for industry transformation, especially in the shaded realm of technical apparel and uniforms. The article by Angelica Vandi, Paola Bertola and Emma Suh explores the evolution of the concept of “materiality” in fashion, influenced by Industry 4.0 technologies, and its implications in human-computer interaction (HCI). The research, resulting from a collaboration between the Gianfranco Ferré Research Center of the Politecnico di Milano and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, employs a Reverse Engineering approach to study and deconstruct a garment from the Gianfranco Ferré archive. This process aims to rematerialize the garment and integrate HCI principles into educational applications in culture and design. The results underscore the innovative potential of the fusion of traditional craftsmanship and advanced production, highlighting the democratization and dissemination of archival knowledge through technological hybridization and interdisciplinary collaboration. The second section, “Consumer Communities”, brings together articles that critically reflect on the changing dynamics of fashion consumption and the growing influence of consumer communities, highlighting their intrinsic motivations and imagining future trajectories. This section analyses how consumer behaviour, social movements and community-led initiatives are reshaping the fashion industry towards sustainability and ethical approaches. By examining different case studies and research findings, the selected articles provide insights into how consumer participation, digital platforms and innovative consumption patterns are beginning to contribute to a more sustainable and responsible fashion ecosystem and what - desirable - impacts they may have on the future of fashion. Claudia Morea and Silvia Gambi explore the central role of consumers in the transition to sustainable fashion. Recent consumer purchasing decisions have shaped new trends and business models, with one segment viewing purchasing as a political choice and in line with European legislation promoting sustainability in the fashion industry. The research surveyed Generation Z to investigate their familiarity with eco-design strategies related to the use phase, revealing a gap between policy and design orientations and actual consumer engagement. The study highlights the need to bridge the gap between policy, design and consumer behaviour for true sustainability in fashion. Lam Hong Lan and Donna Cleveland’s article analyzes the shift to sustainable consumption through pre-owned fashion in Vietnam. The research includes observations of local media, analysis of two major pre-owned fashion platforms, and insights from an online survey of Vietnamese consumers. This comprehensive study reveals how online media, particularly celebrity endorsements and social commerce, contribute significantly to this transformation by building e-communities that support circular fashion practices. The findings reveal that these e-communities are crucial in promoting responsible consumption among Vietnamese youth, driven by economic, environmental, and style considerations that make second-hand fashion attractive. Iryna Kucher’s article examines fashion consumption by analyzing clothing purchase, use, and disposal practices in Denmark and Ukraine. Employing the theory of fashion consumption temporalities, the study analyzes how these practices have evolved due to social changes. Through wardrobe studies of different age groups, the research highlights the unique and common aspects of sustainable clothing consumption among Western and post-Soviet consumers. It also introduces an additional temporality of clothing consumption, challenging previous studies and offering new perspectives for understanding the transition to sustainability in fashion. Laura Giraldi, Marta Maini, and Francesca Morelli examine the contemporary fashion consumption landscape, focusing on consumers' growing awareness of sustainability in the fashion industry. Analyzing the current state and highlighting exemplary sustainable practices, the article reveals emerging service design solutions that promote more sustainable and conscious fashion consumption. These practices, such as second-hand shopping, collaborative wardrobe sharing, and clothing customization, reshape consumer experiences and push brands to adapt their communication strategies to appeal to the more conscious Gen Z audience. Remaining in collaborative fashion consumption practices, Gabriela Fabro Cardoso analyzes the final stages of retail dynamics as potential pathways to a more sustainable future, focusing on the distribution and use phases through collaborative consumption models such as resale, rental and subscription services. Through case studies, the research explores the relationship between community involvement in retail activities - such as product authentication, promotion, price negotiation, and transaction completion - and corporate commitments to sustainability, including consumer education on circularity, financial support for sustainable practices, and progress monitoring systems. Finally, Giovanni Conti and Martina Motta explore the resurgence of knitwear in the contemporary fashion industry, emphasizing its role as a bridge between creation and consumption and challenging traditional fashion norms. Their qualitative research highlights knitwear’s response to changing consumer attitudes, technological advances and global events, showing its potential to promote creativity, sustainability and ethical practices. The article investigates the space created by knitwear, questioning the new role of individuals, who are freer to experiment and experiment with interconnected aspects, breaking away from being mere consumers and becoming conscious makers. The third and final section, “Consumer Culture”, presents a selection of articles that aim to analyze, adopting different points of view, the dynamics, approaches and practices through which fashion is narrated, transmitted and experienced. This section explores fashion narratives and recent evolutions in terms of languages, content and formats, focusing on the impact of digital technologies. Examining historical perspectives, philosophical readings and the transformative power of digital media, these articles offer a comprehensive understanding of how consumer culture shapes and is shaped by fashion. The studies provide insights into the cyclical nature of fashion, the intersection of fashion and social class, the emerging role of the metaverse, the motivations behind digital fashion consumption, and the implications of technologies in sustainable fashion. Karmen Samson opens the discussion with a theoretical reflection on fashion as an “economy of the ephemeral”, emphasizing its cyclical and transitory nature within consumer culture. Using the concepts of “blooming” and “decay”, the author elucidates the temporal dynamics of fashion, integrating these natural processes with the temporal politics of industry. By investigating the interplay between time, consumerism, and fashion’s impermanence, the article provides a deeper understanding of cycles that extend beyond traditional notions and presents a detailed and nuanced analysis of fashion's fleeting essence, encouraging to reconsider the significance of decay within the fashion industry. Shajwan Nariman Fatah’s article delves into the social dynamics captured in the narratives of the Toile de Jouy textile through a philosophical perspective. This study aims to reveal the fundamental connection between working-class labor and bourgeois consumption patterns as depicted in Toile de Jouy. Utilizing the theoretical frameworks of Karl Marx and Jean Baudrillard, the research examines the links between fashion, production methods, consumer behavior, and the concept of simulation, highlighting how the capitalist system commodifies/appropriates the product without regard for its aesthetic qualities, labor origins, or intrinsic value. Finally, diving into the impacts of digital technologies on fashion consumption, Romana Andò delves into the emerging and evolving concept of the Metaverse within the fashion industry. Through qualitative research focused on international Millennials and Generation Z consumers, the study explores the meanings associated with the Metaverse, its intersection with the digitization of fashion and digital apparel, and its target audience's media literacy and expectations. The investigation highlights the relationship between fashion and individual self-presentation in the Metaverse and examines how these digital environments are transforming consumption processes in the fashion industry. Adil Boughlala and Silvia Mazzucotelli Salice’s article explores the intricate relationship between contemporary fashion consumption and digital tools, from pre-purchase browsing to post-purchase sharing on social media. The study delves into the growing field of digital fashion, particularly the motivations behind consumer adoption of digital fashion end products such as NFT fashion, video game skins, and AR filters. The research, adopting a mixed-media approach, examines the profiles and cultures surrounding digital fashion consumption, suggesting that digital fashion contributes significantly to identity formation and self-expression, creating a new “phygital” hybrid identity paradigm in which the physical and digital realms merge, reinforcing socio-cultural dynamics within brand communities. By means of data from web platforms and social media recommendation systems, Tommaso Elli proposes research to identify and analyze significant local projects in sustainable fashion and design initiatives in the Milanese context. The research aims to investigate the relationships between urban actors, highlight key sustainability advocates, and evaluate the effectiveness of digital methods in studying local phenomena. The results demonstrate the potential of these methodologies to improve the understanding and promotion of sustainable practices in fashion and design. To conclude, Ermanno Petrocchi investigates the influence of persuasive technologies on consumer behavior in sustainable fashion. The study addresses the ethical concerns surrounding sustainability labels and their implementation within digital platforms, highlighting potential consumer risks in the digital age. By analyzing consumption patterns and consumer preferences, the paper reveals how persuasive technologies can manipulate individuals with weak preferences for sustainable fashion, thereby affecting the formation and expression of their identity. Together, these sections offer a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted nature of fashion consumption in the contemporary world. By examining the economic, social and cultural dimensions of consumption, the issue provides a nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics shaping the fashion industry today. Contributors highlight the critical need for a more responsible and reflective approach to fashion consumption that recognizes the interconnectedness of production, distribution and use and the potential for more sustainable and ethical practices. Through this critical lens, this issue thus advances the discourse on sustainable fashion and deepens understanding of the changing landscape of fashion consumption.

Along with the need for global competence, the aspect of high-level thinking skills that is widely emphasized nowadays has demanded students to be intelligent individuals who apply the ability of learning skills through their own determination by implementing effective learning methods through self-regulated learning. However, the study found that in the teaching and learning of high-level thinking skills, the approach in learning self-regulation is less applied. Thus, this concept paper aims to discuss the application of self-regulation learning theory in teaching and learning metacognitive-based high-level thinking skills. This study uses an analytical approach to the literature review in discussing the relationship between learning self-regulation, metacognition and high-level thinking skills, the definition and concept of self-regulation learning, self-learning theory and the importance of self-regulation learning in teaching and learning metacognitive-based high-level thinking skills. Self-regulated learning theory suggests that teachers can use metacognitive elements in self-regulated learning to improve students' cognitive abilities and improve pedagogical knowledge and teaching efficiency. Through the application of this theory, it gives implications to the teaching and learning practices of teachers and students in improving students' thinking skills based on metacognition.

Euro-American psychology’s strong focus on the individual mind and behavior has become a fundamental part of global development agendas. Concepts like self-regulation, self-actualization, self-efficacy, and behavior change decorate the development discourse. Scholars term this phenomenon the “psychologization of development.” The main driver of this focus is likely rooted in the hegemonic belief that Western psychological theories are universally applicable. Yet, the discipline’s embeddedness in Euro-American imperialism, globalization, and neoliberalism makes its theories particularly un-universal and unfit in many contexts. Nevertheless, people in non-Western societies are increasingly subjected to development interventions targeting their individual behavior. Using examples from research in sub-Saharan Africa of how articulations of harmful witchcraft may increase because of development interventions that promote individualized ways of being and thinking, this article prompts a cultural and decolonial perspective to reimagine other ways of doing development.

Peace for a common man indicates the existing condition in his/her surroundings. Everyone expects peace to come from the external sources to the extent that can fulfil one’s satisfactory level. Man is not separate from his society. So, if s/he has expectations of a peaceful environment there are duties/skills which he himself or herself should develop and follow. It can be started from one to many and vice-versa and in harmony. For this there is a need of self-regulation in everyday life which can foreshadow peace in gradual steps. This is possible only when one understands his/her Self. Peace is each one’s responsibility in every simple manner one can. We should not depend on the Government or any authority or organization to grant peace. This attitude has to be changed because Government is of the people, by the people and for the people. One of the biggest reasons of conflict, violence and unrest is that we try to think for ourselves first, our own needs and desires too. There are ways to peace if we all are willing. First of all, the goal and then our efforts with mutual trust and respect can make everyday life better. To know about other people, their way of life is necessary for a better communication and to maintain healthy relationships. Even the stranger in a remote place, though harmful, is our responsibility, to prevent him/her from disturbing peace and to know the root cause of his/her inner conflict or state of mind. It is the self-regulation strategies which everyone should follow and practise in his/her immediate environment such as home, neighbourhood, institution and workplace. This can start from the local to the global level. This paper is a humble attempt to reflect on our everyday life, how we lead it, our thinking, feeling and doing that not only affects ourselves but also the surroundings and society. Health factor both physiological and mental has a role to play in inner peace and the peace to be built all around us. Several other causes as obstacles to inner peace, how to deal with them and self-regulation in various ways are included in this paper. Also to be aware of the basic life skills which will help to maintain our inner peace and our peaceful co-existence with the living and non-living around.

Economics as a discipline is currently in disarray. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, academic experts, students, commentators, practitioners and politicians all questioned the status of academic economics and many called for a 'new economic thinking'. Nearly a decade later, however, there is little evidence of a transformation in research and teaching. The present study first clarifies what is meant by a transformation of economics as a discipline, since this remains an ill-defined term and may be interpreted in very different ways. It then establishes the conditions of a successful transformation of the discipline in terms of intra-disciplinary and extra-disciplinary factors. The paper argues that economics as a discipline cannot be expected to trigger this transformation by itself (i.e. via self-regulation), since the 'market for economic ideas' is prone to market failure. In addition, the influence of external factors and actors on the market may serve to distort the congruence between the individual researcher's utility and societal welfare. External incentives are therefore required to establish constitutional guardrails that ensure fair competition between ideas.

Science Education has improved the quality of life, developed competitiveness, and helped understand global issues. Thus, the present study identified the impact of motivation and learning strategies in Biology among non- science majors. The respondents chosen through simple random sampling for this study were the 83 Information Technology students taking Biology. The study used the descriptive method of research using Biology Motivation Questionnaire (Glynn and Koballa, 2005) and Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich et al., 1991). These instruments were administered thrice: at the start of classes, and a week before the midterm and the final examinations. The data gathered were tabulated and analyzed. The student's midterm exam scores in biology were used as measures of achievement. The statistical tools employed were mean, standard deviation, ANOVA and regression analysis. Results showed that non- Science majors have high motivation level. Among the sub- components: intrinsic, and extrinsic motivation, personal relevance and self- determination have very high contribution to the level of motivation especially to the high performers. The results further revealed that all the respondents have the low assessment anxiety in Biology. For the learning strategies used, high performers often used organization, metacognitive selfregulation skills, rehearsal and elaboration while low performers seldom used the given strategies. Average performers often used these strategies including critical thinking. The level of motivation is significantly different among the different course performers. Among the learning strategies, there is a significant difference in the use of organization, metacognitive self- regulation skills and rehearsal. Furthermore, the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, personal relevance and self-determination are significant predictors of better performance in Biology. In conclusion, the level of motivation and learning strategies used can predict the level of Biology performance of non-science majors.

Abstract Focus of Presentation There has been a global proliferation of fully online programs in public health. There is a dearth of information on how to best deliver epidemiology and biostatistics education to students studying online. This may be due to the relatively few changes in the teaching of introductory epidemiology and biostatistics over the past several decades. This presentation reflects on our experiences in teaching these subjects. We pose some key research questions that may drive innovation of teaching to better prepare public health graduates. Findings Asynchronous online teaching of epidemiology and biostatistics brings both benefits and challenges. Novel methods of engaging students, supporting self-regulation of learning, building communities of practice, and other strategies to encourage active and deep learning need to be identified. Evidence for both student satisfaction and performance from effective online teaching of epidemiology and biostatistics is critical but currently lacking. Conclusions/Implications Given the growth in online delivery of tertiary education, evidence is required to determine best practice around quality online teaching of epidemiology and biostatistics. Researchers should use their unique skills in causal thinking to innovate methodologies to support evidence-based and quality assured teaching of epidemiology and biostatistics. Key messages The teaching of epidemiology and biostatistics is an essential part of ensuring a skilled public health workforce. Educational research should prioritise effective teaching strategies suited to the online learning environment and future-proof programs for online delivery.

Somatic intelligence is a type of human intelligence that includes self-regulation, emotional awareness, and listening to the body. Analyzing the scientific literature, it becomes clear that there are few theoretical works and empirical studies of somatic intelligence in Lithuania, but this does not mean the absence of discourse. Recently, the concept of somatic intelligence has been actively explored in the foreign scientific field using concepts such as somatic awareness, body awareness or interoceptive awareness; creating different models that enable detailing and structuring the concept of somatic intelligence; when constructing assessment systems (questionnaires). The concept of somatic intelligence, from a theoretical point of view, is a new and rarely studied phenomenon that requires in-depth research on a global and (especially) Lithuanian scale. Analyzing the research field of somatic intelligence, it was found that somatic intelligence is of interest to many researchers in various aspects related to the topic of kinesthetics: concept development and modelling, evaluation, education and management processes. The aim of the research – to reveal the features of kinestethic and sensory cognitive processes as the somatic intelligence parts in the educational management. The method of empirical research of the work is qualitative, which is based on phenomenological methodology. The qualitative research method (instrument) is a semi-structured individual interview. For the qualitative research, questions were prepared based on the model of somatic intelligence. The research results showed that, the somatic intelligence of primary school students in Klaipėda city formal education institutions is developed in a rather complex way. Methods and means of developing sensory intelligence include: creating a positive atmosphere, creating a sense of trust and security; the use of educational senses to create knowledge, cultural and environmental knowledge, training of critical thinking; involvement of students' and teacher's feelings, use of feelings for the development of critical thinking. Kinesthetic intelligence training methods include: training of fine and gross motor skills; methods and tools promoting discipline, methods and tools for overcoming stress and solving problems; physical involvement through role playing and other games. Research results related to other aspects of somatic intelligence (emotional and spiritual intelligence) will be presented in next article.

Jaan Kaplinski kireva loomingu kese on ökoloogiline mõtlemine. Nii tema luule, proosa, esseistika kui ka laiemalt eluhoiak põhineb dünaamilise tasakaalu otsimisel inimese ja looduse vahel. Põhiküsimus, millega ta oma loometöös tegeleb, on küsimus elu järele – kuidas elu mõista, kuidas tagada elu mitmekesisus ja jätkumine ning kuidas saavutada mõtestatud elu. Artikkel esitab visandi Kaplinski ökoloogilisest mõtlemisest, tuginedes peamiselt tema esseedele. Fookuses on küsimus, mida on Kaplinskil öelda meile praegu, keset süvenevat keskkonnakriisi: mida me saame õppida tema tekstidest eluks – ellujäämiseks – antropotseenis.&#x0D; ---&#x0D; Ecological thinking lies at the core of Jaan Kaplinski’s (1941–2021) diverse catalogue. His poetry, prose and essays were grounded in the quest to achieve a dynamic balance between humans and nature. Life was Kaplinski’s primary focus: how it can be understood, how to ensure its continuity, and how to attain a meaningful existence.&#x0D; Today, Kaplinski’s ecological writing has acquired new relevance. An ever-keener awareness of human responsibility for the environmental crisis, the declaration of a new geological era (the Anthropocene), and a re-evaluation of the relationship between nature and culture give us an opportunity to read Kaplinski from a fresh perspective.&#x0D; Kaplinski’s ecological worldview essentially boils down to three principles.&#x0D; The first of these is holism. As Kaplinski saw it, life forms a complete network in which everything is interconnected and interdependent. The clearest expression of this belief appeared in his 2000 travelogue Spring on Two Coasts, or A Sentimental Journey to America: “In fact, Life on Earth is not a chain, but a web, a network. If a knot or an eyelet breaks then it is still a web, albeit broken. Earth’s biosphere is currently a broken web, one so vital to us all. It is broken, but still working.” (Kaplinski 2000, 25)&#x0D; Secondly, there is the principle of anti-economism. Life cannot be subjected to economic thinking, which tends to view people as creators of value, and thus believe that more work equals more value. Economic thinking leads to environmental destruction and devastation. Ecology is uneconomic. Kaplinski wrote his main essay on this topic, titled: “Ecology and Economy”, in 1972.&#x0D; Thirdly, there is the principle of pluralism. In much of his writing, Kaplinski emphasised that reducing nature’s diversity weakens its self-regulating mechanisms. As a member of a tiny nation, he expressed equal appreciation for natural and cultural diversity, writing in 1972: “The biosphere is very strange and our cautious existence in it can be summarised with the slogan ‘reverence for information’. For not one genotype, community, language, or culture can be restored if they should disappear.” (Kaplinski [1972] 1996, 71)&#x0D; Kaplinski’s perception of today’s global ecological situation was highly pessimistic. The preservation of natural diversity was one of his greatest concerns, as he was convinced that humankind is taking more from the environment than can be restored through its renewal. Humanity has become a force of natural destruction, which simultaneously means self-destruction.&#x0D; Pessimistic diagnoses of the state of the world are abundant, to say the least. However, the value of Kaplinski’s writing for the modern readerfirst and foremost lies in his proposals for how to emerge from the crisis. In the interests of symmetry, one can select three items from his extensive catalogue.&#x0D; Firstly, a shift in thinking and in imagination is required. According to Kaplinski, improving the ecological situation starts with a change in thought, by replacing economic thinking with ecological thinking. Life-endangering dreams must be replaced with ones that can cause no harm: “There are two possible courses of action: either we slow the economic engine, refrain from accelerating, and leave most of our dreams unfulfilled, or we change the dreams themselves and dream only of what isn’t dangerous to achieve.” (Kaplinski [1972] 1996, 69)&#x0D; Secondly, the new self-regulation of mankind is mentioned. Kaplinski believes that it is possible to alter the relationships between humans and nature by consciously adjusting our behaviour. In his 1973 essay “Thoughts on Ecosystems and Human Culture”, he suggested that the history of human development seems to prove that we once possessed an ability to self-regulate, similar to that of other species: “If the stability of the ecosystem hinges greatly upon human activity, then man has, in principle, the opportunity to preserve or even restore stability by steering that ecosystem via his own actions. Man can govern nature by governing himself.” (Kaplinski [1973] 2004, 54)&#x0D; Thirdly, and most importantly, humankind as a whole can learn how to think ecologically and consciously regulate our behaviour based on the experiences of peoples that exist within nature. Kaplinski’s ecological worldview has strong roots in anthropology and one of his primary long-term interests was searching for ties between religion and ecological thinking. In sum, Kaplinski’s message to today’s world is this: humanity’s sole chance to survive in the Anthropocene is to learn to consider all living beings as an interconnected web, to exist in a way that disturbs as few other living beings as possible, and to seek an optimal balance between our needs and the environment’s possibilities. This will require a tremendous revolution of human thought; a cultural shift that places our attitude towards nature on new foundations that lie beyond simplistic contrasts such as culture vs. nature and humans vs. animals.

Teesid: Videomängud on saanud oluliseks kultuuriliseks ja hariduslikuks väljendusvahendiks, mille potentsiaali vaimse tervise hariduses ei ole veel piisavalt rakendatud. Artikkel käsitleb, kuidas koosloomepõhine videomängude disain võib toetada noorte täiskasvanute psühholoogilist heaolu, loovust ja õppimist. Erasmus+ töötoas kasutati kunstipõhist ja osaluslikku disainiprotsessi, et soodustada eneseväljendust, emotsionaalset teadlikkust ja refleksiooni. Metoodika lõimis osalusdisaini, metakognitiivse õppimise ja kunstipõhise tegevusuuringu. Tulemused viitavad, et selline lähenemine võib toetada motivatsiooni, keskendumisvõimet ja heaolu, pakkudes tõhusat viisi loovuse ja vaimse tervise ühendamiseks hariduslikus kontekstis. Mental health challenges faced by young adults have become a global concern, with rising rates of anxiety, depression, and stress. The World Health Organization highlights a decline in well-being, particularly among younger populations. In Estonia, nearly half of young adults report mental health difficulties, underscoring the need for innovative approaches to mental health education. While traditional interventions remain essential, creative and participatory methods are gaining recognition for their potential to enhance psychological well-being. One such approach is participatory video game design, which integrates artistic creativity, interactive storytelling, and collaborative learning to foster engagement and emotional resilience. This article explores how co-creative video game design can support psychological well-being, creativity and learning among young adults. Conducted during a three-day Erasmus+ workshop, the study investigates how art-based and participatory design practices can promote emotional awareness, presence, self-expression, and reflection. The methodology combines art-based action research, participatory design, and metacognitive learning into an integrated framework that enables safe, collaborative and meaningful exploration of mental health themes. Participants – international students aged 17 to 18 – worked in small teams to design game prototypes that addressed personal and social aspects of mental health. Two custom-developed toolkits structured the creative process: one based on flow theory, the other on visual world-building templates. These toolkits supported both creative design and psychological reflection. Participants also completed daily self-assessment surveys and the Flow Likelihood Questionnaire to assess their motivation, focus, and engagement. Results indicated increasing levels of attentional focus, intrinsic motivation, and psychological presence over the course of the workshop, with the highest scores on the final day. Participants reported enjoyment, self-development, and creative flow, suggesting the design process had both cognitive and emotional significance. Psychological frameworks were embedded within the design structure, allowing participants to internalise concepts such as flow and self-regulation through hands-on creative engagement, rather than direct instruction. This research positions participatory game design as more than a technical skill, it becomes a shared artistic and pedagogical process through which young people explore identity, emotions, and interpersonal dynamics. Co-creation offers a shift from passive media consumption to active authorship, fostering agency and reflective thinking. The facilitator’s role was framed not as instructor but as a ‘journey designer’, creating a flexible structure in which participants could safely navigate complex content, experiment, and express themselves. Methodologically, the study proposes a four-part model – game, creators, journey designer, and journey – that integrates artistic creation, learner agency, guidance, and the process of reflection. Flow theory was both a design concept and an evaluative lens, showing strong correlation with participant engagement. Quantitative data were supported by open-ended reflections in which participants articulated new insights into game mechanics, storytelling, teamwork, and their own emotional experiences. Rather than measuring outcomes alone, this study focuses on the conditions that support psychological well-being through creative participation. The results demonstrate that structured co-creation, rooted in interdisciplinary arts-based research, can create a psychologically supportive space where learning, expression, and personal growth intersect. In conclusion, this research contributes to the expanding field of arts-based mental health education by showing how participatory video game design can foster emotional presence, metacognitive awareness, and peer connection. It encourages further integration of creative, reflective, and collaborative practices into education and youth work contexts, offering a promising model for engaging young adults in meaningful dialogue around mental health.

Social media companies like to claim the world. Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is “building a global community”. Twitter promises to show you “what’s happening in the world right now”. Even Parler claims to be the “global town square”. Indeed, among the fungible aspects of digital culture is the promise of geographic fungibility—the interchangeability of location and national provenance. The taglines of social media platforms tap into the social imagination of the Internet erasing distance—Marshall McLuhan’s global village on a touch screen (see fig. 1). Fig. 1: Platform taglines: YouTube, Twitter, Parler, and Facebook have made globality part of their pitch to users. Yet users’ perceptions of geographic fungibility remain unclear. Scholars have proposed forms of cosmopolitan and global citizenship in which national borders play less of a role in how people engage with political ideas (Delanty; Sassen). Others suggest the potential erasure of location may be disorienting (Calhoun). “Nobody lives globally”, as Hugh Dyer writes (64). In this article, I interrogate popular and academic assumptions about global political spaces, looking at geographic fungibility as a condition experienced by users. The article draws on interviews conducted with Twitter users in the Scandinavian region. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark offer an interesting contrast to online spaces because of their small and highly cohesive political cultures; yet these countries also have high Internet penetration rates and English proficiency levels, making them potentially highly globally connected (Syvertsen et al.). Based on a thematic analysis of these interviews, I find fungibility emerges as a key feature of how users interact with politics at a global level in three ways: invisibility: fungibility as disconnection; efficacy: fungibility as empowerment; and antagonism: non-fungibility as strategy. Finally, in contrast to currently available models, I propose that online practices are not characterised so much by cosmopolitan norms, but by what I describe as fungible citizenship. Geographic Fungibility and Cosmopolitan Hopes Let’s back up and take a real-life example that highlights what it means for geography to be fungible. In March 2017, at a high-stakes meeting of the US House Intelligence Committee, a congressman suddenly noticed that President Donald Trump was not only following the hearing on television, but was live-tweeting incorrect information about it on Twitter. “This tweet has gone out to millions of Americans”, said Congressman Jim Himes, noting Donald Trump’s follower count. “16.1 million to be exact” (C-SPAN). Only, those followers weren’t just Americans; Trump was tweeting to 16.1 million followers worldwide (see Sevin and Uzunoğlu). Moreover, the committee was gathered that day to address an issue related to geographic fungibility: it was the first public hearing on Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 American presidential race—which occurred, among other places, on Twitter. In a way, democratic systems are based on fungibility. One person one vote. Equality before the law. But land mass was not imagined to be commutable, and given the physical restrictions of communication, participation in the public sphere was largely assumed to be restricted by geography (Habermas). But online platforms offer a fundamentally different structure. Nancy Fraser observes that “public spheres today are not coextensive with political membership. Often the interlocutors are neither co-nationals nor fellow citizens” (16). Netflix, YouTube, K-Pop, #BLM: the resources that people draw on to define their worlds come less from nation-specific media (Robertson 179). C-SPAN’s online feed—if one really wanted to—is as easy to click on in Seattle as in Stockholm. Indeed, research on Twitter finds geographically dispersed networks (Leetaru et al.). Many Twitter users tweet in multiple languages, with English being the lingua franca of Twitter (Mocanu et al.). This has helped make geographic location interchangeable, even undetectable without use of advanced methods (Stock). Such conditions might set the stage for what sociologists have envisioned as cosmopolitan or global public spheres (Linklater; Szerszynski and Urry). That is, cross-border networks based more on shared interest than shared nationality (Sassen 277). Theorists observing the growth of online communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s proposed that such activity could lead to a shift in people’s perspectives on the world: namely, by closing the communicative distance with the Other, people would also close the moral distance. Delanty suggested that “discursive spaces of world openness” could counter nationalist tendencies and help mobilise cosmopolitan citizens against the negative effects of globalisation (44). However, much of this discourse dates to the pre-social media Internet. These platforms have proved to be more hierarchical, less interactive, and even less global than early theorists hoped (Burgess and Baym; Dahlgren, “Social Media”; Hindman). Although ordinary citizens certainly break through, entrenched power dynamics and algorithmic structures complicate the process, leading to what Bucher describes as a reverse Panopticon: “the possibility of constantly disappearing, of not being considered important enough” (1171). A 2021 report by the Pew Research Center found most Twitter users receive few if any likes and retweets of their content. In short, it may be that social media are less like Marshall McLuhan’s global village and more like a global version of Marc Augé’s “non-places”: an anonymous and disempowering whereabouts (77–78). Cosmopolitanism itself is also plagued by problems of legitimacy (Calhoun). Fraser argues that global public opinion is meaningless without a constituent global government. “What could efficacy mean in this situation?” she asks (15). Moreover, universalist sentiment and erasure of borders are not exactly the story of the last 15 years. Media scholar Terry Flew notes that given Brexit and the rise of figures like Trump and Bolsonaro, projections of cosmopolitanism were seriously overestimated (19). Yet social media are undeniably political places. So how do we make sense of users’ engagement in the discourse that increasingly takes place here? It is this point I turn to next. Citizenship in the Age of Social Media In recent years, scholars have reconsidered how they understand the way people interact with politics, as access to political discourse has become a regular, even mundane part of our lives. Increasingly they are challenging old models of “informed citizens” and traditional forms of political participation. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik writes: the oft-heard claims that citizenship is in decline, particularly for young people, are usually based on citizenship indicators derived from these legacy models—the informed/dutiful citizen. Yet scholars are increasingly positing … citizenship [is not] declining, but rather changing its form. (1891) In other words, rather than wondering if tweeting is like a citizen speaking in the town square or merely scribbling in the margins of a newspaper, this line of thinking suggests tweeting is a new form of citizen participation entirely (Bucher; Lane et al.). Who speaks in the town square these days anyway? To be clear, “citizenship” here is not meant in the ballot box and passport sense; this isn’t about changing legal definitions. Rather, the citizenship at issue refers to how people perceive and enact their public selves. In particular, new models of citizenship emphasise how people understand their relation to strangers through discursive means (Asen)—through talking, in other words, in its various forms (Dahlgren, “Talkative Public”). This may include anything from Facebook posts to online petitions (Vaughan et al.) to digital organising (Vromen) to even activities that can seem trivial, solitary, or apolitical by traditional measures, such as “liking” a post or retweeting a news story. Although some research finds users do see strategic value in such activities (Picone et al.), Lane et al. argue that small-scale acts are important on their own because they force us to self-reflect on our relationship to politics, under a model they call “expressive citizenship”. Kligler-Vilenchik argues that such approaches to citizenship reflect not only new technology but also a society in which public discourse is less formalised through official institutions (newspapers, city council meetings, clubs): “each individual is required to ‘invent themselves’, to shape and form who they are and what they believe in—including how to enact their citizenship” she writes (1892). However, missing from these new understandings of politics is a spatial dimension. How does the geographic reach of social media sites play into perceptions of citizenship in these spaces? This is important because, regardless of the state of cosmopolitan sentiment, political problems are global: climate change, pandemic, regulation of tech companies, the next US president: many of society’s biggest issues, as Beck notes, “do not respect nation-state or any other borders” (4). Yet it’s not clear whether users’ correlative ability to reach across borders is empowering, or overwhelming. Thus, inspired particularly by Delanty’s “micro” cosmopolitanism and Dahlgren’s conditions for the formation of citizenship (“Talkative Public”), I am guided by the following questions: how do people negotiate geographic fungibility online? And specifically, how do they understand their relationship to a global space and their ability to be heard in it? Methodology Christensen and Jansson have suggested that one of the underutilised ways to understand media cultures is to talk to users directly about the “mediatized everyday” (1474). To that end, I interviewed 26 Twitter users in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The Scandinavian region is a useful region of study because most people use the Web nearly every day and the populations have high English proficiency (Syvertsen et al.). Participants were found in large-scale data scrapes of Twitter, using linguistic and geographic markers in their profiles, a process similar to the mapping of the Australian Twittersphere (Bruns et al.). The interviewees were selected because of their mixed use of Scandinavian languages and English and their participation in international networks. Participants were contacted through direct messages on Twitter or via email. In figure 2, the participants’ timeline data have been graphed into a network map according to who users @mentioned and retweeted, with lines representing tweets and colours representing languages. The participants include activists, corporate consultants, government employees, students, journalists, politicians, a security guard, a doctor, a teacher, and unemployed people. They range from age 24 to 60. Eight are women, reflecting the gender imbalance of Twitter. Six have an immigrant background. Eight are right-leaning politically. Participants also have wide variation in follower counts in order to capture a variety of experiences on the platform (min=281, max=136,000, median=3,600, standard deviation=33,708). All users had public profiles, but under Norwegian rules for research data, they will be identified here by an ID and their country, gender, and follower count (e.g., P01, Sweden, M, 23,000). Focussing on a single platform allowed the interviews to be more specific and makes it easier to compare the participants’ responses, although other social media often came up in the course of the interviews. Twitter was selected because it is often used in a public manner and has become an important channel for political communication (Larsson and Moe). The interviews lasted around an hour each and were conducted on Zoom between May 2020 and March 2021. Fig. 2: Network map of interview participants’ Twitter timelines. Invisibility: The Abyss of the Global Village Each participant was asked during the interview how they think about globality on Twitter. For many, it was part of the original reason for joining the platform. “Twitter had this reputation of being the hangout of a lot of the world’s intellectuals”, said P022 (Norway, M, 136,000). One Swedish woman described a kind of cosmopolitan curation process, where she would follow people on every continent, so that her feed would give her a sense of the world. “And yes, you can get that from international papers”, she told me, “but if I actually consumed as much as I do on Twitter in papers, I would be reading papers and articles all day” (P023, Sweden, F, 384). Yet while globality was part of the appeal, it was also an abstraction. “I mean, the Internet is global, so everything you do is going to end up somewhere else”, said one Swedish user (P013, M, 12,000). Users would echo the taglines that social media allow you to “interact with someone half a world away” (P05, Norway, M, 3,300) but were often hard-pressed to recall specific examples. A strong theme of invisibility—or feeling lost in an abyss—ran throughout the interviews. For many users this manifested in a lack of any visible response to their tweets. Even when replying to another user, the participants didn’t expect much dialogic engagement with them (“No, no, that’s unrealistic”.) For P04 (Norway, F, 2,000), tweeting back a heart emoji to someone with a large following was for her own benefit, much like the intrapersonal expressions described by Lane et al. that are not necessarily intended for other actors. P04 didn’t expect the original poster to even see her emoji. Interestingly, invisibility was more of a frustration among users with several thousand followers than those with only a few hundred. Having more followers seemed to only make Twitter appear more fickle. “Sometimes you get a lot of attention and sometimes it’s completely disregarded” said P05 (Norway, M, 3,300). P024 (Sweden, M, 2,000) had essentially given up: “I think it’s fun that you found me [to interview]”, he said, “Because I have this idea that almost no one sees my tweets anymore”. In a different way, P08 (Norway, F) who had a follower count of 121,000, also felt the abstraction of globality. “It’s almost like I’m just tweeting into a void or into space”, she said, “because it's too many people to grasp or really understand that these are real people”. For P08, Twitter was almost an anonymous non-place because of its vastness, compared with Facebook and Instagram where the known faces of her friends and family made for more finite and specific places—and thus made her more self-conscious about the visibility of her posts. Efficacy: Fungibility as Empowerment Despite the frequent feeling of global invisibility, almost all the users—even those with few followers—believed they had some sort of effect in global political discussions on Twitter. This was surprising, and seemingly contradictory to the first theme. This second theme of empowerment is characterised by feelings of efficacy or perception of impact. One of the most striking examples came from a Danish man with 345 followers. I wondered before the interview if he might have automated his account because he replied to Donald Trump so often (see fig. 3). The participant explained that, no, he was just trying to affect the statistics on Trump’s tweet, to get it ratioed. He explained: it's like when I'm voting, I'm not necessarily thinking [I’m personally] going to affect the situation, you know. … It’s the statistics that shows a position—that people don't like it, and they’re speaking actively against it. (P06, Denmark, M, 345) Other participants described their role similarly—not as making an impact directly, but being “one ant in the anthill” or helping information spread “like rings in the water”. One woman in Sweden said of the US election: I can't go to the streets because I'm in Stockholm. So I take to their streets on Twitter. I'm kind of helping them—using the algorithms, with retweets, and re-enforcing some hashtags. (P018, Sweden, F, 7,400) Note that the participants rationalise their Twitter activities through comparisons to classic forms of political participation—voting and protesting. Yet the acts of citizenship they describe are very much in line with new norms of citizenship (Vaughan et al.) and what Picone et al. call “small acts of engagement”. They are just acts aimed at the American sphere instead of their national sphere. Participants with large followings understood their accounts had a kind of brand, such as commenting on Middle Eastern politics, mocking leftist politicians, or critiquing the media. But these users were also sceptical they were having any direct impact. Rather, they too saw themselves as being “a tiny part of a combined effect from a lot of people” (P014, Norway, M, 39,000). Fig. 3: Participant P06 replies to Trump. Antagonism: Encounters with Non-Fungibility The final theme reflects instances when geography became suddenly apparent—and thrown back in the faces of the users. This was often in relation to the 2020 American election, which many of the participants were following closely. “I probably know more about US politics than Swedish”, said P023 (Sweden, F, 380). Particularly among left-wing users who listed a Scandinavian location in their profile, tweeting about the topic had occasionally led to encounters with Americans claiming foreign interference. “I had some people telling me ‘You don't have anything to do with our politics. You have no say in this’” said P018 (Sweden, F, 7,400). In these instances, the participants likewise deployed geography strategically. Participants said they would claim legitimacy because the election would affect their country too. “I think it’s important for the rest of the world to give them [the US] that feedback. That ‘we’re depending on you’” said P017 (Sweden, M, 280). As a result of these interactions, P06 started to pre-emptively identify himself as Danish in his tweets, which in a way sacrificed his own geographic fungibility, but also reinforced a wider sense of geographic fungibility on Twitter. In one of his replies to Donald Trump, Jr., he wrote, “Denmark here. The world is hoping for real leader!” Conclusion: Fungible Citizenship The view that digital media are global looms large in academic and popular imagination. The aim of the analysis presented here is to help illuminate how these perceptions play into practices of citizenship in digital spaces. One of the contradictions inherent in this research is that geographic or linguistic information was necessary to find the users interviewed. It may be that users who are geographically anonymous—or even lie about their location—would have a different relationship to online globality. With that said, several key themes emerged from the interviews: the abstraction and invisibility of digital spaces, the empowerment of geographic fungibility, and the occasional antagonistic deployment of non-fungibility by other users and the participants. Taken together, these themes point to geographic fungibility as a condition that can both stifle as well as create new arenas for political expression. Even spontaneous and small acts that aren’t expected to ever reach an audience (Lane et al.) nevertheless are done with an awareness of social processes that extend beyond the national sphere. Moreover, algorithms and metrics, while being the source of invisibility (Bucher), were at times a means of empowerment for those at a physical distance. In contrast to the cosmopolitan literature, it is not so much that users didn’t identify with their nation as their “community of membership” (Sassen)—they saw it as giving them an important perspective. Rather, they considered politics in the EU, US, UK, Russia, and elsewhere to be part of their national arena. In this way, the findings support Delanty’s description of “changes within … national identities rather than in the emergence in new identities” (42). Yet the interviews do not point to “the desire to go beyond ethnocentricity and particularity” (42). Some of the most adamant and active global communicators were on the right and radical right. For them, opposition to immigration and strengthening of national identity were major reasons to be on Twitter. Cross-border communication for them was not a form of resistance to nationalism but wholly compatible with it. Instead of the emergence of global or cosmopolitan citizenship then, I propose that what has emerged is a form of fungible citizenship. This is perhaps a more ambivalent, and certainly a less idealistic, view of digital culture. It implies that users are not elevating their affinities or shedding their national ties. Rather, the transnational effects of political decisions are viewed as legitimate grounds for political participation online. This approach to global platforms builds on and nuances current discursive approaches to citizenship, which emphasise expression (Lane et al.) and contribution (Vaughan et al.) rather than formal participation within institutions. Perhaps the Scandinavian users cannot cast a vote in US elections, but they can still engage in the same forms of expression as any American with a Twitter account. That encounters with non-fungibility were so notable to the participants also points to the mundanity of globality on social media. Vaughan et al. write that “citizens are increasingly accustomed to participating in horizontal networks of relationships which facilitate more expressive, smaller forms of action” (17). The findings here suggest that they are also accustomed to participating in geographically agnostic networks, in which their expressions of citizenship are at once small, interchangeable, and potentially global. References Asen, Robert. "A Discourse Theory of Citizenship." Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189–211. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Bruns, Axel, et al. "The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network." Social Media + Society 3.4 (2017): 1–15. Bucher, Taina. "Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook." New Media &amp; Society 14.7 (2012): 1164–80. Burgess, Jean, and Nancy Baym. Twitter: A Biography. New York: New York UP, 2020. C-SPAN. Russian Election Interference, House Select Intelligence Committee. 24 Feb. 2017. Transcript. 21 Mar. 2017 &lt;https://www.c-span.org/video/?425087-1/fbi-director-investigating-links-trump-campaign-russia&gt;. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. New York: Routledge, 2007. Christensen, Miyase, and André Jansson. "Complicit Surveillance, Interveillance, and the Question of Cosmopolitanism: Toward a Phenomenological Understanding of Mediatization." New Media &amp; Society 17.9 (2015): 1473–91. Dahlgren, Peter. "In Search of the Talkative Public: Media, Deliberative Democracy and Civic Culture." Javnost – The Public 9.3 (2002): 5–25. ———. "Social Media and Political Participation: Discourse and Deflection." Critique, Social Media and the Information Society. Eds. Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval. New York: Routledge, 2014. 191–202. Delanty, Gerard. "The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory." British Journal of Sociology 57.1 (2006): 25–47. Dyer, Hugh C. Coping and Conformity in World Politics. Routledge, 2009. Flew, Terry. "Globalization, Neo-Globalization and Post-Globalization: The Challenge of Populism and the Return of the National." Global Media and Communication 16.1 (2020): 19–39. Fraser, Nancy. "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World." Theory, Culture &amp; Society 24.4 (2007): 7–30. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991 [1962]. Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta. "Alternative Citizenship Models: Contextualizing New Media and the New ‘Good Citizen’." New Media &amp; Society 19.11 (2017): 1887–903. Lane, Daniel S., Kevin Do, and Nancy Molina-Rogers. "What Is Political Expression on Social Media Anyway? A Systematic Review." Journal of Information Technology &amp; Politics (2021): 1–15. Larsson, Anders Olof, and Hallvard Moe. "Twitter in Politics and Elections: Insights from Scandinavia." Twitter and Society. Eds. Katrin Weller et al. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 319–30. Linklater, Andrew. "Cosmopolitan Citizenship." Handbook of Citizenship Studies. Eds. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage, 2002. 317–32. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Ark, 1987 [1964]. Mocanu, Delia, et al. "The Twitter of Babel: Mapping World Languages through Microblogging Platforms." PLOS ONE 8.4 (2013): e61981. Picone, Ike, et al. "Small Acts of Engagement: Reconnecting Productive Audience Practices with Everyday Agency." New Media &amp; Society 21.9 (2019): 2010–28. Robertson, Alexa. Mediated Cosmopolitanism: The World of Television News. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Sassen, Saskia. "Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship." Handbook of Citizenship Studies. Eds. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage, 2002. 277–91. Sevin, Efe, and Sarphan Uzunoğlu. "Do Foreigners Count? Internationalization of Presidential Campaigns." American Behavioral Scientist 61.3 (2017): 315–33. Stock, Kristin. "Mining Location from Social Media: A Systematic Review." Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 71 (2018): 209–40. Syvertsen, Trine, et al. The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era. New Media World. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2014. Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and John Urry. "Cultures of Cosmopolitanism." The Sociological Review 50.4 (2002): 461–81. Vaughan, Michael, et al. "The Role of Novel Citizenship Norms in Signing and Sharing Online Petitions." Political Studies (2022). Vromen, Ariadne. Digital Citizenship and Political Engagement: The Challenge from Online Campaigning and Advocacy Organisations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

There is a moment in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth devised to expose the sheer audacity of fossil fuel lobby groups in the United States. In their attempts to address significant scientific consensus and growing public concern over climate change, these groups are resorting to what Gore’s film suggests are grotesque distortions of fact. A particular example highlighted in the film is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CPE—a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil) “pro” energy industry advertisement: “Carbon dioxide”, the ad states. “They call it pollution, we call it life.” While on the one hand employing rhetoric against the “inconvenient truth” that carbon dioxide emissions are ratcheting up the Earth’s temperature, these advertisements also pose a question – though perhaps unintended – that is worth addressing. Where does life reside? This is not an issue of essentialism, but relates to the claims, materials and technologies through which life as a political object emerges. The danger of entertaining the vested interests of polluting industry in a discussion of climate change and its biopolitics is countered by an imperative to acknowledge the ways in which multiple positions in the climate change debate invoke and appeal to ‘life’ as the bottom line, or inviolable interest, of their political, social or economic work. In doing so, other questions come to the fore that a politics of climate change framed in terms of moral positions or competing values will tend to overlook. These questions concern the manifold practices of life that constitute the contemporary terrain of the political, and the actors and instruments put in this employ. Who speaks for life? And who or what produces it? Climate change as a matter of concern (Latour) has gathered and generated a host of experts, communities, narratives and technical devices all invested in the administration of life. It is, as Malcom Bull argues, “the paradigmatic issue of the new politics,” a politics which “draws people towards the public realm and makes life itself subject to the caprices of state and market” (2). This paper seeks to highlight the politics of life that have emerged around climate change as a public issue. It will argue that these politics appear in incremental and multiple ways that situate an array of actors and interests as active in both contesting and generating the terms of life: what life is and how we come to know it. This way of thinking about climate change debates opposes a prevalent moralistic framework that reads the practices and discourses of debate in terms of oppositional positions alone. While sympathies may flow in varying directions, especially when it comes to such a highly charged and massively consequential issue as climate change, there is little insight to be had from charging the CPE (for example) with manipulating consumers, or misrepresenting well-known facts. Where new and more productive understandings open up is in relation to the fields through which these gathering actors play out their claims to the project of life. These fields, from the state, to the corporation, to the domestic sphere, reveal a complex network of strategies and devices that seek to secure life in constantly renovated terms. Life Politics Biopolitical scholarship in the wake of Foucault has challenged life as a pre-given uncritical category, and sought to highlight the means through which it is put under question and constituted through varying and composing assemblages of practitioners and practices. Such work regards the project of human well-being as highly complex and technical, and has undertaken to document this empirically through close attention to the everyday ecologies in which humans are enmeshed. This is a political and theoretical project in itself, situating political processes in micro, as well as macro, registers, including daily life as a site of (self) management and governance. Rabinow and Rose refer to biopolitical circuits that draw together and inter-relate the multiple sites and scales operative in the administration of life. These involve not just technologies, rationalities and regimes of authority and control, but also politics “from below” in the form of rights claims and community formation and agitation (198). Active in these circuits, too, are corporate and non-state interests for whom the pursuit of maximising life’s qualities and capabilities has become a concern through which “market relations and shareholder value” are negotiated (Rabinow and Rose 211). As many biopolitical scholars argue, biopower—the strategies through which biopolitics are enacted—is characteristic of the “disciplinary neo-liberalism” that has come to define the modern state, and through which the conduct of conduct is practiced (Di Muzio 305). Foucault’s concept of governmentality describes the devolution of state-based disciplinarity and sovereignty to a host of non-state actors, rationalities and strategies of governing, including the self-managing subject, not in opposition to the state, but contributing to its form. According to Bratich, Packer and McCarthy, everyday life is thus “saturated with governmental techniques” (18) in which we are all enrolled. Unlike regimes of biopolitics identified with what Agamben terms “thanopolitics”—the exercise of biopower “which ultimately rests on the power of some to threaten the death of others” (Rabinow and Rose 198), such as the Nazi’s National Socialism and other eugenic campaigns—governmental arts in the service of “vitalist” biopolitics (Rose 1) are increasingly diffused amongst all those with an “interest” in sustaining life, from organisations to individuals. The integration of techniques of self-governance which ask the individual to work on themselves and their own dispositions with State functions has broadened the base by which life is governed, and foregrounded an unsettled terrain of life claims. Rose argues that medical science is at the forefront of these contemporary biopolitics, and to this effect “has […] been fully engaged in the ethical questions of how we should live—of what kinds of creatures we are, of the kinds of obligations that we have to ourselves and to others, of the kinds of techniques we can and should use to improve ourselves” (20). Asking individuals to self-identify through their medical histories and bodily specificities, medical cultures are also shaping new political arrangements, as communities connected by shared genetics or physical conditions, for instance, emerge, evolve and agitate according to the latest medical knowledge. Yet it is not just medicine that provokes ethical work and new political forms. The environment is a key site for life politics that entails a multi-faceted discourse of obligations and entitlements, across fields and scales of engagement. Calculating Environments In line with neo-liberal logic, environmental discourse concerned with ameliorating climate change has increasingly focused upon the individual as an agent of self-monitoring, to both facilitate government agendas at a distance, and to “self-fashion” in the mode of the autonomous subject, securing against external risks (Ong 501). Climate change is commonly represented as such a risk, to both human and non-human life. A recent letter published by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in two leading British medical journals, named climate change as the “biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” (Morton). As I have argued elsewhere (Potter), security is central to dominant cultures of environmental governance in the West; these cultures tie sustainability goals to various and interrelated regimes of monitoring which attach to concepts of what Clark and Stevenson call “the good ecological citizen” (238). Citizenship is thus practiced through strategies of governmentality which call on individuals to invest not just in their own well-being, but in the broader project of life. Calculation is a primary technique through which modern environmental governance is enacted; calculative strategies are seen to mediate risk, according to Foucault, and consequently to “assure living” (Elden 575). Rationalised schemes for self-monitoring are proliferating under climate change and the project of environmentalism more broadly, something which critics of neo-liberalism have identified as symptomatic of the privatisation of politics that liberal governmentality has fostered. As we have seen in Australia, an evolving policy emphasis on individual practices and the domestic sphere as crucial sites of environmental action – for instance, the introduction of domestic water restrictions, and the phasing out of energy-inefficient light bulbs in the home—provides a leading discourse of ethico-political responsibility. The rise of carbon dioxide counting is symptomatic of this culture, and indicates the distributed fields of life management in contemporary governmentality. Carbon dioxide, as the CPE is keen to point out, is crucial to life, but it is also—in too large an amount—a force of destruction. Its management, in vitalist terms, is thus established as an effort to protect life in the face of death. The concept of “carbon footprinting” has been promoted by governments, NGOs, industry and individuals as a way of securing this goal, and a host of calculative techniques and strategies are employed to this end, across a spectrum of activities and contexts all framed in the interests of life. The footprinting measure seeks to secure living via self-policed limits, which also—in classic biopolitical form—shift previously private practices into a public realm of count-ability and accountability. The carbon footprint, like its associates the ecological footprint and the water footprint, has developed as a multi-faceted tool of citizenship beyond the traditional boundaries of the state. Suggesting an ecological conception of territory and of our relationships and responsibilities to this, the footprint, as a measure of resource use and emissions relative to the Earth’s capacities to absorb these, calculates and visualises the “specific qualities” (Elden 575) that, in a spatialised understanding of security, constitute and define this territory. The carbon footprint’s relatively simple remit of measuring carbon emissions per unit of assessment—be that the individual, the corporation, or the nation—belies the ways in which life is formatted and produced through its calculations. A tangled set of devices, practices and discourses is employed to make carbon and thus life calculable and manageable. Treading Lightly The old environmental adage to “tread lightly upon the Earth” has been literalised in the metaphor of the footprint, which attempts both to symbolise environmental practice and to directly translate data in order to meaningfully communicate necessary boundaries for our living. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2008 exemplifies the growing popularity of the footprint as a political and poetic hook: speaking in terms of our “ecological overshoot,” and the move from “ecological credit to ecological deficit”, the report urges an attendance to our “global footprint” which “now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 per cent” (1). Angela Crombie’s A Lighter Footprint, an instruction manual for sustainable living, is one of a host of media through which individuals are educated in modes of footprint calculation and management. She presents a range of techniques, including carbon offsetting, shifting to sustainable modes of transport, eating and buying differently, recycling and conserving water, to mediate our carbon dioxide output, and to “show […] politicians how easy it is” (13). Governments however, need no persuading from citizens that carbon calculation is an exercise to be harnessed. As governments around the world move (slowly) to address climate change, policies that instrumentalise carbon dioxide emission and reduction via an auditing of credits and deficits have come to the fore—for example, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Chicago Climate Exchange. In Australia, we have the currently-under-debate Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a part of which is the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (AETS) that will introduce a system of “carbon credits” and trading in a market-based model of supply and demand. This initiative will put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and cap the amount of emissions any one polluter can produce without purchasing further credits. In readiness for the scheme, business initiatives are forming to take advantage of this new carbon market. Industries in carbon auditing and off-setting services are consolidating; hectares of trees, already active in the carbon sequestration market, are being cultivated as “carbon sinks” and key sites of compliance for polluters under the AETS. Governments are also planning to turn their tracts of forested public land into carbon credits worth billions of dollars (Arup 7). The attachment of emission measures to goods and services requires a range of calculative experts, and the implementation of new marketing and branding strategies, aimed at conveying the carbon “health” of a product. The introduction of “food mile” labelling (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of the food from source to consumer) in certain supermarkets in the United Kingdom is an example of this. Carbon risk analysis and management programs are being introduced across businesses in readiness for the forthcoming “carbon economy”. As one flyer selling “a suite of carbon related services” explains, “early action will give you the edge in understanding and mitigating the risks, and puts you in a prime position to capitalise on the rewards” (MGI Business Solutions Worldwide). In addition, lobby groups are working to ensure exclusions from or the free allocation of permits within the proposed AETS, with degrees of compulsion applied to different industries – the Federal Government, for instance, will provide a $3.9 billion compensation package for the electric power sector when the AETS commences, to enable their “adjustment” to this carbon regime. Performing Life Noortje Mares provides a further means of thinking through the politics of life in the context of climate change by complicating the distinction between public and private interest. Her study of “green living experiments” describes the rise of carbon calculation in the home in recent years, and the implementation of technologies such as the smart electricity meter that provides a constantly updating display of data relating to amounts and cost of energy consumed and the carbon dioxide emitted in the routines of domestic life. Her research tracks the entry of these personal calculative regimes into public life via internet forums such as blogs, where individuals notate or discuss their experiences of pursing low-carbon lifestyles. On the one hand, these calculative practices of living and their public representation can be read as evidencing the pervasive neo-liberal governmentality at work in contemporary environmental practice, where individuals are encouraged to scrupulously monitor their domestic cultures. The rise of auditing as a technology of self, and more broadly as a technique of public accountability, has come under fire for its “immunity-granting role” (Charkiewicz 79), where internal audits become substituted for external compliance and regulation. Mares challenges this reading, however, by demonstrating the ways in which green living experiments “transform everyday material practices into practices of public involvement” that (118) don’t resolve or pin down relations between the individual, the non-human environment, and the social, or reveal a mappable flow of actions and effects between the public realm and the home. The empirical modes of publicity that these individuals employ, “the careful recording of measurements and the reliable descriptions of sensory observation, so as to enable ‘virtual witnessing’ by wider audiences”, open up to much more complex understandings than one of calculative self-discipline at work. As “instrument[s] of public involvement” (120), the experiments that Mares describe locate the politics of life in the embodied socio-material entanglements of the domestic sphere, in arrangements of humans and non-human technologies. Such arrangements, she suggests, are ontologically productive in that they introduce “not only new knowledge, but also new entities […] to society” (119), and as such these experiments and the modes of calculation they employ become active in the composition of reality. Recent work in economic sociology and cultural studies has similarly contended that calculation, far from either a naturalised or thoroughly abstract process, relies upon a host of devices, relations, and techniques: that is, as Gay Hawkins explains, calculative processes “have to be enacted” (108). Environmental governmentality in the service of securing life is a networked practice that draws in a host of actors, not a top-down imposition. The institution of carbon economies and carbon emissions as a new register of public accountability, brings alternative ways to calculate the world into being, and consequently re-calibrates life as it emerges from these heterogeneous arrangements. All That Gathers Latour writes that we come to know a matter of concern by all the things that gather around it (Latour). This includes the human, as well as the non-human actors, policies, practices and technologies that are put to work in the making of our realities. Climate change is routinely represented as a threat to life, with predicted (and occurring) species extinction, growing numbers of climate change refugees, dispossessed from uninhabitable lands, and the rise of diseases and extreme weather scenarios that put human life in peril. There is no doubt, of course, that climate change does mean death for some: indeed, there are thanopolitical overtones in inequitable relations between the fall-out of impacts from major polluting nations on poorer countries, or those much more susceptible to rising sea levels. Biosocial equity, as Bull points out, is a “matter of being equally alive and equally dead” (2). Yet in the biopolitical project of assuring living, life is burgeoning around the problem of climate change. The critique of neo-liberalism as a blanketing system that subjects all aspects of life to market logic, and in which the cynical techniques of industry seek to appropriate ethico-political stances for their own material ends, are insufficient responses to what is actually unfolding in the messy terrain of climate change and its biopolitics. What this paper has attempted to show is that there is no particular purchase on life that can be had by any one actor who gathers around this concern. Varying interests, ambitions, and intentions, without moral hierarchy, stake their claim in life as a constantly constituting site in which they participate, and from this perspective, the ways in which we understand life to be both produced and managed expand. This is to refuse either an opposition or a conflation between the market and nature, or the market and life. It is also to argue that we cannot essentialise human-ness in the climate change debate. For while human relations with animals, plants and weathers may make us what we are, so too do our relations with (in a much less romantic view) non-human things, technologies, schemes, and even markets—from carbon auditing services, to the label on a tin on the supermarket shelf. As these intersect and entangle, the project of life, in the new politics of climate change, is far from straightforward. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Village Roadshow, 2006. Arup, Tom. “Victoria Makes Enormous Carbon Stocktake in Bid for Offset Billions.” The Age 24 Sep. 2009: 7. Bratich, Jack Z., Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy. “Governing the Present.” Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Ed. Bratich, Packer and McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 3-21. Bull, Malcolm. “Globalization and Biopolitics.” New Left Review 45 (2007): 12 May 2009 . &lt; http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&amp;view=2675 &gt;. Charkiewicz, Ewa. “Corporations, the UN and Neo-liberal Bio-politics.” Development 48.1 (2005): 75-83. Clark, Nigel, and Nick Stevenson. “Care in a Time of Catastrophe: Citizenship, Community and the Ecological Imagination.” Journal of Human Rights 2.2 (2003): 235-246. Crombie, Angela. A Lighter Footprint: A Practical Guide to Minimising Your Impact on the Planet. Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe, 2007. Di Muzio, Tim. “Governing Global Slums: The Biopolitics of Target 11.” Global Governance. 14.3 (2008): 305-326. Elden, Stuart. “Governmentality, Calculation and Territory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 562-580. Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248. Mares, Noortje. “Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability and Involvement.” European Journal of Social Theory 12.1 (2009): 117-133. MGI Business Solutions Worldwide. “Carbon News.” Adelaide. 2 Aug. 2009. Ong, Aihwa. “Mutations in Citizenship.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2-3 (2006): 499-505. Potter, Emily. “Footprints in the Mallee: Climate Change, Sustaining Communities, and the Nature of Place.” Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies in a Global World. Ed. Margaret Somerville, Kerith Power and Phoenix de Carteret. Sense Publishers. Forthcoming. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today.” Biosocieties 1 (2006): 195-217. Rose, Nikolas. “The Politics of Life Itself.” Theory, Culture and Society 18.6 (2001): 1-30. World Wildlife Fund. Living Planet Report 2008. Switzerland, 2008.

Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia depicts the last days of the earth through the eyes of a young woman, Justine, who is suffering from a severe depressive illness. In the hours leading up to the Earth’s destruction through the impact of a massive blue planet named Melancholia, Justine tells her sister that “the Earth is evil, we don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.” We can read this apparently anti-environmental statement in one sense as a symptom of Justine’s melancholic depression. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines melancholia as a form of depression that is “qualitatively different from the sadness experienced during bereavement” (419). It is as if Justine’s illness relates to some ungrievable loss, a loss so pathologically far reaching that it short circuits the normal psychology of mourning. But, in another sense, does her statement not strike us with the ring of an absolute and inescapable truth? In the wake of our destruction, there would be no one left to mourn it since human memory itself would have been destroyed along with the global ecosystems which support and sustain it. The film’s central dramatic metaphor is that the experience of a severe depressive episode is like the destruction of the world. But the metaphor can be turned around to suggest that ecological crisis, real irreparable damage to the environment to the point where it may no longer be able to support human life, affects us with a collective melancholia because the destruction of the human species is a strictly ungrievable event. The discoveries of Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century constituted a major thought event which placed the emergence of humanity within a temporal context extending far beyond the limits of human memory. Claire Colebrook suggests that the equivalent event for present times is the thought of our own extinction, the awareness that environmental changes could bring about the end of the species: “[the] extinction awareness that is coming to the fore in the twenty-first century adds the sense of an ending to the broader awareness of the historical emergence of the human species.” While the scientific data is stark, our mediated cultural experience provides us with plenty of opportunities to, in Colebrook’s words, “[domesticate] the sense of the human end” by affirming “various modes of ‘post-humanism’” in ways which ultimately deny the shattering truth of extinction. This domestication obviously takes place in one sense on the level of a conscious denial of the scale of the ecological crisis. On another level, however, environmentally conscious representations of “the planet” or “nature” as a sheer autonomous objectivity, a self-contained but endangered natural order, may ultimately be the greatest obstacle to genuine ecological thinking. By invoking the concept of a non-human nature in perfect balance with itself we factor ourselves out of the ecological equation while simultaneously drawing on the power of an objectifying gaze. Slavoj Žižek gives the example of Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us which imagines a contemporary world in which all humans have disappeared and nature reasserts itself in the ruins of our abandoned cities. Žižek describes this as the ultimate expression of ideology because: we, the humans, are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence [...] this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence—like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one’s own burial (80). In many ways, the very spectacle or fantasy of our own destruction has provided us with a powerful means of naturalising it—environmental catastrophe occurs to and in a “nature” whose essence excludes us—and this renders it compatible with a psychology by which the human end is itself internalised, processed, and normalised. Ironically, this normalisation may have been affected to a great extent through the popularisation, over the last ten years or so, of environmental discourses relating to the grave threats of climate change. A film such as Wall-E, for example, shows us an entirely depopulated, desertified world in which the eponymous robot character sorts through the trash of human history, living an almost-human life among the ruins. The robot functions as a kind of proxy humanity, placing us, the viewers, in a position posterior to our own species extinction and thus sending us the ultimately reassuring message that, even in our absence, our absence will be noted. In a similar way, the drama-documentary The Age of Stupid presents a future world devastated by environmental collapse in which a lone archivist presides over the whole digitised memory of humanity and carefully constructs out of actual news and documentary footage the story of our demise. These narratives and others like them ultimately serve, whatever their intentions, to domesticate the end of humanity through the logic of a post-human mastery of the story of our own obliteration. The starker truth with which Melancholia confronts us is that the end of humanity cannot and will not be internalised by any process of human memorialisation. Von Trier’s film does not portray any post-catastrophe world from which we might be able to extract a degree of psychological comfort or residual sense of mastery. Rather, the narrative frame is entirely bounded by the impact event, which we witness first in the film’s opening shots and then again at its close. There is no narrative time posterior to the impact and yet for us, the viewers, everything happens in its shattering aftermath, according to the strange non-successional logic of the future-anterior. Everything begins and ends with the moment of impact. If the narrative itself is concerned with the lives of the characters, particularly the effects of the main character’s depression on her family relationships, then the film’s central event remains radically disjunctive, incapable of being processed on this interpersonal level through the standard cinematic tropes of the disaster or survival genres. The value of regarding Melancholia as an environmental film, then, is that it profoundly de-psychologises the prospect of our extinction while forcing the burden of this event’s unfathomable content onto us. Von Trier’s film suggests that melancholy, not mourning, is a more apt emotional register for ecological crisis and for the extinction awareness it brings, and in this sense Melancholia represents a valuable alternative to more standard environmental narratives which remain susceptible to ideological reinscriptions of human (or post-human) mastery. As ecocritic Timothy Morton suggests, “melancholy is more apt, even more ethically appropriate, to an ecological situation in which the worst has already happened, and in which we find ourselves [...] already fully implicated” (75–6). The most influential account of mourning and melancholia comes from Sigmund Freud, who described these attitudes as two different ways of dealing with loss. In the process of mourning, Freud states that there comes the realisation “that the loved object no longer exists” which “[demands] that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (245). The healthy outcome of this very painful process is that our libidinal attachments are free once again to take on another object of love; the lost object can be replaced according to a logic of temporal succession. Melancholia also results from a loss, says Freud, but this time it relates not simply or primarily to a replaceable external object but, more complexly, to something in the ego itself, not a discrete thing in the world but a certain way of being in the world which the lost object facilitated. Freud writes that the trauma of melancholia is thus manifested by the ego itself taking on or embodying the loss. The ego, stripped of its sense of being, comes to mimic the non-existence of that which once supported it. The “delusion” of the melancholic’s depressive state, says Freud, stems from the fact that something has ruptured her affective and libidinal attachment to the world, but this cannot be psychologically processed in terms of a replaceable loss since what is lost was never simply an external object. Her world is struck by an absence that cannot be mourned because it is kept alive as a non-being which she is. She has taken on the burden of this structural impossibility and does not pursue an imaginary resolution of it which, to invoke Žižek’s Lacanian terms once more, would involve her submitting to the subjective position of fantasy (i.e. becoming a witness to her own non-existence). The melancholic’s attitude is, Freud observes, “psychologically very remarkable” because it involves “an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life” (246). The melancholic carves out an existence apparently contrary to nature. This is the context in which Justine remarks that the earth, as an ungrievable object, is “evil.” Her melancholia is never explained in the course of the film, and, indeed, we see little of her personality apart from the events which manifest her psychological crisis. The film opens with the moment of interplanetary impact itself. The great blue planet of Melancholia approaches and begins to swallow the earth into its atmosphere. We cut immediately to Justine and her sister in the moments just before the impact: the air is electrified by the approaching collision and birds cascade from the trees. Our way into the narrative is this moment of chaos and dispersion, but von Trier’s depiction of it, his use of highly choreographed slow-motion shots resembling tableaux vivants, distance us from any sense of urgency or immediacy. It is as if the closer we come to the collision, the less real and the more stylised the world becomes; as if the impact holds a content which cannot be rendered in realist terms. By contrast, the subsequent scenes focusing on Justine’s interpersonal drama use a shaky, handheld camera which embeds us in the action. The narrative follows Justine on her wedding day. As events unfold we see cracks appear in the wedding party’s luxurious facade: Justine’s divorced parents argue viciously; her wealthy brother-in-law, who funded the wedding, fears that the occasion may be ruined by petty squabbling, to his great expense. Beneath these cracks, however, we realise that there is a deeper, more inexplicable crack opening up within Justine herself. At one point she retreats with her newlywed husband from the tumult of the wedding party. We expect from this scene an articulation or partial resolution, perhaps, of Justine’s mental conflict, or at least an insight into her character. In a more conventional story, this moment of conjugal intimacy would allow Justine to express an “authentic” desire, distinct from the superficial squabbling of her family, a means to “be herself.” But this doesn’t happen. Justine inexplicably rejects her husband’s overtures. In clinical terms, we might say that Justine’s behaviour corresponds to “anhedonia,” a loss of interest in the normal sources of pleasure or enjoyment. Invoking Freud, we could add to this that the very objective viability of her libidinal attachments has been called into question and that this is what precipitates her crisis. If such attachments are what ground us in reality, Justine’s desire seems to have become ungrounded through the emergence of something “nonobjectifiable,” to borrow a term from philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy?, 209). This “something” is revealed only in the second half of the film with the appearance of Melancholia and the prospect of its obliterating impact. Justine is drawn to this new planet, in one scene luxuriating naked beneath its blue glow. We could argue, in one sense, that she has discovered in Melancholia a correlate to her own self-destructive desire: the only thing that can possibly gratify her is the annihilation of the earth itself. However in another, more constructive sense, we can say that her melancholic desire amounts to a kind of geophilosophical critique, a political and ultimately ecological protest against the territorialisation of her desire according to a supposed acceptability of objects. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that, if desire’s libidinal attachments form a kind of ground or “territory” then all territories interact with one another at some level because they are all equally founded on “lines of deterritorialization” sweeping them towards a mutually shared, extra-territorial outside (A Thousand Plateaus, 9). Or, putting it in plainer terms: beneath every ground is a non-ground such that the earth cannot ultimately ground itself in itself. Every mental, material, or social territory is founded upon this global movement of ungrounding. The trauma of Justine’s melancholia refers us to something which cannot be resolved within the given territories of her social or interpersonal milieus. While her illness can be registered in terms of the events of the film’s narrative time, the film’s central event—the collision with Melancholia—remains irreducible to the memorial properties of storytelling. We may thus argue that the impact event is not strictly speaking an element of the film’s narrative, but rather a pure cinematic sign evoking a radical form of ecological openness. The film moves through different territories—conjugal, familial, economic, scientific—but what propels us from one territory to another is the impact event whose content is reducible to none of these territories. Of all the film’s characters, only Justine is “open” to this absolute irreducibility, this resistance to closure. Her openness to Melancholia is not determined by whether or not it can be objectified, that is, rendered assimilable to the terms of a given territory. Both her brother-in-law (an amateur astronomer) and her sister attempt to calculate the chances of impact, but Justine remains open to it in a manner which does not close off that which precludes survival. In the end, as Melancholia bears down on the Earth, Justine’s attitude—which in Freud’s terms is antithetical to the instinct for life—turns out to be the most appropriate one. The point of this article is certainly not to argue that we should acquiesce to the traumatic realities of environmental crisis. Its aim, rather, is to suggest that well-being and harmony may no longer describe the appropriate emotional register for ecological thinking, given the current urgency of the crisis. Human and ecological health may, after all, be radically different and incommensurable things. The great anthropologist and structuralist thinker Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked: I am concerned with the well-being of plants and animals that are threatened by humanity. I think ecologists make the mistake of thinking that they can defend humans and nature at the same time. I think it is necessary to decide if one prefers humans or nature. I am on the side of nature (qtd in Conley, 66). Lévi-Strauss may well be right when he says that a common human and ecological health may be an illusion of wishful thinking. However, what if there is a common trauma, whose ineradicability would not be a tragedy but, rather, evidence of radical openness in which we no longer have to pick sides (humans or plants and animals)? What if the proper “base” from which to begin thinking ecologically were not a conception of a harmonious human-ecological whole but a foundational non-harmony, an encounter with which contains something ineliminably traumatising? In a recent paper, the philosopher Reza Negarestani proposes just such a traumatic account of ecological openness. All existence, understood geophilosophically, is, says Negarestani, “conditioned by a concatenation of traumas or cuts [...] there is no single or isolated psychic trauma [...] there is no psychic trauma without an organic trauma and no organic trauma without a terrestrial trauma that in turn is deepened into open cosmic vistas.” Ecological openness, in this sense, would be necessarily melancholic, in the terms described above, in that it would necessitate the perpetual precariousness of those links by which we seek to ground ourselves. Ecology is all too often given to a “mournful” attitude, which is, as we’ve argued, the very attitude of psychological incorporation, healing, and normalisation. Similarly, “nature,” we are told, holds the key to harmonious self-regulation. But what if today such notions are obstacles to a genuine awareness of the ecological realities facing us all (humans and non-humans)? What if this ideal of nature were just a product of our own desire for stability, order, and regularity—for some imaginary extra-social and non-human point of reference by which to attain to a position of mastery in the telling of the story of ourselves? References Age of Stupid, The. Dir. Fanny Armstrong. Spanner Films, 2009. American Psychological Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th Ed. Text Revision. Washington: American Psychological Association, 2000. Colebrook, Claire. “Introduction: Framing the End of the Species.”.Extinction. Ed. Claire Colebrook. Open Humanities Press. 2012. 14 April 2012. Conley, Vera Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought. London: Routledge, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 24. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1917. 237–58. Melancholia. Dir. Lars von Trier. Zontropa, 2011. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Negarestani, Reza. “On the Revolutionary Earth: A Dialectic in Territopic Materialism.” Dark Materialism Conference. Natural History Museum, London. January 12th 2011. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Picador, 2007. WALL-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Pixar, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.

Introduction Historically in Australia, there has been a growing movement behind the development of quality Early Childhood Education and Care Centres (termed ‘centres’ for this article). These centres are designed to provide care and education outside of the home for children from birth to five years old. In the mid 1980s, the then Labor Government of Australia promoted and funded the establishment of many centres to provide women who were at home with children the opportunity to move into the workplace. Centre fees were heavily subsidised to make this option viable in the hope that more women would become employed and Australia’s rising unemployment statistics would be reduced. The popularity of this system soon meant that there was a childcare centre shortage and parents were faced with long waiting lists to enrol their child into a centre. To alleviate this situation, independent centres were established that complied with Government rules and regulations. Independent, state, and local government funded centres had a certain degree of autonomy over facilities, staffing, qualifications, quality programmes, and facilities. This movement became part of the global increased focus on the importance of early childhood education. As part of that educational emphasis, the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians in 2008 set the direction for schooling for the next 10 years. This formed the basis of Australia’s Education Reforms (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations). The reforms have influenced the management of early childhood education and care centres. All centres must comply with the National Quality Framework that mandates staff qualifications, facility standards, and the ratios of children to adults. From a parent’s perspective centres now look very much the same. All centres have indoor and outdoor playing spaces, separate rooms for differently aged children, playgrounds, play equipment, foyer and office spaces with similarly qualified staff. With these similarities in mind, the dilemma for parents is how to decide on a centre for their child to attend. Does it come down to parents’ taste about a centre? In the education context, how is taste conceptualised? This article will present research that conceptualises taste as being part of a decision-making process (DMP) that is used by parents when choosing a centre for their child and, in doing so, will introduce the term: parental taste. The Determining Factors of Taste A three phase, sequential, mixed methods study was used to determine how parents select one centre over another. Cresswell described this methodology as successive phases of data collection, where each builds on the previous, with the aim of addressing the research question. This process was seen as a method to identify parents’ varying tastes in centres considered for their child to attend. Phase 1 used a survey of 78 participants to gather baseline data to explore the values, expectations, and beliefs of the parents. It also determined the aspects of the centre important to parents, and gauged the importance of the socio-economic status and educational backgrounds of the participants in their decision making. Phase 2 built on the phase 1 data and included interviews with 20 interviewees exploring the details of the decision-making process (DMP). This phase also elaborated on the survey questions and responses, determined the variables that might impact on the DMP, and identified how parents access information about early learning centres. Phase 3 focussed on parental satisfaction with their choice of early learning setting. Again using 20 interviewees, these interviews investigated the DMP that had been undertaken, as well as any that might still be ongoing. This phase focused on parents' reflection on the DMP used and questioned them as to whether the same process would be used again in other areas of decision making. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that it usually fell to the mother to explore centre options and make the decision about enrolment. Along the way, she may have discussions with the father and, to a lesser extent, with the centre staff. Friends, relatives, the child, siblings, and other educational professionals did not rank highly when the decision was being considered. Interestingly, it was found that the mother began to consider childcare options and the need for care twelve months or more before care was required and a decision had to be made. A small number of parents (three from the 20) said that they thought about it while pregnant but felt silly because they “didn’t even have a baby yet.” All mothers said that it took quite a while to get their head around leaving their child with someone else, and this anxiety and concern increased the younger the child was. Two parents had criteria that they did not want their child in care until he/she could talk and walk, so that the child could look after him- or herself to some extent. This indicated some degree of scepticism that their child would be cared for appropriately. Parents who considered enrolling their child into care closer to when it was required generally chose to do this because they had selected a pre-determined age that their child would go into childcare. A small number of parents (two) decided that their child would not attend a centre until three years old, while other parents found employment and had to find care quickly in response. The survey results showed that the aspects of a centre that most influenced parental decision-making were the activities and teaching methods used by staff, centre reputation, play equipment inside and outside the centre, and the playground size and centre buildings. The interview responses added to this by suggesting that the type of playground facilities available were important, with a natural environment being preferred. Interestingly, the lowest aspect of importance reported was whether the child had friends or family already attending the centre. The results of the survey and interview data reflected the parents’ aspirations for their child and included the development of personal competencies of self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation linking emotions to thoughts and actions (Gendron). The child’s experience in a centre was expected to develop and refine personal traits such as self-confidence, self-awareness, self-management, the ability to interact with others, and the involvement in educational activities to achieve learning goals. With these aspirations in mind, parents felt considerable pressure to choose the environment that would fit their child the best. During the interview stage of data collection, the term “taste” emerged. The term is commonly used in a food, fashion, or style context. In the education context, however, taste was conceptualised as the judgement of likes and dislikes regarding centre attributes. Gladwell writes that “snap judgements are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious” (50). The immediacy of determining one's taste refutes the neoliberal construction (Campbell, Proctor, Sherington) of the DMP as a rational decision-making process that systematically compares different options before making a decision. In the education context, taste can be reconceptualised as an alignment between a decision and inherent values and beliefs. A personal “backpack” of experiences, beliefs, values, ideas, and memories all play a part in forming a person’s taste related to their likes and dislikes. In turn, this effects the end decision made. Parents formulated an initial response to a centre linked to the identification of attributes that aligned with personal values, beliefs, expectations, and aspirations. The data analysis indicated that parents formulated their personal taste in centres very quickly after centres were visited. At that point, parents had a clear image of the preferred centre. Further information gathering was used to reinforce that view and confirm this “parental taste.” How Does Parental Taste about a Centre Influence the Decision-Making Process? All parents used a process of decision-making to some degree. As already stated, it was usually the mother who gathered information to inform the final decision, but in two of the 78 cases it was the father who investigated and decided on the childcare centre in which to enrol. All parents used some form of process to guide their decision-making. A heavily planned process sees the parent gather information over a period of time and included participating in centre tours, drive-by viewings, talking with others, web-based searches, and, checking locations in the phone book. Surprisingly, centre advertising was the least used and least effective method of attracting parents, with only one person indicating that advertising had played a part in her DMP. This approach applied to a woman who had just moved to a new town and was not aware of the care options. This method may also be a reflection of the personality of the parent or it may reflect an understanding that there are differences between services in terms of their focus on education and care. A lightly planned process occurred when a relatively swift decision was made with minimal information gathering. It could have been the selection of the closest and most convenient centre, or the one that parents had heard people talk about. These parents were happy to go to the centre and add their name to the waiting list or enrol straight away. Generally, the impression was that all services provide the same education and care. Parents appeared to use different criteria when considering a centre for their child. Aspects here included the physical environment, size of rooms, aesthetic appeal, clean buildings, tidy surrounds, and a homely feel. Other aspects that affected this parental taste included the location of the centre, the availability of places for the child, and the interest the staff showed in parent and child. The interviews revealed that parents placed an importance on emotions when they decided if a centre suited their tastes that in turn affected their DMP. The “vibe,” the atmosphere, and how the staff made the parents feel were the most important aspects of this process. The centre’s reputation was also central to decision making. What Constructs Underpin the Decision? Parental choice decisions can appear to be rational, but are usually emotionally connected to parental aspirations and values. In this way, parental choice and prior parental decision making processes reflect the bounded rationality described by Kahneman, and are based on factors relevant to the individual as supported by Ariely and Lindstrom. Ariely states that choice and the decision making process are emotionally driven and may be irrational-rational decisions. Gladwell supports this notion in that “the task of making sense of ourselves and our behaviour requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis” (17). Reay’s research into social, cultural, emotional, and human capital to explain human behaviour was built upon to develop five constructs for decision making in this research. The R.O.P.E.S. constructs are domains that tie together to categorise the interaction of emotional connections that underpin the decision making process based on the parental taste in centres. The constructs emerged from the analysis of the data collected in the three phase approach. They were based on the responses from parents related to both their needs and their child’s needs in terms of having a valuable and happy experience at a centre. The R.O.P.E.S. constructs were key elements in the formation of parental taste in centres and eventual enrolment. The Reputational construct (R) included word of mouth, from friends, the cleaner, other staff from either the focus or another centre, and may or may not have aligned with parental taste and influenced the decision. Other constructs (O) included the location and convenience of the centre, and availability of spaces. Cost was not seen as an issue with the subsidies making each centre similar in fee structure. The Physical construct (P) included the facilities available such as the indoor and outdoor play space, whether these are natural or artificial environments, and the play equipment available. The Social construct (S) included social interactions—sharing, making friends, and building networks. It was found that the Emotional construct (E) was central to the process. It underpinned all the other constructs and was determined by the emotions that were elicited when the parent had the first and subsequent contact with the centre staff. This construct is pivotal in parental taste and decision making. Parents indicated that some centres did not have an abundance of resources but “the lady was really nice” (interview response) and the parent thought that her child would be cared for in that environment. Comments such as “the lady was really friendly and made us feel part of the place even though we were just looking around” (interview response) added to the emotional connection and construct for the DMP. The emotional connection with staff and the willingness of the director to take the time to show the parent the whole centre was a common comment from parents. Parents indicated that if they felt comfortable, and the atmosphere was warm and homelike, then they knew that their child would too. One centre particularly supported parental taste in a homely environment and had lounges, floor rugs, lamps for lighting, and aromatherapy oil burning that contributed to a home-like feel that appealed to parents and children. The professionalism of the staff who displayed an interest in the children, had interesting activities in their room, and were polite and courteous also added to the emotional construct. Staff speaking to the parent and child, rather than just the parent, was also valued. Interestingly, parents did not comment on the qualifications held by staff, indicating that parents assumed that to be employed staff must hold the required qualifications. Is There a Further Application of Taste in Decision Making? The third phase of data collection was related to additional questions being asked of the interviewee that required reflection of the DMP used when choosing a centre for their child to attend. Parents were asked to review the process and comment on any changes that they would make if they were in the same position again. The majority of parents said that they were content with their taste in centres and the subsequent decision made. A quarter of the parents indicated that they would make minor changes to their process. A common comment made was that the process used was indicative of the parent’s personality. A self confessed “worrier” enrolling her first child gathered a great deal of information and visited many centres to enable the most informed decision to be made. In contrast, a more relaxed parent enrolling a second or third child made a quicker decision after visiting or phoning one or two centres. Although parents considered their decision to be rationally considered, the impact of parental taste upon visiting the centre and speaking to staff was a strong indicator of the level of satisfaction. Taste was a precursor to the decision. When asked if the same process would be used if choosing a different service, such as an accountant, parents indicated that a similar process would be used, but perhaps not as in depth. The reasoning here was that parents were aware that the decision of selecting a centre would impact on their child and ultimately themselves in an emotional way. The parent indicated that if they spent time visiting centres and it appealed to their taste then the child would like it too. In turn this made the whole process of attending a centre less stressful and emotional. Parents clarified that not as much personal information gathering would occur if searching for an accountant. The focus would be centred on the accountant’s professional ability. Other instances were offered, such as purchasing a car, or selecting a house, dentist, or a babysitter. All parents suggested that additional information would be collected if their child of family would be directly impacted by the decision. Advertising of services or businesses through various multimedia approaches appeared not to rate highly when parents were in the process of decision making. Television, radio, print, Internet, and social networks were identified as possible modes of communication available for consideration by parents. The generational culture was evident in the responses from different parent age groups. The younger parents indicated that social media, Internet, and print may be used to ascertain the benefits of different services and to access information about the reputation of centres. In comparison, the older parents preferred word-of-mouth recommendations. Neither television nor radio was seen as media approaches that would attract clientele. Conclusion In the education context, the concept of parental taste can be seen to be an integral component to the decision making process. In this case, the attributes of an educational facility align to an individual’s personal “backpack” and form a like or a dislike, known as parental taste. The implications for the Directors of Early Childhood Education and Care Centres indicate that parental taste plays a role in a child’s enrolment into a centre. Parental taste is determined by the attributes of the centre that are aligned to the R.O.P.E.S. constructs with the emotional element as the key component. A less rigorous DMP is used when a generic service is required. Media and cultural ways of looking at our society interpret how important decisions are made. A general assumption is that major decisions are made in a calm, considered and rational manner. This is a neoliberal view and is not supported by the research presented in this article. References Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. London: Harper, 2009. Australian Children’s Education, Care and Quality Authority (ACECQA). n.d. 14 Jan. 2014. ‹http://www.acecqa.gov.au›. Campbell, Craig, Helen Proctor, and Geoffrey Sherington. School Choice: How Parents Negotiate The New School Market In Australia. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen and Unwin, 2009. Cresswell, John,W. Research Design. Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Sage, 2003. Department of Education. 11 Oct. 2013. 14 Jan. 2014. ‹http://education.gov.au/national-quality-framework-early-childhood-education-and-care›. Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). Education Reforms. Canberra, ACT: Australian Government Publishing Service, 2009. Gendron, Benedicte. “Why Emotional Capital Matters in Education and in Labour?: Toward an Optimal Exploitation of Human Capital and Knowledge Mangement.” Les Cahiers de la Maison des Sciences Economiques 113 (2004): 1–37. Glaswell, Malcolm. “Blink: The power of thinking without thinking.” Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2005. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Strauss &amp; Giroux, 2011. Lindstrom, Martin. Buy-ology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong. Great London: Random House Business Books, 2009. Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians. 14 Jan. 2014. ‹http://www.mceecdya.edu.au/mceecdya/melbourne_declaration,25979.html›. National Quality Framework. 14 Jan. 2014. ‹http://www.acecqa.gov.au. Reay, Diane. A Useful Extension of Bourdieu’s Conceptual Framework?: Emotional Capital as a Way of Understanding Mothers’ Involvement in their Children’s Education? Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Complex systems are an invention of the universe. It is not at all clear that science has an a priori primacy claim to the study of complex systems. (Galanter 5) Introduction In popular dialogues, describing a system as “complex” is often the point of resignation, inferring that the system cannot be sufficiently described, predicted nor managed. Transport networks, management infrastructure and supply chain logistics are all often described in this way. In socio-cultural terms “complex” is used to describe those humanistic systems that are “intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories” (Cahir &amp; James). Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates ‘self organising’ principles and ‘emergent’ properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design and media practice since the late 1960s. Complex Systems Theory Complexity theory grew out of systems theory, an holistic approach to analysis that views whole systems based upon the links and interactions between the component parts and their relationship to each other and the environment within they exists. This stands in stark contrast to conventional science which is based upon Descartes’s reductionism, where the aim is to analyse systems by reducing something to its component parts (Wilson 3). As systems thinking is concerned with relationships more than elements, it proposes that in complex systems, small catalysts can cause large changes and that a change in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system. As is apparent, systems theory is a way of thinking rather than a specific set of rules, and similarly there is no single unified Theory of Complexity, but several different theories have arisen from the natural sciences, mathematics and computing. As such, the study of complex systems is very interdisciplinary and encompasses more than one theoretical framework. Whilst key ideas of complexity theory developed through artificial intelligence and robotics research, other important contributions came from thermodynamics, biology, sociology, physics, economics and law. In her volume for the Elsevier Advanced Management Series, “Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations”, Eve Mitleton-Kelly describes a comprehensive overview of this evolution as five main areas of research: complex adaptive systems dissipative structures autopoiesis (non-equilibrium) social systems chaos theory path dependence Here, Mitleton-Kelly points out that relatively little work has been done on developing a specific theory of complex social systems, despite much interest in complexity and its application to management (Mitleton-Kelly 4). To this end, she goes on to define the term “complex evolving system” as more appropriate to the field than ‘complex adaptive system’ and suggests that the term “complex behaviour” is thus more useful in social contexts (Mitleton-Kelly). For our purpose here, “complex systems” will be the general term used to describe those systems that are diverse and made up of multiple interdependent elements, that are often ‘adaptive’, in that they have the capacity to change and learn from events. This is in itself both ‘evolutionary’ and ‘behavioural’ and can be understood as emerging from the interaction of autonomous agents – especially people. Some generic principles of complex systems defined by Mitleton Kelly that are of concern here are: self-organisation emergence interdependence feedback space of possibilities co-evolving creation of new order Whilst the behaviours of complex systems clearly do not fall into our conventional top down perception of management and production, anticipating such behaviours is becoming more and more essential for products, processes and policies. For example, compare the traditional top down model of news generation, distribution and consumption to the “emerging media eco-system” (Bowman and Willis 14). Figure 1 (Bowman &amp; Willis 10) Figure 2 (Bowman &amp; Willis 12) To the traditional news organisations, such a “democratization of production” (McLuhan 230) has been a huge cause for concern. The agencies once solely responsible for the representation of reality are now lost in a global miasma of competing perspectives. Can we anticipate and account for complex behaviours? Eve Mitleton Kelly states that “if organisations are understood as complex evolving systems co-evolving as part of a social ‘ecosystem’, then that changed perspective changes ways of acting and relating which lead to a different way of working. Thus, management strategy changes, and our organizational design paradigms evolve as new types of relationships and ways of working provide the conditions for the emergence of new organisational forms” (Mitleton-Kelly 6). Complexity in Design It is thus through design practice and processes that discovering methods for anticipating complex systems behaviours seem most possible. The Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) research programme, is a contemporary interdisciplinary research cluster consisting of academics and designers from architectural engineering, robotics, geography, digital media, sustainable design, and computing aiming to explore the possibility of trans disciplinary principles of complexity in design. Over arching this work is the conviction that design can be seen as model for complex systems researchers motivated by applying complexity science in particular domains. Key areas in which design and complexity interact have been established by this research cluster. Most immediately, many designed products and systems are inherently complex to design in the ordinary sense. For example, when designing vehicles, architecture, microchips designers need to understand complex dynamic processes used to fabricate and manufacture products and systems. The social and economic context of design is also complex, from market economics and legal regulation to social trends and mass culture. The process of designing can also involve complex social dynamics, with many people processing and exchanging complex heterogeneous information over complex human and communication networks, in the context of many changing constraints. Current key research questions are: how can the methods of complex systems science inform designers? how can design inform research into complex systems? Whilst ECiD acknowledges that to answer such questions effectively the theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design need further exploration and enquiry, there are no reliable precedents for such an activity across the sciences and the arts in general. Indeed, even in areas where a convergence of humanities methodology with scientific practice might seem to be most pertinent, most examples are few and far between. In his paper “Post Structuralism, Hypertext &amp; the World Wide Web”, Luke Tredennick states that “despite the concentration of post-structuralism on text and texts, the study of information has largely failed to exploit post-structuralist theory” (Tredennick 5). Yet it is surely in the convergence of art and design with computation and the media that a search for practical trans-metadisciplinary methodologies might be most fruitful. It is in design for interactive media, where algorithms meet graphics, where the user can interact, adapt and amend, that self-organisation, emergence, interdependence, feedback, the space of possibilities, co-evolution and the creation of new order are embraced on a day to day basis by designers. A digitally interactive environment such as the World Wide Web, clearly demonstrates all the key aspects of a complex system. Indeed, it has already been described as a ‘complexity machine’ (Qvortup 9). It is important to remember that this ‘complexity machine’ has been designed. It is an intentional facility. It may display all the characteristics of complexity but, whilst some of its attributes are most demonstrative of self organisation and emergence, the Internet itself has not emerged spontaneously. For example, Tredinnick details the evolution of the World Wide Web through the Memex machine of Vannevar Bush, through Ted Nelsons hypertext system Xanadu to Tim Berners-Lee’s Enquire (Tredennick 3). The Internet was engineered. So, whilst we may not be able to entirely predict complex behavior, we can, and do, quite clearly design for it. When designing digitally interactive artifacts we design parameters or co ordinates to define the space within which a conceptual process will take place. We can never begin to predict precisely what those processes might become through interaction, emergence and self organisation, but we can establish conceptual parameters that guide and delineate the space of possibilities. Indeed this fact is so transparently obvious that many commentators in the humanities have been pushed to remark that interaction is merely interpretation, and so called new media is not new at all; that one interacts with a book in much the same way as a digital artifact. After all, post-structuralist theory had established the “death of the author” in the 1970s – the a priori that all cultural artifacts are open to interpretation, where all meanings must be completed by the reader. The concept of the “open work” (Eco 6) has been an established post modern concept for over 30 years and is commonly recognised as a feature of surrealist montage, poetry, the writings of James Joyce, even advertising design, where a purposive space for engagement and interpretation of a message is designated, without which the communication does not “work”. However, this concept is also most successfully employed in relation to installation art and, more recently, interactive art as a reflection of the artist’s conscious decision to leave part of a work open to interpretation and/or interaction. Art &amp; Complex Systems One of the key projects of Embracing Complexity in Design has been to look at the relationship between art and complex systems. There is a relatively well established history of exploring art objects as complex systems in themselves that finds its origins in the systems art movement of the 1970s. In his paper “Observing ‘Systems Art’ from a Systems-Theroretical Perspective”, Francis Halsall defines systems art as “emerging in the 1960s and 1970s as a new paradigm in artistic practice … displaying an interest in the aesthetics of networks, the exploitation of new technology and New Media, unstable or de-materialised physicality, the prioritising of non-visual aspects, and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support (such as the gallery, discourse, or the market) within which it occurs” (Halsall 7). More contemporarily, “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970”, at Tate Modern, London, focuses upon systems artists “rejection of art’s traditional focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments al focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments with media that included dance, performance and…film &amp; video” (De Salvo 3). Artists include Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Gilbert &amp; George, Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. In 2002, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York, held an international exhibition entitled “Complexity; Art &amp; Complex Systems”, that was concerned with “art as a distinct discipline offer[ing] its own unique approache[s] and epistemic standards in the consideration of complexity” (Galanter and Levy 5), and the organisers go on to describe four ways in which artists engage the realm of complexity: presentations of natural complex phenomena that transcend conventional scientific visualisation descriptive systems which describe complex systems in an innovative and often idiosyncratic way commentary on complexity science itself technical applications of genetic algorithms, neural networks and a-life ECiD artist Julian Burton makes work that visualises how companies operate in specific relation to their approach to change and innovation. He is a strategic artist and facilitator who makes “pictures of problems to help people talk about them” (Burton). Clients include public and private sector organisations such as Barclays, Shell, Prudential, KPMG and the NHS. He is quoted as saying “Pictures are a powerful way to engage and focus a group’s attention on crucial issues and challenges, and enable them to grasp complex situations quickly. I try and create visual catalysts that capture the major themes of a workshop, meeting or strategy and re-present them in an engaging way to provoke lively conversations” (Burton). This is a simple and direct method of using art as a knowledge elicitation tool that falls into the first and second categories above. The third category is demonstrated by the ground breaking TechnoSphere, that was specifically inspired by complexity theory, landscape and artificial life. Launched in 1995 as an Arts Council funded online digital environment it was created by Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley. TechnoSphere is a virtual world, populated by artificial life forms created by users of the World Wide Web. The digital ecology of the 3D world, housed on a server, depends on the participation of an on-line public who accesses the world via the Internet. At the time of writing it has attracted over a 100,000 users who have created over a million creatures. The artistic exploration of technical applications is by default a key field for researching the convergence of trans-metadisciplinary methodologies. Troy Innocent’s lifeSigns evolves multiple digital media languages “expressed as a virtual world – through form, structure, colour, sound, motion, surface and behaviour” (Innocent). The work explores the idea of “emergent language through play – the idea that new meanings may be generated through interaction between human and digital agents”. Thus this artwork combines three areas of converging research – artificial life; computational semiotics and digital games. In his paper “What Is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory”, Philip Galanter describes all art as generative on the basis that it is created from the application of rules. Yet, as demonstrated above, what is significantly different and important about digital interactivity, as opposed to its predecessor, interpretation, is its provision of a graphical user interface (GUI) to component parts of a text such as symbol, metaphor, narrative, etc for the multiple “authors” and the multiple “readers” in a digitally interactive space of possibility. This offers us tangible, instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of interpretations of an artwork. Conclusion: Digital Interactivity – A Complex Medium Digital interaction of any sort is thus a graphic model of the complex process of communication. Here, complexity does not need deconstructing, representing nor modelling, as the aesthetics (as in apprehended by the senses) of the graphical user interface conveniently come first. Design for digital interactive media is thus design for complex adaptive systems. The theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design can clearly be expounded especially well through post-structuralism. The work of Barthes, Derrida &amp; Foucault offers us the notion of all cultural artefacts as texts or systems of signs, whose meanings are not fixed but rather sustained by networks of relationships. Implemented in a digital environment post-structuralist theory is tangible complexity. Strangely, whilst Philip Galanter states that science has no necessary over reaching claim to the study of complexity, he then argues conversely that “contemporary art theory rooted in skeptical continental philosophy [reduces] art to social construction [as] postmodernism, deconstruction and critical theory [are] notoriously elusive, slippery, and overlapping terms and ideas…that in fact [are] in the business of destabilising apparently clear and universal propositions” (4). This seems to imply that for Galanter, post modern rejections of grand narratives necessarily will exclude the “new scientific paradigm” of complexity, a paradigm that he himself is looking to be universal. Whilst he cites Lyotard (6) describing both political and linguistic reasons why postmodern art celebrates plurality, denying any progress towards singular totalising views, he fails to appreciate what happens if that singular totalising view incorporates interactivity? Surely complexity is pluralistic by its very nature? In the same vein, if language for Derrida is “an unfixed system of traces and differences … regardless of the intent of the authored texts … with multiple equally legitimate meanings” (Galanter 7) then I have heard no better description of the signifiers, signifieds, connotations and denotations of digital culture. Complexity in its entirety can also be conversely understood as the impact of digital interactivity upon culture per se which has a complex causal relation in itself; Qvortups notion of a “communications event” (9) such as the Danish publication of the Mohammed cartoons falls into this category. Yet a complex causality could be traced further into cultural processes enlightening media theory; from the relationship between advertising campaigns and brand development; to the exposure and trajectory of the celebrity; describing the evolution of visual language in media cultures and informing the relationship between exposure to representation and behaviour. In digital interaction the terms art, design and media converge into a process driven, performative event that demonstrates emergence through autopoietic processes within a designated space of possibility. By insisting that all artwork is generative Galanter, like many other writers, negates the medium entirely which allows him to insist that generative art is “ideologically neutral” (Galanter 10). Generative art, like all digitally interactive artifacts are not neutral but rather ideologically plural. Thus, if one integrates Qvortups (8) delineation of medium theory and complexity theory we may have what we need; a first theory of a complex medium. Through interactive media complexity theory is the first post modern science; the first science of culture. References Bowman, Shane, and Chris Willis. We Media. 21 Sep. 2003. 9 March 2007 http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php&gt;. Burton, Julian. “Hedron People.” 9 March 2007 http://www.hedron.com/network/assoc.php4?associate_id=14&gt;. Cahir, Jayde, and Sarah James. “Complex: Call for Papers.” M/C Journal 9 Sep. 2006. 7 March 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/upcoming.php&gt;. De Salvo, Donna, ed. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970. London: Tate Gallery Press, 2005. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Galanter, Phillip, and Ellen K. Levy. Complexity: Art &amp; Complex Systems. SDMA Gallery Guide, 2002. Galanter, Phillip. “Against Reductionism: Science, Complexity, Art &amp; Complexity Studies.” 2003. 9 March 2007 http://isce.edu/ISCE_Group_Site/web-content/ISCE_Events/ Norwood_2002/Norwood_2002_Papers/Galanter.pdf&gt;. Halsall, Francis. “Observing ‘Systems-Art’ from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective”. CHArt 2005. 9 March 2007 http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005/abstracts/halsall.htm&gt;. Innocent, Troy. “Life Signs.” 9 March 2007 http://www.iconica.org/main.htm&gt;. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD).” 2007. 9 March 2007 http://www.complexityanddesign.net/&gt;. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Mitleton-Kelly, Eve, ed. Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations. Elsevier Advanced Management Series, 2003. Prophet, Jane. “Jane Prophet.” 9 March 2007 http://www.janeprophet.co.uk/&gt;. Qvortup, Lars. “Understanding New Digital Media.” European Journal of Communication 21.3 (2006): 345-356. Tedinnick, Luke. “Post Structuralism, Hypertext &amp; the World Wide Web.” Aslib 59.2 (2007): 169-186. Wilson, Edward Osborne. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: A.A. Knoff, 1998. &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Cham, Karen, and Jeffrey Johnson. "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Cham, K., and J. Johnson. (Jun. 2007) "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php&gt;. &#x0D;

Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circumstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist pornography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. 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