Journal articles on the topic 'Teenagers' writings, English'

This study aims to discuss (1) adolescent slang in the form of abbreviations in the WhatsApp(WA) group of national-level short story writing competitions, (2) youth slang in the form ofwords in the WA group, and (3) slang as a medium of cultural communication in the millennialera. The research method uses qualitative methods. The research data were taken from two WAgroups in the national-level short story writing competition. Data collection techniques usinglistening and tapping techniques. The time used for data collection is half a year, from July2021 to December 2021. The results show ten forms of abbreviations and fifteen forms ofwords. Ten forms of abbreviations used by teenagers in chatting in the WA group of nationallevel short story writing competitions have variety, including abbreviations in English andIndonesian. The fifteen-word forms used by teenagers in chatting in the group also varied; ninewords came from English, six words came from Indonesian, there were variations inIndonesian words whose spellings were reversed (from the middle and behind), and There weretwo Jakarta dialect words. These findings represent adolescent self-identity. Communicationin the form of chatting is a youth culture, so there is a national-level short story writingcompetition in the WA group, which feels that teenagers tend to use slang. The number ofEnglish teenagers use in cultural communication shows that they want to be seen as modernand cool. By being looked at like that, teenagers feel happy and proud because they feel theyare not out of date. The findings from the study show that millennial youth have creativity incommunicating through abbreviations and variations of English to represent the context ofcontemporary culture that is modern, cool, and proud.

Abstract For many years in ELT methodology the questions of teaching writing in ELT coursebooks have been given much attention in terms of its nature, differences between written and spoken speech, ELT objectives and approaches to teaching writing, types of writing genres, writing assessment. But one rather neglected area in that regard is a graded teaching of creative writing to FL learners. The fifteen-year experience with organizing language-and-culture competitions launched by the Research Centre “Euroschool” for foreign language /FL/ students across Russia have proved that even intermediate FL learners, not to speak about advanced students are quite capable of writing in a FL: a) poems and songs expressing their ideas about teenagers’ lifestyle & visions of contemporary world; b) short stories describing family and school life experiences of their own or their peers; c) essays based on their comparative study of native and foreign cultures; d) presentations of Russian culture & other cultures of the Russian Federation in an English environment while being on exchange visits; e) translations of English poetry, short stories, excerpts from humours books, stripes of comics. The paper compares teaching creative writing in Russian and English, discusses the questions arisen from the outcomes of the language-and-culture competitions, arguing that effective teaching of creative writing presupposes: 1) teaching a FL in the context of the dialogue of cultures and civilizations, 2) introducing creative writing into a FL curriculum, 3) designing a package of thought-provoking teaching materials aiming at developing communicative, intellectual & mediating learners’ powers, 4) applying appropriate assessment scales for observing the dynamics of learners’ development as creative writers, 5) marrying students’ bilingual and crosscultural/ pluricultural classroom activities stimulating their participation in language-and-culture competitions.

The acquaintance of teenagers with the advent of time-economical and an advancedinteraction mode has threatened the English language's standard form.This research explores the phenomenon of mixing SMS language in ESL learners' writing skills regarding the choices of lexical and morpho-syntactic items and the presence and absence of SMS features at higher secondary level in Bahawalpur.Two questionnaires have been administered to collect data for quantitative analysis. The data has been collected from 80 ESL learners and 50 ESL teachersat the Intermediate level in private and government colleges sectors in Bahawalpur. Content analysis of 15-20 recently sent SMS has been conducted through text dictionaryof 80 ESL learners.The study shows the violation of standard norms of the English language, i.e., contractions, vowel deletion, punctuation mistakes, use of letters and symbols observed in SMS, and written assignments collected from ESL learnersof both sectors. Although SMS has its radicaleffects in the form oflearners' negligence, carelessness, syntactic ignorance, and absence of teachers' guidance, teaching methodology, and educational context are also the cause of learners'inept written work.

ABSTRACTThe language learning potential of writing has been an underresearched topic in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context. The present study investigates what Basque-Spanish EFL teenage learners (n = 60) notice when writing a composition in response to visual stimuli in a three-stage writing task including output, comparison, and delayed revision. The present study also explores how this noticing and feedback processing affects their subsequent revisions. The findings revealed that participants noticed mainly lexical problems, although they also paid attention to content features. Moreover, more proficient learners and guided learners noticed more features. A qualitative analysis of the results indicated that, overall, learners had a negative attitude toward writing and modeling, but those with more positive beliefs incorporated more items in subsequent revisions. A number of implications for research and pedagogy will be discussed.

Although many investigations have been carried out into the consequence of applying different approaches to teaching writing, there is still a lack of the empirical comparing research into two influential focus-on-form methods of generating writing accuracy. This study is therefore significant as it is the very first study that compares the relative effects of the two instructional interventions of dictogloss and processing instruction on EFL learners’ writing accuracy. To achieve the abovementioned aim, 56 teenage Iranian participants with elementary level English were homogenized and selected out of 90 learners at a language school, using the results of a piloted sample Key English Test (KET). These participants were randomly divided into two experimental groups with 28 participants in each to practice in one group dictogloss tasks and in the other processing instruction tasks after a pretest. A picture sequence writing task was administered as a posttest at the end of the treatments to both groups. Finally the mean scores of both groups on the posttest were compared through an independent samples t-test. The result rejected the null hypothesis demonstrating that dictogloss could significantly motivate the participants who outperformed the processing instruction group regarding their writing accuracy.

Nine teenage Filipino-Germans were challenged to learn two languages when they moved to Dumaguete City, Philippines. These German native speakers were born in Germany and migrated to the Philippines with their German fathers and Filipino mothers. In this new environment, they have been exposed to communicating in Cebuano, the dominant language, and develop their listening, speaking, reading, and writing English skills in school. The Can-do Scale test of Keijzer (2007) demonstrates their ability to learn a second language, with all responders willing to read, speak, and write in Cebuano and English. Short-term Filipino-Germans (who stayed in the Philippines for less than five years) prefer to listen to German on the radio or television, while long-term respondents (those who lived in the Philippines for more than five years) with dwindling German vocabulary favor listening to Cebuano and English. The study concludes that German respondents have gradually acquired Cebuano and English through time. The long-term migrants have forgotten their first language, as seen in their reading, speaking and writing skills. In contrast, the short-term migrants are still proficient in their first language despite the competition of the other two languages.

It is crucial for families and professionals to promote basic instrumental skills in children with autism, as these skills can help with comprehensive growth and development, and are a starting point in acquiring the essential tools needed for one to live an independent and successful life. These skills include oral language, reading, writing, and mathematics. Therefore, given that ICT and mobile applications (apps) are effective tools that offer suitable content, and are designed exclusively for people with this disorder, working on these skills with apps is an interesting option that is worthy of our attention. We analyzed 88 apps that focused on these skills, through a duly validated system of indicators, calculating frequencies, percentages, measures of central tendency and dispersion, and non-parametric contrast statistics. The app search was carried out in the Google Play Store, with the keyword “autism”, in English and in Spanish. Most of the apps focused on aspects linked to oral language and reading, but few were aimed at reading and mathematics. In addition to the apps’ lack of specialization in the last two skills, the vast majority did not specify the age group for which their content was intended.

In the current era of globalization, learning a foreign language has become a necessity for everyone. Not only for adults, but for teenagers and children, the ability to speak foreign languages ​​really supports them to understand other knowledge, especially those using foreign languages. Learning in the scope of public schools under the auspices of the Ministry of National Education and schools under the auspices of the Ministry of Religion such as Madrasah Ibtidaiyah and the like have differences both in the types of lessons in the curriculum and the standards of each of these subjects. For schools that are under the auspices of the department of religion such as Madrasah Ibtidaiyah and the like, the foreign language included in the national curriculum is generally Arabic. While English is usually included in the realm of local content. For the practice of learning these English teachers must develop their own learning implementation plans that have not been included in the national curriculum. Likewise, learning English at Madrasah Khozinatul Ulum Blora, Central Java. Foreign language teachers at there, both English and Arabic try to use learning methods and strategies that can attract the attention of their students. This study aims to describe foreign language learning for students of Madrasah Ibtidaiyah in Blora. The target is expected to increase knowledge about foreign language learning for children and expand knowledge about foreign language learning for students of Madrasah Ibtidaiyah. Data collection techniques were carried out by observing learning activities and written documents. The research steps consist of 1) design 2) data collection 3) data processing 4) conclusion drawing, and 5) report writing. The data collection stage includes data categorization activities, and data analysis. The report writing stage includes report writing activities and research results presentation. The results of this study are expected to add insight and expand knowledge about foreign language learning for students of Madrasah Ibtidaiyah.

After the invention of PC and the internet, smart phones and tablet PC are the common gadgets that can be easily found among people in Indonesia. Besides its advantages, these instruments change the way users communicating to the others. Preliminary observation suggests that students who used IT or communication gadgets have developed a different attitude compared to those who are not. In writing for example, many young students today tend to write using the keyboard rather than handwriting. From the writer’s point of view, it is believed that the characteristic of these communication gadgets has influenced the way most young teenagers act, talk, and behave. The result of analysis of this paper has provided a clearer picture on the effect of certain technology toward the behavior of some students and teachers at BINUS University. The data gathered through qualitative observation from English Department students and English teachers at BINUS University shows that the presence of communication gadgets and social networking activities has changed the attitude especially concerning to learning preference.

This study examined the literacy development of teenage refugee boys in a one-month intensive summer literacy camp. Th e study intervention sought to abate literacy regression among language minority students in a suburban southern US city by combining physical training and promotion of literacy culture. Students experienced an intensive schedule of athletics and reading/writing workshops. Data were collected regarding student writing, reading proficiency, and dispositions toward literacy practices. Outcomes included increased expressed student enjoyment expressed for both reading and writing, especially for the experience of older students reading to younger peers. In addition, data indicated that summer literacy regression was largely avoided. However, reading proficiency level assessments foreshadow obstacles for students in achieving timely high school graduation. Finally, means used by mainstream teachers of assessing the literacy of refugee students, especially compared to assessments of proficient English-speaking students, are critiqued.

Abstract Overcoming the reluctance of teenage learners to speak in the language classroom is a challenge for many teachers. This article reports on a study in which 60 Swedish pupils, aged 15–16, took part in a Storyline project based on a young adult fantasy novel. In the Storyline approach, a fictive world is created when learners, taking on the roles of characters in a story, collaborate on tasks to develop the story. A key feature is that the learners work in the same small groups for much of the time. During the six-week period of this study, these learners used English in a variety of speaking and writing tasks. The project showed a number of benefits, the most important of which were an increase in their motivation to speak English and enhanced self-confidence through doing so.

Michael Howarth is a Professor of English at Missouri Southern States University and his main teaching areas are creative writing, film studies, American literature to the 1900s, British literature of the 19th century and children’s and young adult literature. He is also an author of both fiction and critical texts such as Under the Bed, Creeping: Psychoanalyzing the Gothic in Children’s Literature (2014) and Movies to See Before You Graduate from High School (2019), which is an analysis of 60 movies that he considers essential viewing for teenagers. He is also an author of fiction: in 2016 he published Fair Weather Ninjas, a young adult novel, and in 2021 his first Gothic novel titled A Still and Awful Red. He is a member of the Children’s Literature Association and the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations, as well as Sigma Tau Delta.

Language is a multiplicity of meaning-making systems, which are connected with social, cultural and psychological networks. Focusing on issues of power, this article is concerned to explore how the readings of a European folktale triggered attempts among teenage girls in Hong Kong to make their own feminist and subversive interpretations in English. The reconstructed stories are more than a partial reproduction of the conventional text, they are also a useful reflection of the teenage girls' literacy and gender experience, as well as of their generic and social knowledge. With a resistance to textual conventions, the teenage girls demonstrate their written competence to create alternative subject and reading positions, which are textually motivated by their sense of difference. The material realisation of the stories is also characterised by splits and instabilities, in the negotiation of a new boundary for femininity. This negotiation demonstrates how the teenage girls are on the move, facing and settling contradictory possibilities in acquiring literacy and social roles. Along these lines of observation, the synchronic view of language, characterised by regularity and internal consistency, needs to be challenged in second-language writing instruction.

In October 1995 a short novel, Tammy Damulkurra, was published by Aboriginal Studies Press. Tammy was the result of a six-week narrative writing program undertaken with a class of teenage girls at Maningrida Community Education Centre, in the Northern Territory. The girls, Charlene Bonson Djarpi-Djarpi, Alison Cooper Gangarnda, Jacqueline Phillips Galamarrjin, Evette Dawn Pascoe, Sabrina Yulumurru Dhurrkay, Rhonda Brown Guykaladawuy, Eileen Bonson Djinjirrow, Simonne Lawrence, Justina Williams Wilinggirra and Roseanne Darcy Wangaytcha, are mostly Burarra, speak English as a second or third language and in 1994 were studying for their General Studies Certificate with me in Eagle Class.

Code switching and code mixing have become a trend in teenagers’ communication today. Not only in communicating, code switching and code mixing also influence the author’s style in writing novels. However, recently, it is not easy to define which is code switching or code mixing because the occurrence of the codes is very tight recently. The characters in the novel often do codes at least Indonesian-English. The objectives of this study are to find out the form of codes and the sociolinguistic features of the characters in Refrain novel. This research uses descriptive qualitative design from collecting the data until analyzing them. The result of the analysis yields some forms of codes spoken by the characters in the novel. The forms are sentence, clause, phrases like noun phrase & verb phrase, and words like noun, verb, adjective, & adverb. The other problem indicating their social background reflects the sociolinguistic features of the characters. They are education, family, friendship, and occupation.

This article is a report based on a qualitative study on the skills needed for junior high school students to produce written compositions in the context of creating a short message. This kind of research has been made necessary by the implementation of an obligatory exam for junior high school graduates, including a writing part in which there are some requirements to be met in order to obtain a positive grade. Although the recent educational reforms mean that junior high schools will no longer exist, this research is useful in the diagnosis of the writing skills of Polish teenagers that will be going into high school. The results have shown that the students had no major problems with such requirements as text organization, punctuation rules and with keeping to the word limit for a given written composition. On the other hand, however, the students showed the need for improvement in formal aspects of the written English language such as grammar, vocabulary accuracy and spelling and transition signals. Additionally, the meeting of requirements mentioning and developing three elements should be practiced more. For the purpose of the study, an analysis sheet has been implemented but no hypotheses have been put forth. The research group included 33 written compositions.

Abstract The study investigates the linguistic basis of Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) levels in English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing. Specifically, it examines whether CEFR levels can be distinguished with reference to syntactic complexity (SC) and whether the results differ between two groups of EFL learners with different first languages (Sindhi and Finnish). This sheds light on the linguistic comparability of the CEFR levels across L1 groups. Informants were teenagers from Pakistan (N = 868) and Finland (N = 287) who wrote the same argumentative essay that was rated on a CEFR-based scale. The essays were analysed for 28 SC indices with the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and Coh-Metrix. Most indices were found to distinguish CEFR levels A1, A2, and B1 in both language groups: the clearest separators were the length of production units, subordination, and phrasal density indices. The learner groups differed most in the length measures and phrasal density when their CEFR level was controlled for. However, some indices remained the same, and the A1 level was more similar than A2 and B2 in terms of SC across the two groups.

In her book Street without a Name, Kapka Kassabova, a Bulgarian author living in Scotland, combines a memoir of her childhood in communist Bulgaria with a travelogue about later return visits to her – now post-communist – native country. In this study, the discontinuous, fragmented and heterogeneous narrative of her autobiographical text is interpreted as an attempt to find an appropriate mode of sharing intimate knowledge of life in communism with a wider reading public in (primarily) Western English-speaking countries. It is demonstrated that Kassabova, writing from the perspective of an expatriate, emphasizes both the uniqueness of life in communist Bulgaria and the commonality of many experiences and values as well as their compatibility with those held by many people in Western countries. By employing a hybrid textual form, she succeeds in rendering her experiences as a child and teenager in communist Bulgaria and as a transnational migrant into the structures, metaphors and themes of a transnational “liquid modernity”, thus appealing to a broad multinational readership.

The implementation of health promotion programs is important because it is to increase adolescent knowledge about the dangers of smoking, improve adolescent perceptions of smoking, and change adolescent attitudes about smoking to not smoking anymore. The purpose of writing this article is to know and understand the role of health promotion in changing adolescent smoking behavior. The method used in this paper is a systematic review study. 80 articles (2011-2021) were collected in English based on the database of Google, Google Scholar, PubMed, DOAJ, and Emerald Insight. From the 7 articles analyzed, it can be found that the adverse effects of cigarettes on smokers and people around smokers are diseases; some of these diseases are cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, acute respiratory infections (ARI), hypertension, stroke, and various other diseases. This impact cannot be felt when initially consuming cigarettes in the early stages. The bad impact will refer to a decrease in individual productivity and performance. One of the strategic efforts to change smoking behavior is through health promotion interventions to change unhealthy lifestyles into healthy ones. Health promotion is one of the efforts to improve public health that focuses on promotion and preventive efforts to provide knowledge in changing adolescent smoking behavior so that they are able to maintain and improve their health status independently.

Abstract Gossip has mainly been investigated as an oral discourse practice, one that serves as a mechanism to reaffirm relationships and to construct, monitor and maintain social norms and values within communities. This study investigates how a group of Aboriginal English speaking teenage girls constructed norms, values and identities in their email gossip. Adopting a communities of practice perspective and a social constructionist understanding of identity, the study draws on ethnographic data collected on the writing practices of a group of Indigenous girls in a high school program for educationally ‘at risk’ students. The findings indicate that the girls used email gossip to do friendship while constructing multifaceted identities and negotiating social norms and values relating to four themes: 1) the social practices of girls in friendship circles; 2) the physical attributes, characters and social practices of boys; 3) the relationships between girls and boys; and 4) risk-taking practices. By creating spaces in the curriculum for email writing (and gossip), teachers can make school a more personally meaningful place for ‘disaffected’ students. It can also enhance students’ writing, computer and analytical skills and raise their language awareness with respect to constructing identities needed to participate in the workplace and wider community.

[Bahasa]: Tujuan Pengabdian Kepada Masyarakat (PKM) ini adalah untuk meningkatkan pengetahuan dan keterampilan kepada para remaja tentang membuat digital academics writing yang berbasis COST (comprehensive, objective, systematic, trusted) sehingga dapat Meningkatkan wawasan pengetahuan tentang menulis makalah atau karya tulis yang baik dan benar. Disamping itu juga meningkatkan hubungan dan kerjasama antara Universitas Budi Luhur dengan Warga Puri Cinere Hijau Depok sebagai mitra. Metode yang digunakan adalah survey, wawancara, penyampaian materi dan praktikum serta memberikan kuesioner sebagai feedback dari mitra dan evaluasi dari kegiatan PKM. Kesimpulan dari kegiatan ini menunjukkan bahwa pelatihan penggunaan aplikasi Microsoft Word dalam pembuatan digital academics writing yang berbasis COST berjalan dengan baik dan terbukti berdasarkan Analisis angket menunjukkan bahwa respon remaja terhadap Evaluasi pelatihan untuk meningkatkan keterampilan dalam Digital Academics Writing berbasis COST dengan rata-rata persentase sebesar 71%. Serta berdasarkan hasil evaluasi proses pelatihan menunjukkan 90% peserta setuju isi materi pelatihan jelas dan mudah dipahami, 80% Tutor memberi kesempatan untuk bertanya, 90% peserta sangat setuju bahwa tutor mampu menjawab pertanyaan peserta dengan jelas, 70% Peserta setuju bahwa tutor membantu dalam memahami materi yang disampaikan contoh latihan jelas dan mudah dipahami. Pelatihan ini meningkatkan kompetensi remaja dalam bidang menulis makalah atau bentuk digital academic writing lainnya serta memiliki dampak sangat positif bagi remaja khususnya pelajar dan mahasiswa dalam menyelesaikan tugas harian sekolah atau kampus dan juga sebagai modal dalam penyusunan makalah dan skripsi nantinya. Kata Kunci: digital academics writing, COST [English]: This community service aims to increase teenagers’ knowledge and skills on how to make Digital Academics Writing based by COST (comprehensive, objective, systematic, trusted) to increase their writing quality. It also improves relations and cooperation between Budi Luhur University and the partner (Puri Cinere Hijau Depok residents). The methods used were surveys, interviews, expository, and practicum. Questionnaires were also given to the participants as an evaluation of the program. The training on using Microsoft Word application to create Digital academic Writing based on COST was running well. The questionnaire results showed that the program improved participants’ Digital Academics Writing skills based on COST with 71% average. The evaluation of the training reveals that 90% of the participants agreed that the training content is clear and understandable, 80% agreed that the tutor facilitated a discussion, 90% strongly agreed that the tutor could answer the participants’ questions clearly, and 70% agreed that tutor had helped the participants to understand the delivered lesson, and appropriately given the exercises. The program has improved the participants’ competence in writing papers or another digital academic writing form. Also, it gives a strong positive impact on school students and university students to complete their daily school or college tasks and as a preparation for writing the thesis. Keywords: digital academics writing, COST

The students at Senior High School are teenagers. They were easy to feel bored if teacher taught them by a conventional method. They love to learn everything by a fun way. In this case, the writer tries to improve their ability in mastery English vocabulary, which vocabulary is something important to be learnt. It is one element to sharp the four skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing all together. The writer takes a research about this case. This study is mainly aimed to identify the improvement of student's vocabulary mastery through Talking Stick for the tenth grade students of SMA NEGERI 2 KABUPATEN SORONG in the academic year of 2016/2017. This research is a classroom action research. The methods of collecting data are observation, interview, test instrument and field notes. Then, the writer analyzes them in descriptive and statistical technique. This study takes two cycles. After did two cycles, the writer get a result. Both in the cycle I and cycle II, score of post-test are higher than pre-test. Then, the percentage of students’ mastery also improve, while in the first cycle there were only 41% students who could pass the target score of the Minimal Mastery Level Criterion (KKM). In the second cycle, there were 72% students who could pass the target score. Then from the questioner respond, it seems that students interested in learning vocabulary through Talking Stick. These all results indicate that there was significant improvement of students’ vocabulary mastery through Talking Stick for the tenth grade students of SMA NEGERI 2 Kabupaten Sorong in the academic year of 2016 /2017.

Permasalahan mengenai isu gender sudah mulai mendapatkan perhatian dan seringkali menjadi bahan perbincangan. Namun begitu, kesadaran masyarakat akan kesetaraan gender masih cukup rendah sehingga perlu dicanangkan kegiatan untuk meningkatkan kesadaran dan kepedulian akan permasalahan gender kepada masyarakat luas. Kegiatan semacam itu seharusnya bukan saja menargetkan orang dewasa, tetapi juga para remaja karena hal ini akan sangat berpengaruh terhadap pola pikir mereka saat dewasa. Kegiatan pengabdian masyarakat ini bertujuan meningkatkan pemahaman kesadaran gender dan perilaku kesetaraan gender pada siswa SMA di kota. Para siswa SMAN 5 Purwokerto yang tergabung dalam English Conversation Club (ECC) dipilih sebagai target sasaran kegiatan. Media film juga digunakan dalam kegiatan ini untuk memudahkan pemahaman para peserta. Metode yang digunakan dalam kegiatan ini dilaksanakan secara terstruktur dan sistematis, dimulai dari survey terhadap pihak mitra, identifikasi permasalahan, persiapan program kegiatan, pelaksanaan kegiatan PkM, dan yang terakhir evaluasi jalannya kegiatan. Program PkM ini dilaksanakan dalam bentuk kegiatan English Movie Club yang mencakup kegiatan ceramah, menonton film dengan isu gender, berdiskusi mengenai isu gender dalam film, dan membuat movie review pada kurun waktu Maret hingga Juni 2022. Hasil kegiatan menunjukkan bahwa terjadi peningkatan pemahaman para siswa terhadap isu gender. Hal ini dapat diketahui melalui evaluasi kuesioner jawaban para siswa dan hasil dari movie review yang telah mereka kumpulkan. Selain meningkatkan pemahaman isu gender, kegiatan dapat meningkatkan kompetensi menulis dan kepercayaan diri para siswa untuk mempublikasikan karya mereka.These days, gender issues have begun to get attention and are often a subject of discussion. However, public consciousness of gender awareness and gender equality is still quite low. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct activities to increase awareness and concern for gender issues in the wider community. Such activities should target adults and teenagers because it will greatly affect their mindset as adults. Based on that idea, this community service activity aims to increase understanding of gender awareness and gender equality behaviour in high school students. The students of SMAN 5 Purwokerto who are members of the English Conversation Club (ECC) extracurricular were chosen as the target of the activity. Film media was also used in this activity to facilitate providing understanding to the participants. Furthermore, the method used in this activity was structured and systematic, starting from a partner survey, identification of problems, preparation of activity programs, implementation of PkM activities, and evaluation of the course of activities. This PkM program is carried out in the form of English Movie Club activities which include lectures, watching films with gender issues, and making movie reviews starting from March to June 2022. The results of the activity showed that there was an increase in students' understanding of gender issues. This can be known by evaluating the students' answers to the questionnaire and the results of their movie reviews. In addition to increasing understanding of gender issues, activities can increase students' writing competence and boost their confidence to publish their work.

Background/Context Although progress has been made since members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication passed the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution (1974), there still remains a demand to examine youth perceptions of language. Such examinations can help teachers and researchers improve curricular choices, honor the lived experiences of students in classrooms, and address a systemic problem within a larger sociopolitical context: the continued failure of American public schooling to adequately educate Black students and other students of color. Purpose/Objective/Research Questions/Focus of Study The primary purpose of this article is to detail how youth perceive language rights in their academic and community lives, particularly in relation to what they name “Black English” and “Academic English.” To understand youth language perceptions, this article is guided by the following inquiry: Given the historically dichotomous relationship between Black English and Academic English, how do youth perceive language in their struggle to acquire academic success? Setting Data for this ethnographic project, which derive from a larger ongoing multiyear study on youth representations of community and literacy, were collected from two African American teenage males who reside in or near New York City's Harlem community and who graduated from the Harlem High School of New York City and currently attend local colleges in the area. Research Design The article uses a case study design to examine youth perceptions of language in their struggle to acquire academic success. Data for this study were collected from the following sources: researcher field notes, classroom observations, audio- and videotaped “rap” sessions, formal and informal interview meetings, participants’ written responses to and verbal conversations on a series of 10 questions that we collaboratively designed over a 3-month period, and data member checking sessions. Conclusions/Recommendations The findings presented in this article highlight the potential for additional research on youth perceptions of language in relation to success and survival. Given current debates in educational research on student achievement, multiple perspectives, and the intersections of students’ lived experiences with pedagogical practices and teacher training, teachers and researchers should continue to identify the ways in which student voices, writings, and experiences are oftentimes excluded from schools. Students’ Right to Their Own Language is an important policy statement that questions U.S. mono-lingualism in multicultural, multilingual contexts. “It's who we are. It's like telling me I gotta take off my culture and identity when I leave my hood and go to a place that don't care about me. Like schools. How can I leave me and my Black English home? I'm nobody's traitor.” —Phillip, youth participant 2007 “We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.” —Passed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Fall 19741

As the first half of the literacy equation (reading + writing = literacy), reading is primarily considered a dynamic meaning-focused interaction in which the reader is required to build comprehension of a text in a non-linear way. In other words, the reader is constantly checking the degree to which he or she understands the given information, simultaneously trying to identify comprehension failures and employ efficient repair strategies. This ability is termed metacomprehension; when it is enhanced, comprehension is generally more successful. Metacomprehension appears to be even more important for non-native readers because of their limited vocabulary and grammar. This is the key theoretical background of the single case study described in the current paper since it follows the developmental path of an EFL learner (Croatian teenager) with special focus on his reading ability. The main aim of the study was to see how his metacomprehension would develop over an extended period of exposure to EFL in the school setting. It was based on the hypothesis that extended exposure would result in better awareness of comprehension during the reading process. The study was conducted in two parts (Grade 5 and Grade 8) and comprised a number of stages. Being a case study, multiple sources and techniques were applied in gathering data, both qualitative and quantitative, such as: a multiple-choice comprehension test, a questionnaire for measuring the reader’s awareness of strategic reading processes (in Grade 5), an English proficiency test, a text restoration task, the self-revelation (stream-of-consciousness data) technique, a post-reading interview, and observation notes (in Grade 8). The results obtained initially indicated the participant’s good EFL reading comprehension performance but later showed that he was less successful, which was related to his poor EFL proficiency. In terms of reading strategy, it can be added that, despite some initial strategic abilities, the participant did not significantly develop his strategic behaviour for EFL reading. To conclude, prolonged exposure to EFL did not lead to better reading metacomprehension in this particular school learner.

Sharenting is a habit of using social media to share content that disseminates pictures, videos, information, and parenting styles for their children. The purpose of this article is to describe the sharenting phenomenon that occurs among young parents, and the importance of parenting programs, rather than protecting children's privacy. Writing articles use a qualitative approach as a literature review method that utilizes various scientific articles describing the sharenting phenomenon in various countries. The findings show that sharenting behaviour can create the spread of children's identity openly on social media and tends not to protect children's privacy and even seems to exploit children. Apart from that, sharenting can also create pressure on the children themselves and can even have an impact on online crime. This article is expected to provide benefits to parents regarding the importance of maintaining attitudes and behaviour when sharing and maintaining children's privacy and rights on social media. Keywords: Sharenting on social media, Children's Privacy, Parenting Program References: Åberg, E., & Huvila, J. (2019). Hip children, good mothers – children’s clothing as capital investment? Young Consumers, 20(3), 153–166. https://doi.org/10.1108/YC-06-2018-00816 Altafim, E. R. P., & Linhares, M. B. M. (2016). Universal violence and child maltreatment prevention programs for parents: A systematic review. Psychosocial Intervention, 25(1), 27–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psi.2015.10.003 Archer, C., & Kao, K.-T. (2018). Mother, baby, and Facebook makes three: Does social media provide social support for new mothers? Media International Australia, 168(1), 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X18783016 Bartholomew, M. K., Schoppe-Sullivan, S. J., Glassman, M., Kamp Dush, C. 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Background and Objective: Suicide attempts are 10-20X more common than completed suicide and an important risk factor for death by suicide, yet most people who attempt suicide do not die by suicide. The process of recovering after a suicide attempt has not been well studied. The Reasons to go on Living (RTGOL) Project, a narrative web-based study, focuses on experiences of people who have attempted suicide and made the decision to go on living, a process not well studied. Narrative research is ideally suited to understanding personal experiences critical to recovery following a suicide attempt, including the transition to a state of hopefulness. Voices from people with lived experience can help us plan and conceptualize this work. This paper reports on a secondary research question of the larger study: what stories do participants tell of the positive role/impact of the mental health system. Material and Methods: A website created for The RTGOL Project (www.thereasons.ca) enabled participants to anonymously submit a story about their suicide attempt and recovery, a process which enabled participation from a large and diverse group of participants. The only direction given was “if you have made a suicide attempt or seriously considered suicide and now want to go on living, we want to hear from you.” The unstructured narrative format allowed participants to describe their experiences in their own words, to include and emphasize what they considered important. Over 5 years, data analysis occurred in several phases over the course of the study, resulting in the identification of data that were inputted into an Excel file. This analysis used stories where participants described positive involvement with the mental health system (50 stories). Results: Several participants reflected on experiences many years previous, providing the privilege of learning how their life unfolded, what made a difference. Over a five-year period, 50 of 226 stories identified positive experiences with mental health care with sufficient details to allow analysis, and are the focus of this paper. There were a range of suicidal behaviours in these 50 stories, from suicidal ideation only to medically severe suicide attempts. Most described one or more suicide attempts. Three themes identified included: 1) trust and relationship with a health care professional, 2) the role of friends and family and friends, and 3) a wide range of services. Conclusion: Stories open a window into the experiences of the period after a suicide attempt. This study allowed for an understanding of how mental health professionals might help individuals who have attempted suicide write a different story, a life-affirming story. The stories that participants shared offer some understanding of “how” to provide support at a most-needed critical juncture for people as they interact with health care providers, including immediately after a suicide attempt. Results of this study reinforce that just one caring professional can make a tremendous difference to a person who has survived a suicide attempt. Key Words: web-based; suicide; suicide attempt; mental health system; narrative research Word Count: 478 Introduction My Third (or fourth) Suicide AttemptI laid in the back of the ambulance, the snow of too many doses of ativan dissolving on my tongue.They hadn't even cared enough about meto put someone in the back with me,and so, frustrated,I'd swallowed all the pills I had with me— not enough to do what I wanted it to right then,but more than enough to knock me out for a good 14 hours.I remember very little after that;benzodiazepines like ativan commonly cause pre- and post-amnesia, says Google helpfullyI wake up in a locked rooma woman manically drawing on the windows with crayonsthe colors of light through the glassdiffused into rainbows of joy scattered about the roomas if she were coloring on us all,all of the tattered remnants of humanity in a psych wardmade into a brittle mosaic, a quilt of many hues, a Technicolor dreamcoatand I thoughtI am so glad to be able to see this. (Story 187)The nurse opening that door will have a lasting impact on how this story unfolds and on this person’s life. Each year, almost one million people die from suicide, approximately one death every 40 seconds. Suicide attempts are much more frequent, with up to an estimated 20 attempts for every death by suicide.1 Suicide-related behaviours range from suicidal ideation and self-injury to death by suicide. We are unable to directly study those who die by suicide, but effective intervention after a suicide attempt could reduce the risk of subsequent death by suicide. Near-fatal suicide attempts have been used to explore the boundary with completed suicides. Findings indicated that violent suicide attempters and serious attempters (seriousness of the medical consequences to define near-fatal attempts) were more likely to make repeated, and higher lethality suicide attempts.2 In a case-control study, the medically severe suicide attempts group (78 participants), epidemiologically very similar to those who complete suicide, had significantly higher communication difficulties; the risk for death by suicide multiplied if accompanied by feelings of isolation and alienation.3 Most research in suicidology has been quantitative, focusing almost exclusively on identifying factors that may be predictive of suicidal behaviours, and on explanation rather than understanding.4 Qualitative research, focusing on the lived experiences of individuals who have attempted suicide, may provide a better understanding of how to respond in empathic and helpful ways to prevent future attempts and death by suicide.4,5 Fitzpatrick6 advocates for narrative research as a valuable qualitative method in suicide research, enabling people to construct and make sense of the experiences and their world, and imbue it with meaning. A review of qualitative studies examining the experiences of recovering from or living with suicidal ideation identified 5 interconnected themes: suffering, struggle, connection, turning points, and coping.7 Several additional qualitative studies about attempted suicide have been reported in the literature. Participants have included patients hospitalized for attempting suicide8, and/or suicidal ideation,9 out-patients following a suicide attempt and their caregivers,10 veterans with serious mental illness and at least one hospitalization for a suicide attempt or imminent suicide plan.11 Relationships were a consistent theme in these studies. Interpersonal relationships and an empathic environment were perceived as therapeutic and protective, enabling the expression of thoughts and self-understanding.8 Given the connection to relationship issues, the authors suggested it may be helpful to provide support for the relatives of patients who have attempted suicide. A sheltered, friendly environment and support systems, which included caring by family and friends, and treatment by mental health professionals, helped the suicidal healing process.10 Receiving empathic care led to positive changes and an increased level of insight; just one caring professional could make a tremendous difference.11 Kraft and colleagues9 concluded with the importance of hearing directly from those who are suicidal in order to help them, that only when we understand, “why suicide”, can we help with an alternative, “why life?” In a grounded theory study about help-seeking for self-injury, Long and colleagues12 identified that self-injury was not the problem for their participants, but a panacea, even if temporary, to painful life experiences. Participant narratives reflected a complex journey for those who self-injured: their wish when help-seeking was identified by the theme “to be treated like a person”. There has also been a focus on the role and potential impact of psychiatric/mental health nursing. Through interviews with experienced in-patient nurses, Carlen and Bengtsson13 identified the need to see suicidal patients as subjective human beings with unique experiences. This mirrors research with patients, which concluded that the interaction with personnel who are devoted, hope-mediating and committed may be crucial to a patient’s desire to continue living.14 Interviews with individuals who received mental health care for a suicidal crisis following a serious attempt led to the development of a theory for psychiatric nurses with the central variable, reconnecting the person with humanity across 3 phases: reflecting an image of humanity, guiding the individual back to humanity, and learning to live.15 Other research has identified important roles for nurses working with patients who have attempted suicide by enabling the expression of thoughts and developing self-understanding8, helping to see things differently and reconnecting with others,10 assisting the person in finding meaning from their experience to turn their lives around, and maintain/and develop positive connections with others.16 However, one literature review identified that negative attitudes toward self-harm were common among nurses, with more positive attitudes among mental health nurses than general nurses. The authors concluded that education, both reflective and interactive, could have a positive impact.17 This paper is one part of a larger web-based narrative study, the Reasons to go on Living Project (RTGOL), that seeks to understand the transition from making a suicide attempt to choosing life. When invited to tell their stories anonymously online, what information would people share about their suicide attempts? This paper reports on a secondary research question of the larger study: what stories do participants tell of the positive role/impact of the mental health system. The focus on the positive impact reflects an appreciative inquiry approach which can promote better practice.18 Methods Design and Sample A website created for The RTGOL Project (www.thereasons.ca) enabled participants to anonymously submit a story about their suicide attempt and recovery. Participants were required to read and agree with a consent form before being able to submit their story through a text box or by uploading a file. No demographic information was requested. Text submissions were embedded into an email and sent to an account created for the Project without collecting information about the IP address or other identifying information. The content of the website was reviewed by legal counsel before posting, and the study was approved by the local Research Ethics Board. Stories were collected for 5 years (July 2008-June 2013). The RTGOL Project enabled participation by a large, diverse audience, at their own convenience of time and location, providing they had computer access. The unstructured narrative format allowed participants to describe their experiences in their own words, to include and emphasize what they considered important. Of the 226 submissions to the website, 112 described involvement at some level with the mental health system, and 50 provided sufficient detail about positive experiences with mental health care to permit analysis. There were a range of suicidal behaviours in these 50 stories: 8 described suicidal ideation only; 9 met the criteria of medically severe suicide attempts3; 33 described one or more suicide attempts. For most participants, the last attempt had been some years in the past, even decades, prior to writing. Results Stories of positive experiences with mental health care described the idea of a door opening, a turning point, or helping the person to see their situation differently. Themes identified were: (1) relationship and trust with a Health Care Professional (HCP), (2) the role of family and friends (limited to in-hospital experiences), and (3) the opportunity to access a range of services. The many reflective submissions of experiences told many years after the suicide attempt(s) speaks to the lasting impact of the experience for that individual. Trust and Relationship with a Health Care Professional A trusting relationship with a health professional helped participants to see things in a different way, a more hopeful way and over time. “In that time of crisis, she never talked down to me, kept her promises, didn't panic, didn't give up, and she kept believing in me. I guess I essentially borrowed the hope that she had for me until I found hope for myself.” (Story# 35) My doctor has worked extensively with me. I now realize that this is what will keep me alive. To be able to feel in my heart that my doctor does care about me and truly wants to see me get better.” (Story 34). The writer in Story 150 was a nurse, an honours graduate. The 20 years following graduation included depression, hospitalizations and many suicide attempts. “One day after supper I took an entire bottle of prescription pills, then rode away on my bike. They found me late that night unconscious in a downtown park. My heart threatened to stop in the ICU.” Then later, “I finally found a person who was able to connect with me and help me climb out of the pit I was in. I asked her if anyone as sick as me could get better, and she said, “Yes”, she had seen it happen. Those were the words I had been waiting to hear! I quickly became very motivated to get better. I felt heard and like I had just found a big sister, a guide to help me figure out how to live in the world. This person was a nurse who worked as a trauma therapist.” At the time when the story was submitted, the writer was applying to a graduate program. Role of Family and Friends Several participants described being affected by their family’s response to their suicide attempt. Realizing the impact on their family and friends was, for some, a turning point. The writer in Story 20 told of experiences more than 30 years prior to the writing. She described her family of origin as “truly dysfunctional,” and she suffered from episodes of depression and hospitalization during her teen years. Following the birth of her second child, and many family difficulties, “It was at this point that I became suicidal.” She made a decision to kill herself by jumping off the balcony (6 stories). “At the very last second as I hung onto the railing of the balcony. I did not want to die but it was too late. I landed on the parking lot pavement.” She wrote that the pain was indescribable, due to many broken bones. “The physical pain can be unbearable. Then you get to see the pain and horror in the eyes of someone you love and who loves you. Many people suggested to my husband that he should leave me in the hospital, go on with life and forget about me. During the process of recovery in the hospital, my husband was with me every day…With the help of psychiatrists and a later hospitalization, I was actually diagnosed as bipolar…Since 1983, I have been taking lithium and have never had a recurrence of suicidal thoughts or for that matter any kind of depression.” The writer in Story 62 suffered childhood sexual abuse. When she came forward with it, she felt she was not heard. Self-harm on a regular basis was followed by “numerous overdoses trying to end my life.” Overdoses led to psychiatric hospitalizations that were unhelpful because she was unable to trust staff. “My way of thinking was that ending my life was the only answer. There had been numerous attempts, too many to count. My thoughts were that if I wasn’t alive I wouldn’t have to deal with my problems.” In her final attempt, she plunged over the side of a mountain, dropping 80 feet, resulting in several serious injuries. “I was so angry that I was still alive.” However, “During my hospitalization I began to realize that my family and friends were there by my side continuously, I began to realize that I wasn't only hurting myself. I was hurting all the important people in my life. It was then that I told myself I am going to do whatever it takes.” A turning point is not to say that the difficulties did not continue. The writer of Story 171 tells of a suicide attempt 7 years previous, and the ongoing anguish. She had been depressed for years and had thoughts of suicide on a daily basis. After a serious overdose, she woke up the next day in a hospital bed, her husband and 2 daughters at her bed. “Honestly, I was disappointed to wake up. But, then I saw how scared and hurt they were. Then I was sorry for what I had done to them. Since then I have thought of suicide but know that it is tragic for the family and is a hurt that can never be undone. Today I live with the thought that I am here for a reason and when it is God's time to take me then I will go. I do believe living is harder than dying. I do believe I was born for a purpose and when that is accomplished I will be released. …Until then I try to remind myself of how I am blessed and try to appreciate the wonders of the world and the people in it.” Range of Services The important role of mental health and recovery services was frequently mentioned, including dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT)/cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), recovery group, group therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous, accurate diagnosis, and medications. The writer in Story 30 was 83 years old when she submitted her story, reflecting on a life with both good and bad times. She first attempted suicide at age 10 or 12. A serious post-partum depression followed the birth of her second child, and over the years, she experienced periods of suicidal intent: “Consequently, a few years passed and I got to feeling suicidal again. I had pills in one pocket and a clipping for “The Recovery Group” in the other pocket. As I rode on the bus trying to make up my mind, I decided to go to the Recovery Group first. I could always take the pills later. I found the Recovery Group and yoga helpful; going to meetings sometimes twice a day until I got thinking more clearly and learned how to deal with my problems.” Several participants described the value of CBT or DBT in learning to challenge perceptions. “I have tools now to differentiate myself from the illness. I learned I'm not a bad person but bad things did happen to me and I survived.”(Story 3) “The fact is that we have thoughts that are helpful and thoughts that are destructive….. I knew it was up to me if I was to get better once and for all.” (Story 32): “In the hospital I was introduced to DBT. I saw a nurse (Tanya) every day and attended a group session twice a week, learning the techniques. I worked with the people who wanted to work with me this time. Tanya said the same thing my counselor did “there is no study that can prove whether or not suicide solves problems” and I felt as though I understood it then. If I am dead, then all the people that I kept pushing away and refusing their help would be devastated. If I killed myself with my own hand, my family would be so upset. DBT taught me how to ‘ride my emotional wave’. ……….. DBT has changed my life…….. My life is getting back in order now, thanks to DBT, and I have lots of reasons to go on living.”(Story 19) The writer of Story 67 described the importance of group therapy. “Group therapy was the most helpful for me. It gave me something besides myself to focus on. Empathy is such a powerful emotion and a pathway to love. And it was a huge relief to hear others felt the same and had developed tools of their own that I could try for myself! I think I needed to learn to communicate and recognize when I was piling everything up to build my despair. I don’t think I have found the best ways yet, but I am lifetimes away from that teenage girl.” (Story 67) The author of story 212 reflected on suicidal ideation beginning over 20 years earlier, at age 13. Her first attempt was at 28. “I thought everyone would be better off without me, especially my children, I felt like the worst mum ever, I felt like a burden to my family and I felt like I was a failure at life in general.” She had more suicide attempts, experienced the death of her father by suicide, and then finally found her doctor. “Now I’m on meds for a mood disorder and depression, my family watch me closely, and I see my doctor regularly. For the first time in 20 years, I love being a mum, a sister, a daughter, a friend, a cousin etc.” Discussion The 50 stories that describe positive experiences in the health care system constitute a larger group than most other similar studies, and most participants had made one or more suicide attempts. Several writers reflected back many years, telling stories of long ago, as with the 83-year old participant (Story 30) whose story provided the privilege of learning how the author’s life unfolded. In clinical practice, we often do not know – how did the story turn out? The stories that describe receiving health care speak to the impact of the experience, and the importance of the issues identified in the mental health system. We identified 3 themes, but it was often the combination that participants described in their stories that was powerful, as demonstrated in Story 20, the young new mother who had fallen from a balcony 30 years earlier. Voices from people with lived experience can help us plan and conceptualize our clinical work. Results are consistent with, and add to, the previous work on the importance of therapeutic relationships.8,10,11,14–16 It is from the stories in this study that we come to understand the powerful experience of seeing a family members’ reaction following a participant’s suicide attempt, and how that can be a potent turning point as identified by Lakeman and Fitzgerald.7 Ghio and colleagues8 and Lakeman16 identified the important role for staff/nurses in supporting families due to the connection to relationship issues. This research also calls for support for families to recognize the important role they have in helping the person understand how much they mean to them, and to promote the potential impact of a turning point. The importance of the range of services reflect Lakeman and Fitzgerald’s7 theme of coping, associating positive change by increasing the repertoire of coping strategies. These findings have implications for practice, research and education. Working with individuals who are suicidal can help them develop and tell a different story, help them move from a death-oriented to life-oriented position,15 from “why suicide” to “why life.”9 Hospitalization provides a person with the opportunity to reflect, to take time away from “the real world” to consider oneself, the suicide attempt, connections with family and friends and life goals, and to recover physically and emotionally. Hospitalization is also an opening to involve the family in the recovery process. The intensity of the immediate period following a suicide attempt provides a unique opportunity for nurses to support and coach families, to help both patients and family begin to see things differently and begin to create that different story. In this way, family and friends can be both a support to the person who has attempted suicide, and receive help in their own struggles with this experience. It is also important to recognize that this short period of opportunity is not specific to the nurses in psychiatric units, as the nurses caring for a person after a medically severe suicide attempt will frequently be the nurses in the ICU or Emergency departments. Education, both reflective and interactive, could have a positive impact.17 Helping staff develop the attitudes, skills and approach necessary to be helpful to a person post-suicide attempt is beginning to be reported in the literature.21 Further implications relate to nursing curriculum. Given the extent of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and deaths by suicide, this merits an important focus. This could include specific scenarios, readings by people affected by suicide, both patients themselves and their families or survivors, and discussions with individuals who have made an attempt(s) and made a decision to go on living. All of this is, of course, not specific to nursing. All members of the interprofessional health care team can support the transition to recovery of a person after a suicide attempt using the strategies suggested in this paper, in addition to other evidence-based interventions and treatments. Findings from this study need to be considered in light of some specific limitations. First, the focus was on those who have made a decision to go on living, and we have only the information the participants included in their stories. No follow-up questions were possible. The nature of the research design meant that participants required access to a computer with Internet and the ability to communicate in English. This study does not provide a comprehensive view of in-patient care. However, it offers important inputs to enhance other aspects of care, such as assessing safety as a critical foundation to care. We consider these limitations were more than balanced by the richness of the many stories that a totally anonymous process allowed. Conclusion Stories open a window into the experiences of a person during the period after a suicide attempt. The RTGOL Project allowed for an understanding of how we might help suicidal individuals change the script, write a different story. The stories that participants shared give us some understanding of “how” to provide support at a most-needed critical juncture for people as they interact with health care providers immediately after a suicide attempt. While we cannot know the experiences of those who did not survive a suicide attempt, results of this study reinforce that just one caring professional can make a crucial difference to a person who has survived a suicide attempt. We end with where we began. Who will open the door? References 1. World Health Organization. Suicide prevention and special programmes. http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/index.html Geneva: Author; 2013.2. Giner L, Jaussent I, Olie E, et al. Violent and serious suicide attempters: One step closer to suicide? J Clin Psychiatry 2014:73(3):3191–197.3. Levi-Belz Y, Gvion Y, Horesh N, et al. Mental pain, communication difficulties, and medically serious suicide attempts: A case-control study. Arch Suicide Res 2014:18:74–87.4. Hjelmeland H and Knizek BL. Why we need qualitative research in suicidology? Suicide Life Threat Behav 2010:40(1):74–80.5. Gunnell D. A population health perspective on suicide research and prevention: What we know, what we need to know, and policy priorities. Crisis 2015:36(3):155–60.6. Fitzpatrick S. Looking beyond the qualitative and quantitative divide: Narrative, ethics and representation in suicidology. Suicidol Online 2011:2:29–37.7. Lakeman R and FitzGerald M. How people live with or get over being suicidal: A review of qualitative studies. J Adv Nurs 2008:64(2):114–26.8. Ghio L, Zanelli E, Gotelli S, et al. Involving patients who attempt suicide in suicide prevention: A focus group study. 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Cutcliffe JR, Stevenson C, Jackson S, et al. A modified grounded theory study of how psychiatric nurses work with suicidal people. Int J Nurs Studies 2006:43(7):791–802.16. Lakeman, R. What can qualitative research tell us about helping a person who is suicidal? Nurs Times 2010:106(33):23–26.17. Karman P, Kool N, Poslawsky I, et al. Nurses’ attitudes toward self-harm: a literature review. J Psychiatr Ment Health Nurs 2015:22:65–75.18. Carter B. ‘One expertise among many’ – working appreciatively to make miracles instead of finding problems: Using appreciative inquiry as a way of reframing research. J Res Nurs 2006:11(1): 48–63.19. Lieblich A, Tuval-Mashiach R, Zilber T. Narrative research: Reading, analysis, and interpretation. Sage Publications; 1998.20. Braun V and Clarke V. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol 2006:3(2):77–101.21. Kishi Y, Otsuka K, Akiyama K, et al. Effects of a training workshop on suicide prevention among emergency room nurses. 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The current study aims at investigating the possible interaction of EFL teenage learners’ postcard writing performance (according to A2 level) and their self-regulated learning strategies at an English center. The research also helps to determine the level of interaction between EFL teenagers’ self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies and their postcard writing performance. Thus, it also examined the frequency of use of SRL strategies in writing among those learners. A total of 74 learners completed 32 items in the self-regulated learning strategies questionnaire including six dimensions of three categories namely environmental processes, behavioral processes, and personal processes. Then, three successful writers and three less successful writers were invited into the semi-structured interview. The findings indicated that SRL strategies had a positive impact on EFL teenage learners' postcard writing. The more SRL strategies used in writing, the higher the learners' score. Among these strategies, environmental factors may have a stronger influence than behavioral or personal factors. Specifically, environmental structuring and help-seeking strategies are most frequently used. The findings also showed that EFL teenage learners use SRL strategies to a moderate degree when given writing tasks. Besides, the results of the interview reveal that successful learners self-regulated better than less successful ones. They also self-evaluated their writing more frequently than those who are less successful. Based on the findings of this study, pedagogical implications and recommendations for further study are presented.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0559/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

People with high levels of literacy usually have low crime rates and high intelligence. It is expected that the school community itself will happen in the school environment like teachers and students. The purpose of this research is to collect information on the learning styles and preferences of young junior high school students who are curious and critical. It is very useful to cultivate interest in reading English literature books in order to increase the cultural and social value of students who intend to apply for school literacy campaigns. The reading literacy development model used is the Plomp model: preliminary research, prototyping and evaluation. Science books such as textbooks recommended by the Cambridge Courses may have a major and popular impact because they can increase their value in various courses that use English. Educators are expected to use related books in their learning and lead the school's reading and writing movement. The result of validation of teaching materials indicates that reading literacy material with the use of English-language publications is important and can be tested.

Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of game-based learning applied in language classes. Second language teaching and learning are being inspired by the increasingly mature game-based learning technology. Currently, educational games are regarded as a new technology with great potential. The game-based promotion of oral English has also become one of the research hotspots. This research carried out an empirical study on the subjective experiences and perceptions of using game-based second language learning to cultivate the oral English of Chinese college students. By using Unity 3D technology, “Digital Game-Virtual College” game software was developed for Chinese teenagers as the experimental carrier. Sixty-six freshmen majoring in review engineering at a university located in a first-tier city in southern China were invited as participants. Based on the courses “College English-Reading and Writing” and “College English-Listening, Viewing and Speaking,” this research explored the game-based teaching of “Words Arena Contest” and “Words Talents,” respectively. The analysis of the attitude and achievement data not only indicated the advantages and disadvantages of game-based learning, but also suggested the significant points in game-based learning software design. The results of tests and survey provide insight into the evaluation and reflection of the subjective experiences and perceptions of using digital game-based language learning. The results of this research can not only provide guidance for exploring the psychological contributors and barriers to game-based second language learning, but can also shed some light on and provide a reference for the design of game-based second language learning software.

Advertisement has a big influence in our life as it shows everywhere each day through magazines, newspapers, radio, and even television. The advertisers use writing, visual images, speech, or music to promote their product. The creative and persuasive use of the multimodality supports them to promote the product. One of the attractive targets to promote their product is teenagers which are identified as people ages 12 to 17. This makes the study of multimodality in advertisement for students, mainly TV commercials, becomes important to be conducted at school. Stimulating students’ critical thinking to become aware of persuasive strategies through multimodality in TV commercial is needed. This study is focusing on the analysis of multimodality namely language, visual image, and music illustration used in TV commercials and its use to stimulate the junior high school students’ critical thinking at English as Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. The implication of this research is to analyze TV commercials using Multimodal Analysis and its use in stimulating students’ critical thinking, to become aware of Advertisement’s persuasive intention to promote their product.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a highly regarded series of novels and the winner of many prizes worldwide targeting children and teenagers. The current paper aims to compare the original novel written in English with its Arabic Translation to highlight the purifying measures taken by the publishers to adapt the inappropriate or unsuitable content for the target reader. The original novel includes mentions of love, relationships, indecent clothes, religion and cultural holidays which all were altered and adapted to the Arabic culture. Based on an interview conducted with the publishers of the Arabic translation, translating and writing for children go through a strict filter to guarantee that any content corresponds with the Arabic values and to guarantee the book’s access to every Arab country. The translator, therefore, seems to be free from the blame of making the changes to the original novel as the publishers dictated the translation guidelines. The paper shows that the translators resorted to using strategies such as omission, substitution, and cultural adaptations to purify the content of the original novel.

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La disciplina del idioma inglés es parte de las mallas curriculares en el nivel universitario con el objetivo de posibilitar la comunicación en la lengua inglesa con la integración de las cuatro habilidades (expresión oral, audición, lectura y escritura) para que le sea útil en la vida laboral del profesional. Este trabajo se traza como objetivo caracterizar el proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje del inglés para estudiantes de la carrera de Comercio Exterior para el desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa en dicho proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje del inglés en la Universidad. Para alcanzar los resultados esperados se han utilizado diferentes métodos para conocer la esencia del fenómeno analizado. Así, entre otros para el desarrollo de la investigación han sido fundamentales los siguientes métodos: Análisis y síntesis, Inductivo-deductivo y el Método sistémico funcional. Los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje promueven en cada estudiante la apropiación del conocimiento, pero el proceso en sí influye significativamente en las formas de aprendizaje, y las relaciones que establece el profesional con el entorno del Comercio Exterior. Palabras claves: Enseñanza- aprendizaje, competencias, construcción del conocimiento, aprendizaje de lenguas Prevalence of teenage pregnancy and its psychosocial impact on the general hospital served Jipijapa, Ecuador Abstract The discipline of English is part of the curricula at the university level in order to enable communication in the English language with the integration of the four skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) to make it useful in professional working life. This work is drawn to characterize the process of teaching learning English for students of the career Foreign Trade for the development of communicative competence in the teaching-learning process of English at the University. To achieve the expected results have used different methods to learn the essence of the phenomenon analyzed. Thus, among others for the development of fundamental research have been the following methods: Analysis and synthesis, inductive-deductive and systemic functional method. The processes of teaching and learning in each student promote the appropriation of knowledge, but the process itself significantly influences the ways of learning, and the professional relationship with the external trade environment. Keywords: Teaching – learning, competences, knowledge, language learning

Most investigations of language use in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems colloquially known as 'chat rooms' are based on studies of chat rooms in which English is the predominant language. This study begins to redress that bias by investigating language use in a Swedish text-based chat room. Do Swedish chat participants just adopt strategies adapted to suit the needs of written online conversation, or is Swedish written language being developed in analogy with adaptations that can be observed in 'international' chat rooms? As is now well known, text-based chat rooms provide a means for people to converse in near real time with very little delay between messages. As a written form of interaction, there is no possibility of sending simultaneous non-verbal information, and while the minimal delay gives the interaction a more conversational feel, the conversants must struggle with the time pressure of combining a slow message production system with rapid transmission-reception. Several strategies have been developed in order to ease the strain of writing and to convey more information than written symbols normally allow (Werry; Witmer & Katzman; Hård af Segerstad, "Emoticons"). A number of strategies have been developed to suit the needs of CMC, some of which we recognise from traditional writing, but perhaps use more generously in the new environment. Well known and internationally recognised strategies used to compensate for the lack of non-verbal or non-vocal signals include providing analogies for vocalisations adopted in order to compensate for the effort of typing and time pressure: Smileys (or emoticons): Smileys are combinations of keyboard characters which attempt to resemble facial expressions, eg. ;) (or simple objects such as roses). These are mostly placed at the end of a sentence as an aid to interpret the emotional state of the sender; Surrounding words with *asterisks* (or a number of variants, such as underscores (_word_)). As with smileys, asterisks may be used to indicate the emotional state of the sender (eg. *smiles*, *s*), and also to convey an action (*waves*, *jumps up and down*); In some systems, different fonts and colours may be used to express emotions. Capitals, unorthodox spelling and mixing of cases in the middle of words and Extreme use of punctuation marks may all be used to convey analogies to prosodic phenomena such as intonation, tone of voice, emphasis ("you IDIOT"); Abbreviations and acronyms: some are traditional, others new to the medium; Omission of words: ellipsis, grammatical function words; and, Little correction of typographical errors -- orthography or punctuation -- and little traditional use of mixed cases (eg. capitals at the beginning of sentences), and punctuation. Method This study compares and contrasts data from a questionnaire and material from a logged chat channel. The investigation began with a questionnaire, inquiring into the habits and preferences of Swedish students communicating on the Internet. 333 students (164 females and 169 males) answered the questionnaire that was sent to five upper secondary schools (students aged 16-18), and two lower secondary schools (students aged 13-15). Subjects were asked for three kinds of information: (a) examples of the strategies mentioned above and whether they used these when chatting online, (b) which languages were used in everyday communication and in chat rooms, and (c) the names of favourite chat rooms. One of the most popular public chat rooms turned out to be one maintained by a Swedish newspaper. Permission was obtained to log material from this chat room. The room may be accessed at: <http://nychat.aftonbladet.se/webchat/oppenkanal/Entren.php>. A 'bot (from 'robot', a program that can act like a user on an IRC network) was used to log the time, sender and content of contributions in the room. In order to get a large data set and to record the spread of activity over the most part of a week, approximately 120 hours of logging occurred, six days and nights in succession. During this period 4 293 users ('unique pseudonyms'), from 278 different domains provided 47 715 contributions in total (410 355 total utterances). The logged material was analysed, using the automated search tool TRASA (developed by Leif Gronqvist -- Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden). Results The language used in the chat room was mainly Swedish. Apart from loan words (in some cases with the English spelling intact, in other cases adapted to Swedish spelling), English phrases (often idiomatic) showed up occasionally, sometimes in the middle of a Swedish sentence. Some examples of contributions are shown, extracted from their original context. (Note: Instances of Nordic letters in the examples have been transformed into the letters 'a' and 'o' respectively.) Table 1. Examples of nicknames and contributions taken from the Web chat material. 01.07.20 Darth Olsson Helloo allibadi hur e de i dag? 14:44:40 G.B Critical information check 01.11.40 Little Boy Lost fru hjarterdam...120 mil busstripp...Later hojdare om det...;) 18.10.30 PeeWee this sucks 22.17.12 Ellen (16) Whatever! 16.06.55 Blackboy Whats up The above examples demonstrate that both nicknames and contributions consist of a mix either of Swedish and English, or of pure English. In answering the questionnaire, the subjects gave many examples of the more 'traditional strategies' used in international chat channels for overcoming the limitations of writing: traditional abbreviations, the use of all uppercase, asterisk-framed words, extreme use of punctuation and the simplest smileys (Hård af Segerstad, "Emoticons", "Expressing Emoticons", "Strategies" and "Swedish Teenagers"). The questionnaire results also included examples of 'net-abbreviations' based on English words. However, while these were similar to those observed in international chat rooms, the most interesting finding was that Swedish teenagers do not just copy that behaviour from the international chat rooms that they have visited: the examples of creative and new abbreviations are made up in comparison with the innovative English net-abbreviations, but based on Swedish words. A number of different types of abbreviations emerged: Acronyms made up from the first letters in a phrase (eg. "istf", meaning "i stallet for" [trans. "instead of"]); Numbers representing the sound value of a syllable in combination with letters (eg. "3vligt" meaning "trevligt" [trans. "nice"]); and, Letters representing the sound value of a syllable in combination with other letters forming an abbreviated representation of a word (eg. "CS" meaning "(vi) ses" [trans. "see (you)"]). The logged chat material showed that all of the strategies, both Swedish and English, mentioned in the questionnaire were actually used online. The Swedish strategies mentioned in the questionnaire are illustrated in Table 2. Table 2. Examples of innovative and traditional Swedish abbreviations given in the questionnaire. Innovative Abbreviation Full phrase Translation Traditional abbreviation Full phrase Translation Asg Asgarvar Laughs hard ngn nagon someone Iofs i och for sig Strictly speaking Ngra nagra some ones iaf, if i allafall Anyway gbg Göteborg Göteborg É Ar Is sv svenska Swedish D Det It bla bland annat among other things Cs (vi) ses See you t.ex. till exempel for example Lr Eller Or ngt nagot something B.S.D.V Bara Sa Du Vet Just To Let You Know t.om till och med even P Pa On, at etc et cetera QL (ql) Kul Fun m.m med mera and more 3vligt Trevligt Nice m.a.o. med andra ord in other words Tebax Tillbaka Back mkt mycket a lot Oxa Ocksa Too ibl Ibland sometimes The table above shows examples of traditional and creative abbreviations developed to suit the limitations and advantages of written Swedish online. A comparison of the logged material with the examples given in the questionnaire shows that all innovative abbreviations exemplified were used, sometimes with slightly different orthography. Table 3. The most frequent abbreviations used in the chat material No. of occurrences Innovative Abbreviations No. of occurrences Traditional abbreviations 224 Oxa 74 GBG 101 Oki 60 gbg 62 Oki 56 ngn 47 É 43 mm 16 P 42 Gbg 10 Iofs 37 ngt 10 If 26 bla 10 D 19 tex 5 Tebax 19 Tom 5 OKI 18 etc 4 É 8 MM 4 Ql 6 Ngn 4 P 5 BLA 4 OXA 4 tom 4 D 4 NGN 3 Asg 4 Mm 3 IF 3 TEX 2 Oxa 2 TOM 1 Cs 2 Ngt 1 Tebax 1 ngra 1 QL 1 bLA 1 If 1 ASG The limited space of this article does not allow for a full analysis of the material from the chat, but in short, data from both the questionnaire and the Web chat of this study suggest that Swedish teenagers conversing in electronic chat rooms draw on their previous knowledge of strategies used in traditional written language to minimise time and effort when writing/typing (cf. Ferrara et al.). They do not just copy behaviour and strategies that they observe in international chat rooms that they have visited, but adapt these to suit the Swedish language. As well as saving time and effort typing, and apart from conveying non-verbal information, it would appear that these communication strategies are also used as a way of signalling and identifying oneself as 'cyber-regulars' -- people who know the game, so to speak. At this stage of research, beyond the use of Swedish language by Swedish nationals, there is nothing to indicate that the adaptations found are significantly different to online adaptations of English or French (cf. Werry). This result calls for further research on the specifics of Swedish adaptations. References Allwood, Jens. "An Activity Based Approach to Pragmatics." Gothenburg Papers in Theoretical Linguistics 76. Dept. of Linguistics, University of Göteborg, 1995. Ferrara, K., H. Brunner, and G. Whittemore. "Interactive Written Discourse as an Emergent Register." Written Communication 8.1 (1991): 8-34. Hård af Segerstad, Ylva. "Emoticons -- A New Mode for the Written Language." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Expressing Emotions in Electronic Writing." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Strategies in Computer-Mediated Written Communication -- A Comparison between Two User Groups." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Swedish Teenagers' Written Conversation in Electronic Chat Environments." WebTalk -- Writing As Conversation. Ed. Diane Penrod. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Forthcoming. Witmer, Diane, and Sandra Lee Katzman. "On-Line Smiles: Does Gender Make A Difference in the Use of Graphic Accents?" Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2.4 (1997). 19 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/witmer1.php>. Werry, Christopher, C. "Linguistic and Interactional Features of Internet Relay Chat." Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Susan Herring. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. 47-63. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad. "Swedish Chat Rooms." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php>. Chicago style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad, "Swedish Chat Rooms," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad. (2000) Swedish chat rooms. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php> ([your date of access]).

In 1947, shortly after World War II, when major growth in tourism began, the London publisher Phoenix House launched an illustrated series titled «The Young Traveller Series». The first volume, set in South Africa, would be followed by another 40, targeting 12 to 16 year olds. The aim was to describe the way of life in several countries, exposing young readers to the diversity of the world and to linguistic and cultural differences. Avoiding the drier conventions of the travel book (in particular the profusion of objective, practical, utilitarian information), the series adopted an attractive and effective method of presenting the Other to an audience comprising children and young people, publishing narratives starring children and teenagers who go through the exciting experience of coming into contact with the most diverse regions of the globe. In 1955 a volume dedicated to Portugal was published: The Young Traveller in Portugal, by the journalist Honor Wyatt (1910-1998). A “book of fiction based on fact”, it is strongly autobiographical in tone, as it is the result of a journey to Estado Novo Portugal made by the author in 1953 together with her husband and two children, with the specific purpose of writing a book about this Iberian country. According to the principles of the series, the work relates a trip that from the beginning is intended as educational. Travelling along an alternative itinerary to those enshrined in travel guides, the English family escapes growing massification and instead seeks circuits that correspond to individual tastes and cultural interests. This article analyses how Portugal and the Portuguese are portrayed in this work for young British readers. Special attention is paid to the attitude of the protagonists towards the Portuguese Other and to the way the trip is presented as an experience that provides a comparison between the place of origin of the traveller and the country visited, with the consequent process of self-identification through differentiation. Getting away from the routine of everyday English life represents for the two younger characters a chance of adventure and personal challenge that has always been associated with travel. Furthermore, it is an opportunity to learn two important lessons: that Europe is not a homogeneous space, that it is, rather, made up of differences and specificities, and that the experience of the foreign can promote tolerance and understanding among peoples and cultures.

04–576Alexander, Neville (U. of Cape Town, South Africa; Email: nalexand@humanities.uct.ac.za). The politics of language planning in post-apartheid South Africa. Language Problems and Language Planning (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 28, 2 (2004), 113–130.04–577Bayley, Robert and Langman, Juliet (U. of Texas, USA; Email: rbayley@utsa.edu). Variation in the group and the individual: Evidence from second language acquisition. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (Berlin, Germany), 42, 4 (2004), 303–318.04–578Cruickshank, Ken (U. of Wollongong, Australia; Email: kenc@uow.edu.au). Literacy in multilingual contexts: change in teenagers' reading and writing. Language and Education (Clevedon, UK), 18, 6 (2004), 459–473.04–579Dailey, René M., Giles, Howard and Jansma, Laura L. (U. of California, Santa Barbara, USA; Email: rdailey@umail.ucsb.edu). Language attitudes in an Anglo-Hispanic context: the role of the linguistic landscape. Language and Communication (Oxford, UK), 25, 1 (2005), 27–38.04–580Davis, Kathryn and Skilton-Sylvester, Ellen (U. of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA). Looking Back, Taking Stock, Moving Forward: Investigating Gender in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, VA, USA), 38, 3 (2004), 381–404.04–581Dewaele, Jean-Marc (U. of London, UK; Email: j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk). Vous or tu? Native and non-native speakers of French on a sociolinguistic tightrope. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (Berlin, Germany), 42, 4 (2004), 383–402.04–582Gordon, Daryl (Temple U., USA). “I'm tired. You clean and cook.” Shifting gender identities and second language socialization. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria,VA, USA), 38, 3 (2004), 437–457.04–583Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M. (Howard U., USA; Email: nkamwangamalu@howard.edu). The language policy/language economics interface and mother-tongue education in post-apartheid South Africa. Language Problems and Language Planning (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 28, 2 (2004), 131–146.04–584Ordonez, Claudia Lucia (U. de los Andes, Santafé de Bogota, Colombia; Email: cordonez@uniandes.edu.com). EFL and native Spanish in elite bilingual schools in Colombia: a first look at bilingual adolescent frog stories. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Clevedon, UK), 7, 5 (2004), 449–473.04–585Simpson, M. JoEllen (Formerly at U. del Valle, Cali, Colombia; Email: jsimpson@telesat.com.co). A look at early childhood writing in English and Spanish in a bilingual school in Ecuador. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Clevedon, UK), 7, 5 (2004), 432–448.04–586Skliar, Carlos and Muller Quadros, Ronice (U. Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; Email: skliar@piaget.edu.ufrgs.br). Bilingual deaf education in the south of Brazil. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Clevedon, UK), 7, 5 (2004), 432–448.04–587Spezzini, Susan (U. of Alabama at Birmingham, USA; Email: spezzini@uab.edu). English immersion in Paraguay: individual and sociocultural dimensions of language learning and use. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Clevedon, UK), 7, 5 (2004), 412–431.04–588Wright, Laurence (Rhodes U., South Africa; Email: L.Wright@ru.ac.za). Language and value: towards accepting a richer linguistic ecology for South Africa. Language Problems and Language Planning (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 28, 2 (2004), 175–197.

Heltzel, Anne. Circle Nine. Somerville, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2011. Print. Why are hapless females in YA novels always named Abby? I don’t know, the amnesiac narrator of Circle Nine would reply. That’s just what it says on my necklace. So begins Anne Heltzel’s debut thriller: a teenaged girl awakens on the pavement outside a burning building with no memories and no name, save the one she wears in gold around her neck. With her is a mysterious, charismatic youth named Sam, who claims to be her friend. Sam persuades Abby to retreat from the fire and into the woods, where they hide in the safety of his “cave-palace”: a glittering subterranean paradise full of shimmering fabrics and sumptuous furniture. There, the two of them sip pomegranate wine, discuss fine literature, and forswear all contact with the outside world, which Sam likens to an Aleghierian hell (hence the book’s title). We suspect this a fantasy, invented by Abby to protect herself from an uglier cave and an uglier Sam, to say nothing of the ugly events occluded by her smoke-kippered memory. The question is: whose fantasy is it? What sixteen-year-old with cheap bling on her neck would retreat into a happy place wrought with literary allusion, Platonic cave metaphors, and Oriental carpets? This is clearly the reverie of the author herself, still in love with her various muses. Abby’s fantasyland, though out of character, is not necessarily a detriment to the novel itself. Indeed, we could do without the predictable combination of flashbacks and sleuthing by which Abby reconstructs her true identity, and abide instead within her doomed and darkly luminous otherworld. For it is there that Heltzel’s storytelling is at its boldest, her writing most sensuous and wild, and it is here that the novel promises—if only briefly—to be something other than the dreary chestnut about a naïve girl brought low by bad luck and sly men.Recommended with reservations: 2 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah Mead-Willis Sarah is the Rare Book Cataloguer at the University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. She holds a BA and an MLIS from the University of Alberta and an MA in English Literature from the University of Victoria.

Historically, science and medicine have been a great source of inspiration for fiction writers. Mary Shelley, in the 1831 introduction to her novel Frankenstein said she was been inspired, in part, by discussions about scientific experiments, including those of Darwin and Galvani. Shelley states “perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (10). Countless other authors have followed her lead, from H.G. Wells, whose mad scientist Dr Moreau takes a lead from Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, through to popular contemporary writers of adult fiction, such as Michael Crichton and Kathy Reichs, who have drawn on their scientific and medical backgrounds for their fictional works. Science and medicine themed fiction has also proven popular for younger readers, particularly in dystopian settings. Reichs has extended her writing to include the young adult market with Virals, which combines forensic science with the supernatural. Alison Allen-Grey’s 2009 novel, Lifegame, deals with cloning and organ replacement. Nathan Hobby’s The Fur is based around an environmental disaster where an invasive fungal-fur grows everywhere, including in people’s internal organs. Catherine Jinks’ Piggy in the Middle incorporates genetics and biomedical research into its horror-science fiction plot. Brian Caswell’s young adult novel, Cage of Butterflies uses elements of neuroscience as a plot device. However, although Caswell’s novel found commercial and critical success—it was shortlisted in the 1993 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards Older Readers and was reprinted several times—neuroscience is a field that writers of young adult fiction tend to either ignore or only refer to on the periphery. This paper will explore how neuroscientific and dystopian elements interact in young adult fiction, focusing on the current trend for neuroscientific elements to be something that adolescent characters are subjected to rather than something they can use as a tool of positive change. It will argue that the time is right for a shift in young adult fiction away from a dystopian world view to one where the teenaged characters can become powerful agents of change. The term “neuroscience” was first coined in the 1960s as a way to hybridise a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines including biophsyics, biology and chemistry (Abi-Rached and Rose). Since then, neuroscience as a field has made huge leaps, particularly in the past two decades with discoveries about the development and growth of the adolescent brain; the dismissal of the nature versus nurture dichotomy; and the acceptance of brain plasticity. Although individual scientists had made discoveries relating to brain plasticity in adult humans as far back as the 1960s, for example, it is less than 10 years since neuroplasticity—the notion that nerve cells in human brains and nervous systems are malleable, and so can be changed or modified by input from the environment—was accepted into mainstream scientific thinking (Doidge). This was a significant change in brain science from the once dominant principle of localisation, which posited that specific brain functions were fixed in a specific area of the brain, and that once damaged, the function associated with a brain area could not improve or recover (Burrell; Kolb and Whishaw; Doidge). Furthermore, up until the late 1990s when neuroscientist Jay Giedd’s studies of adolescent brains showed that the brain’s grey matter, which thickens during childhood, thins during adolescence while the white matter thickens, it was widely accepted the human brain stopped maturing at around the age of twelve (Wallis and Dell). The research of Giedd and others showed that massive changes, including those affecting decision-making abilities, impulse control and skill development, take place in the developing adolescent brain (Carr-Gregg). Thus, within the last fifteen years, two significant discoveries within neuroscience—brain plasticity and the maturation of the adolescent brain­—have had a major impact on the way the brain is viewed and studied. Brian Caswell’s Cage of Butterflies, was published too early to take advantage of these neuroscientific discoveries. Nevertheless the novel includes some specific details about how the brains of a group of children within the story, the Babies, have been altered by febrile convulsions to create an abnormality in their brain anatomy. The abnormality is discovered by a CAT scan (the novel predates the use of fMRI brain scans). Due to their abnormal brain anatomy, the Babies are unable to communicate verbally but can communicate telepathically as a “shared mind” with others outside their small group. It is unlikely Caswell would have been aware of brain plasticity in the early 1990s, nevertheless, in the narrative, older teens are able to slowly understand the Babies by focusing on their telepathic messages until, over time, they can understand them without too much difficulty. Thus Caswell has incorporated neuroscientific elements throughout the plot of his novel and provided some neuroscientific explanation for how the Babies communicate. In recent years, several young adult novels, both speculative and contemporary, have used elements of neuroscience in their narratives; however, these novels tend to put neuroscience on the periphery. Rather than embracing neuroscience as a tool adolescent characters can use for their benefit, as Caswell did, neuroscience is typically something that exists around or is done to the characters; it is an element over which they have no control. These novels are found across several sub-genres of young adult fiction, including science fiction, speculative fiction and contemporary fiction. Most place their narratives in a dystopian world view. The dystopian settings reinforce the idea that the world is a dangerous place to live, and the teenaged characters living in the world of the novels are at the mercy of powerful oppressors. This creates tension within the narrative as the adolescents battle authorities for power. Without the ability to use neuroscientific advantages for their own gain, however, the characters’ power to change their worlds remains in the hands of adult authorities and the teenaged characters ultimately lose the fight to change their world. This lack of agency is evident in several dystopian young adult novels published in recent years, including the Uglies series and to a lesser extent Brain Jack and Dark Angel. Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series is set in a dystopian future world and uses neuroscientific concepts to both reinforce the power of the ruling regime and give limited agency to the protagonists. In the first book in the series, Uglies, the science supports the narrative where necessary but is always subservient to the action. Westerfeld’s intended the Uglies series to focus on action. Westerfield states “I love a good action sequence, and this series is of full of hoverboard chases, escapes through ancient ruins, and leaps off tall buildings in bungee jackets” (Books). Nevertheless, the brain’s ability to rewire itself—the neuroscientific concept of brain plasticity—is a central idea within the Uglies series. In book one, the protagonist Tally Youngblood is desperate to turn 16 so she can join her friends and become a Pretty. However, she discovers the operation to become a Pretty involves not just plastic surgery to alter her looks: a lesion is inflicted on the brain, giving each Pretty the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. In the next book, Pretties, Tally has undergone the procedure and then becomes one of the elite Specials, and in the third instalment she eventually rejects her Special status and returns to her true nature. This latter process, one of the characters explains, is possible because Tally has learnt to rewire her brain, and so undo the Pretty operation and the procedure that made her a Special. Thus neuroscientific concepts of brain injury and recovery through brain plasticity are prime plot devices. But the narrative offers no explanations for how Tally and some others have the ability to rewire their brains to undo the Pretty operation while most do not. The apparent complexity of the neuroscience is used as a surface plot device rather than as an element that could be explored to add narrative depth. In contrast, the philosophical implications of recent neuroscientific discoveries, rather than the physical, are explored in another recent young adult novel, Dark Angel. David Klass’ novel, Dark Angel, places recent developments in neuroscience in a contemporary setting to explore the nature of good and evil. It tells the story of 17-year-old Jeff, whose ordinary, small-town life implodes when his older brother, Troy, comes home on parole after serving five years for manslaughter. A school assignment forces Jeff to confront Troy’s complex nature. The science teacher asks his class “where does our growing knowledge of the chemical nature of the brain leave us in terms of... the human soul? When we think, are we really making choices or just following chemical pathways?” (Klass 74). This passage introduces a neuroscientific angle into the plot, and may refer to a case brought before the US Supreme Court in 2005 where the court admitted a brief based on brain scans showing that adolescent brains work differently than adult brains (Madrigal). The protagonist, Jeff, explores the nature of good and evil through this neuroscientific framework as the story's action unfolds, and examines his relationship with Troy, who is described in all his creepiness and vulnerability. Again through the teacher, Klass incorporates trauma and its impact on the brain from a neuroscientific perspective: There are psychiatrists and neurologists doing studies on violent lawbreakers...who are finding that these felons share amazingly similar patterns of abusive childhoods, brain injuries, and psychotic symptoms. (Klass 115)Jeff's story is infused with the fallout of his brother’s violent past and present, yet there is no hint of any trauma in Jeff’s or Troy’s childhoods that could be seen as a cause for Troy’s aberrant behaviour. Thus, although Klass’ novel explores more philosophical aspects of neuroscience, like Westerfeld’s novel, it uses developments in neuroscience as a point of interest. The neuroscience in Dark Angel is not embedded in the story but is a lens through which to view the theme of whether people are born evil or made evil. Brain Jack and Being are another two recent young adult novels that explore physical and philosophical aspects of modern neuroscience to some extent. Technology and its possible neurological effects on the brain, particularly the adolescent brain, is a field of research popularised by English neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield. Brian Falkner’s 2010 release, Brain Jack, explores this branch of neuroscience with its cautionary tale of a hands-free device—a cap with small wires that attach to your head called the neuro-headset­—that allows you to control your computer with your thoughts. As more and more people use the neuro-headset, the avatar designed to help people learn to use the software develops consciousness and its own moral code, destroying anyone who it considers a threat by frying their brains. Like Dark Angel and Uglies, Brain Jack keeps the neuroscience on the periphery as an element over which the characters have little or no control, and details about how the neuro-headset affects the brain of its wearers, and how the avatar develops consciousness, are not explored. Conversely, Kevin Brooks’ novel Being explores the nature of consciousness outside the field of neuroscience. The protagonist, Robert, goes into hospital for a routine procedure and discovers that instead of internal organs, he has some kind of hardware. On the run from authorities who are after him for reasons he does not understand, Robert tries frantically to reconstruct his earliest memories to give him some clue as to who, or what, he really is: if he does not have normal human body parts, is he human? However, whether or not he has a human brain, and the implications of either answer for his consciousness, is never addressed. Thus, although the novels discussed above each incorporate neuroscience to some degree, they do so at a cursory level. In the case of Being this is understandable as neuroscience is never explicitly mentioned; rather it is a possible sub-text implied through the theme of consciousness. In Dark Angel, through the teacher as mouthpiece, neuroscience is offered up as a possible explanation for criminal behaviour, which causes the protagonist to question his beliefs and judgements about his brother. However, in Uglies, and to a lesser extent in Brain Jack, neuroscience is glossed over when more detail may have added extra depth and complexity to the novels. Fast-paced action is a common element in much contemporary young adult fiction, and thus it is possible that Westerfeld and Falkner both chose to sacrifice complexity for the sake of action. In Uglies, it is likely this is the case, given Westerfeld’s love of action sequences and his attention to detail about objects created exclusively for his futuristic world. However, Brain Jack goes into explicit detail about computer hacking. Falkner’s dismissal of the neuroscientific aspects of his plot, which could have added extra interest, most likely stems from his passion for computer science (he studied computer science at university) rather than a distaste for or ignorance of neuroscience. Nevertheless Falkner, Westerfeld, Brooks, and to a lesser extent Klass, have each glossed over a source of potential power that could turn the dystopian worlds of their novels into one where the teenaged protagonists hold the power to make lasting change. In each of these novels, neuroscientific concepts are generally used to support a bleak or dystopian world view. In Uglies, the characters have two choices: a life as a lobotomised Pretty or a life on the run from the authorities, where discovery and capture is a constant threat. The USA represented in Brain Jack descends into civil war, where those unknowingly enslaved by the avatar’s consciousness fight against those who refuse to wear the neuro-headsets. The protagonist in Being lives in hiding from the secret authorities who seek to capture and destroy him. Even in Dark Angel, the neuroscience is not a source of comfort or support for the protagonist, whose life, and that of his family, falls apart as a consequence of his older brother’s criminal actions. It is only in the 1990s novel, Cage of Butterflies, that characters use a neuroscientific advantage to improve their situation. The Babies in Caswell’s Cage of Butterflies are initially victims of their brain abnormality; however, with the help of the teenaged characters, along with two adult characters, they are able to use their “condition” to help create a new life for themselves. Telepathically communicating through their “shared mind,” the Babies coordinate their efforts with the others to escape from the research scientists who threaten their survival. In this way, what starts as a neurological disability is turned into an advantage. Cage of Butterflies illustrates how a young adult novel can incorporate neuroscience into its narrative in a way that offers the young adults agency to make positive changes in their lives. Furthermore, with recent neuroscientific discoveries showing that adolescence is a vital time for brain development and growth, there is potential for neuroscience to be explored as an agent of positive change in a new wave of young adult fiction, one that adopts a non-dystopian (if not optimistic) world view. Dystopian young adult fiction has been enjoying enormous popularity in western publishing in the past few years with series such as Chaos Walking, Hunger Games and Maze Runner trilogies topping bestseller lists. Dystopian fiction’s appeal to young adult audiences, states Westerfeld, is because: Teenagers’ lives are constantly defined by rules, and in response they construct their identities through necessary confrontations with authority, large and small. Imagining a world in which those authorities must be destroyed by any means necessary is one way of expanding that game. ("Teenage Wastelands")Teenagers often find themselves in trouble, and are almost as often like to cause trouble. Placing them in a fictional dystopian world gives them room to fight authority; too often, however, the young adult protagonists are never able to completely escape the world the adults impose upon them. For example, the epilogue of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner tells the reader the surviving group have not escaped the makers of the maze, and their apparent rescuers are part of the same group of adult authorities. Caswell’s neurologically evolved Babies, along with their high IQ teenage counterparts, however, provide a model for how young protagonists can take advantage of neuroscientific discoveries to cause trouble for hostile authorities in their fictional worlds. The power of the brain harnessed by adolescents, alongside their hormonal changes, is by its nature a recipe for trouble: it has the potential to give young people an agency and power adults may fear. In the everyday, lived world, neuroscientific tools are always in the hands of adults; however, there needs to be no such constraint in a fictional world. The superior ability of adolescents to grow the white matter of their brains, for example, could give rise to a range of fictional scenarios where the adolescents could use their brain power to brainwash adults in authority. A teenage neurosurgeon might not work well in a contemporary setting but could be credible in a speculative fiction setting. The number of possible scenarios is endless. More importantly, however, it offers a relatively unexplored avenue for teenaged characters to have agency and power in their fictional worlds. Westerfeld may be right in his assertion that the current popularity of dystopian fiction for young adults is a reaction to the highly monitored and controlled world in which they live ("Teenage Wastelands"). However, an alternative world view, one where the adolescents take control and defeat the adults, is just as valid. Such a scenario has been explored in Cory Doctorow’s For the Win, where marginalised and exploited gamers from Singapore and China band together with an American to form a global union and defeat their oppressors. Doctorow uses online gaming skills, a field of expertise where youth are considered superior to adults, to give his characters power over adults in their world. Similarly, the amazing changes that take place in the adolescent brain are a natural advantage that teenaged characters could utilise, particularly in speculative fiction, to gain power over adults. To imbue adolescent characters with such power has the potential to move young adult fiction beyond the confines of the dystopian novel and open new narrative pathways. The 2011 Bologna Children’s Book Fair supports the view that western-based publishing companies will be looking for more dystopian young adult fiction for the next year or two (Roback). However, within a few years, it is possible that the popularity of zombies, werewolves and vampires—and their dominance of fictional dystopian worlds—will pass or, at least change in their representations. The “next big thing” in young adult fiction could be neuroscience. Moreover, neuroscientific concepts could be incorporated into the standard zombie/vampire/werewolf trope to create yet another hybrid to explore: a zombie virus that mutates to give a new breed of undead creature superior intelligence, for example; or a new cross-breed of werewolf that gives humans the advantages of the canine brain with none of the disadvantages. The capacity and complexity of the human brain is enormous, and thus it offers enormous potential to create exciting young adult fiction that explores new territory, giving the teenaged reader a sense of their own power and natural advantages. In turn, this is bound to give them infinite potential to create fictional trouble. References Abi-Rachedm, Rose. “The Birth of the Neuromolecular Gaze.” History of the Human Sciences 23 (2010): 11-36. Allen-Gray, Alison. Lifegame. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Brooks, Kevin. Being. London: Puffin Books, 2007. Burrell, Brian. Postcards from the Brain Museum. New York: Broadway, 2004. Carr-Gregg, Michael. The Princess Bitchface Syndrome. Melbourne: Penguin Books. 2006. Caswell, Brian. A Cage of Butterflies. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Dashner, James. The Maze Runner. Somerset, United Kingdom: Chicken House, 2010. Doctorow, Cory. For the Win. New York: Tor, 2010. Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. Melbourne: Scribe, 2007. Falkner, Brian. Brain Jack. New York: Random House, 2009. Hobby, Nathan. The Fur. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2004. Jinks, Catherine. Piggy in the Middle. Melbourne: Penguin, 1998. Klass, David. Dark Angel. New York: HarperTeen, 2007. Kolb, Bryan, and Ian Whishaw. Fundamentals of Human Neuropscychology, New York, Worth, 2009. Lehrer, Jonah. “The Human Brain Gets a New Map.” The Frontal Cortex. 2011. 10 April 2011 ‹http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/the-human-brain-atlas/›. Madrigal, Alexis. “Courtroom First: Brain Scan Used in Murder Sentencing.” Wired. 2009. 16 April 2011 ‹http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/brain-scan-murder-sentencing/›. Reichs, Kathy. Virals. London: Young Corgi, 2010. Roback, Diane. “Bologna 2011: Back to Business at a Buoyant Fair.” Publishers Weekly. 2011. 17 April 2011 ‹http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/46698-bologna-2011-back-to-business-at-a-buoyant-fair.html›. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Arrow Books, 1973. Wallis, Claudia, and Krystina Dell. “What Makes Teens Tick?” Death Penalty Information Centre. 2004. 10 April 2011 ‹http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/what-makes-teens-tick-flood-hormones-sure-also-host-structural-changes-brain-can-those-explain-behav›. Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr Moreau. Melbourne: Penguin, 1896. Westerfeld, Scott. Uglies. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. ———. Pretties. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. ———. Specials. New York: Simon Pulse, 2006. ———. Books. 2008. 1 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.scottwesterfeld.com/author/books.htm›. ———. “Teenage Wastelands: How Dystopian YA Became Publishing’s Next Big Thing.” Tor.com 2011. 17 April 2011 ‹http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/04/teenage-wastelands-how-dystopian-ya-became-publishings-next-big-thing›.

Autumn is not only a gloriously colourful time of the year, it is a time when a plethora of children’s book related events and awards take place. Just see what is happening in the next few months:IBBY: “Silent Books: Final Destination Lampedusa” travelling exhibit In response to the international refugee crisis that began last year, the Italian arm of the International Board on Books for Young People has launched a travelling picture-book exhibit to support the first children’s library on the island of Lampedusa, Italy where many African and Middle Eastern refugees are landing. After stops in Italy, Mexico, and Austria, the exhibit is currently touring Canada. It premiered in Edmonton at the Stanley A. Milner Library in August. Next are three Vancouver locations: UBC Irving Barber Learning Centre (Oct. 1 to 23), Vancouver Public Library central branch (Oct. 8 to 18), and the Italian Cultural Centre (Oct. 10 to 22). Then the North York Central Library in Toronto from Nov. 2 to Dec 11. Recognizing Lampedusa island’s cultural diversity, the exhibit comprises exclusively wordless picture books from 23 countries, including three from Canada:“Hocus Pocus” by Sylvie Desrosiers & Rémy Simard’s (Kids Can Press), “Ben’s Big Dig” by Daniel Wakeman and Dirk van Stralen’s(Orca Book Publishers)“Ben’s Bunny Trouble” also by Wakeman and van Stralen (Orca Book Publishers). Other books are drawn from an honour list selected by a jury of experts from the 2015 Bologna Children’s Book Fair including Ajubel’s “Robinson Crusoe” (Spain), Ara Jo’s “The Rocket Boy”(Korea), and Madalena Matoso’s “Todos Fazemos Tudo” (Switzerland), among others. The full catalogue can be viewed online.TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.Next year’s TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will take place from May 7-14, 2016. Thirty Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and storytellers will be touring across Canada visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres. Visit the TD Book Week site (www.bookweek.ca) to find out who will be touring in your area and the types of readings and workshops they will be giving. If your school or library is interested in hosting a Book Week visitor, you can apply online starting in mid-October.Shakespeare Selfie CBC Books will once again be running the Shakespeare Selfie writing challenge in April 2016. Shakespeare took selfies all the time but instead of a camera, he used a quill. And instead of calling them "selfies," they were called "soliloquies."The challenge: Write a modern-day soliloquy or monologue by a Shakespearean character based on a prominent news, pop culture or current affairs event from the last year (April 2015-April 2016). It can be in iambic pentameter or modern syntax with a word count from 200 to 400 words. There are two age categories: Grades 7-9 and 10-12. Details at: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/10/the-2016-shakespeare-selfie-writing-challenge-for-students.html Awards:The winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, celebrating Jewish literature and culture in Canada, have been announced. Amongst the nine awards is one for Youth Literature which was awarded to Suri Rosen for “Playing with Matches” (ECW Press). See all the award winners here: http://www.cjlawards.ca/.The Canadian Children's Book Centre administers several awards including the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. This year’s winners will be announced on November 18, 2015. http://www.bookcentre.ca/awardThe Fitzhenry Family Foundation has revealed the winners of its Lane Anderson Awards for the best Canadian science books published in the previous year. Selections are made based on a title’s pertinence to science in today’s world and the author’s ability to relate scientific issues to everyday life. Prolific Halifax kids’ science writer L.E. Carmichael was awarded the YA prize for “Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild” (Ashby-BP Publishing), about using forensic science to fight crimes against animals. Uxbridge, Ontario–based environmental journalist Stephen Leahy received the adult prize for “Your Water Footprint” (Firefly Books), which examines human usage of the valuable natural resource. http://laneandersonaward.ca/The Edmonton Public Library has named Sigmund Brouwer (author and Rock & Roll Literacy Show host) as the winner (by public vote) of Alberta Reader’s Choice Award. Sigmund’s “Thief of Glory” (WaterBrook Press) is about a young boy trying to take care of his family in the aftermath of the 1942 Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. The prize awards $10,000 to an Alberta-based author of a work of excellent fiction or narrative non-fiction. http://www.epl.ca/alberta-readers-choiceHarperCollins Canada, the Cooke Agency, and the University of British Columbia have announced the shortlist of the annual HarperCollins Publishers/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction awarded to students and alumni of UBC’s creative writing program, and offers the winner literary representation by the Cooke Agency and a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada.“Between the Wind and Us” by Iranian-Canadian writer Nazanine Hozar, the story of a young abandoned girl set during the political unrest of 1953–1979 Iran.“Learning to Breathe” by B.C.-based Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel about a Caribbean teenager’s struggle to establish herself in a new city and home life.“At The Top of the Wall, Alight” by Sudbury, Ontario, author Natalie Morrill, which follows a Viennese Jew separated from his family during the Second World War. An early version of this novel was previously nominated for the award.Novelist and University of Guelph writing professor, Thomas King, and L.A.-based author, graphic novelist, and musician, Cecil Castellucci, have been named winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for excellence in Canadian literature of the fantastic. Castellucci won in the YA category for “Tin Star” (Roaring Brook/Raincoast), the first novel in a planned series about a teenager who struggles to survive parent-less in a space station where she is the only human, and which played scene to a brutal assault that haunts her memory. King won in the adult category for his novel “The Back of the Turtle” (HarperCollins Canada), for which he also received a Copper Cylinder Award from the Sunburst Society last week. The book follows a First Nations scientist who finds himself torn after he’s sent to clean up the ecological mess his company has left on the reserve his family grew up on.Be sure to save October 28th on your calendar for the GG book awards announcement. Of course, “GG” stands for Governor-General. The short lists can be viewed here:http://ggbooks.ca/books/. There are categories in both English and French for both children’s text and illustration books.Online ResourcesPodcast: Yegs and Bacon: Episode 22: the full audio from our recent Indigenous Representation in Popular Culture panel. In the audio, you’ll be hearing from (in order of first vocal appearance) Brandon, who introduces the panelists, James Leask, Richard Van Camp, Kelly Mellings, and Patti Laboucane-Benson. Recorded on Monday, September 28th, 2015. http://variantedmonton.com/category/yegs-and-bacon/European Picture Book Collection: The EPBC was designed to help pupils to find out more about their European neighbours through reading the visual narratives of carefully chosen picture books. Here you can find out about how the project began, the theoretical papers that have been presented on European children's literature, and how the materials were initially used in schools. http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/EN/index.aspMore next time around,Yours in stories, Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

Introduction I think the Privacy Act is a huge edifice to protect the minority of things that could go wrong. I’ve got a good example for you, I’m just trying to think … yeah the worst one I’ve ever seen was the Balga Youth Program where we took these students on a reward excursion all the way to Fremantle and suddenly this very alienated kid started to jump under a bus, a moving bus so the kid had to be restrained. The cops from Fremantle arrived because all the very good people in Fremantle were alarmed at these grown-ups manhandling a kid and what had happened is that DCD [Department of Community Development] had dropped him into the program but hadn’t told us that this kid had suicide tendencies. No, it’s just chronically bad. And there were caseworkers involved and … there is some information that we have to have that doesn’t get handed down. Rather than a blanket rule that everything’s confidential coming from them to us, and that was a real live situation, and you imagine how we’re trying to handle it, we had taxis going from Balga to Fremantle to get staff involved and we only had to know what to watch out for and we probably could have … well what you would have done is not gone on the excursion I suppose (School Principal, quoted in Balnaves and Luca 49). These comments are from a school principal in Perth, Western Australia in a school that is concerned with “at-risk” students, and in a context where the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 has imposed limitations on their work. Under this Act it is illegal to pass health, personal or sensitive information concerning an individual on to other people. In the story cited above the Department of Community Development personnel were apparently protecting the student’s “negative right”, that is, “freedom from” interference by others. On the other hand, the principal’s assertion that such information should be shared is potentially a “positive right” because it could cause something to be done in that person’s or society’s interests. Balnaves and Luca noted that positive and negative rights have complex philosophical underpinnings, and they inform much of how we operate in everyday life and of the dilemmas that arise (49). For example, a ban on euthanasia or the “assisted suicide” of a terminally ill person can be a “positive right” because it is considered to be in the best interests of society in general. However, physicians who tacitly approve a patient’s right to end their lives with a lethal dose by legally prescribed dose of medication could be perceived as protecting the patient’s “negative right” as a “freedom from” interference by others. While acknowledging the merits of collaboration between people who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk”, this paper examines some of the barriers to collaboration. Based on both primary and secondary sources, and particularly on oral testimonies, the paper highlights the tension between privacy as a negative right and collaborative helping as a positive right. It also points to other difficulties and dilemmas within and between the institutions engaged in this joint undertaking. The authors acknowledge Michel Foucault’s contention that discourse is power. The discourse on privacy and the sharing of information in modern societies suggests that privacy is a negative right that gives freedom from bureaucratic interference and protects the individual. However, arguably, collaboration between agencies that are working to support individuals “at-risk” requires a measured relaxation of the requirements of this negative right. Children and young people “at-risk” are a case in point. Towards Collaboration From a series of interviews conducted in 2004, the school authorities at Balga Senior High School and Midvale Primary School, people working for the Western Australian departments of Community Development, Justice, and Education and Training in Western Australia, and academics at the Edith Cowan and Curtin universities, who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk” as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project called Smart Communities, have identified students “at-risk” as individuals who have behavioural problems and little motivation, who are alienated and possibly violent or angry, who under-perform in the classroom and have begun to truant. They noted also that students “at-risk” often suffer from poor health, lack of food and medication, are victims of unwanted pregnancies, and are engaged in antisocial and illegal behaviour such as stealing cars and substance abuse. These students are also often subject to domestic violence (parents on drugs or alcohol), family separation, and homelessness. Some are depressed or suicidal. Sometimes cultural factors contribute to students being regarded as “at-risk”. For example, a social worker in the Smart Communities project stated: Cultural factors sometimes come into that as well … like with some Muslim families … they can flog their daughter or their son, usually the daughter … so cultural factors can create a risk. Research elsewhere has revealed that those children between the ages of 11-17 who have been subjected to bullying at school or physical or sexual abuse at home and who have threatened and/or harmed another person or suicidal are “high-risk” youths (Farmer 4). In an attempt to bring about a positive change in these alienated or “at-risk” adolescents, Balga Senior High School has developed several programs such as the Youth Parents Program, Swan Nyunger Sports Education program, Intensive English Centre, and lower secondary mainstream program. The Midvale Primary School has provided services such as counsellors, Aboriginal child protection workers, and Aboriginal police liaison officers for these “at-risk” students. On the other hand, the Department of Community Development (DCD) has provided services to parents and caregivers for children up to 18 years. Academics from Edith Cowan and Curtin universities are engaged in gathering the life stories of these “at-risk” students. One aspect of this research entails the students writing their life stories in a secured web portal that the universities have developed. The researchers believe that by engaging the students in these self-exploration activities, they (the students) would develop a more hopeful outlook on life. Though all agencies and educational institutions involved in this collaborative project are working for the well-being of the children “at-risk”, the Privacy Act forbids the authorities from sharing information about them. A school psychologist expressed concern over the Privacy Act: When the Juvenile Justice Department want to reintroduce a student into a school, we can’t find out anything about this student so we can’t do any preplanning. They want to give the student a fresh start, so there’s always that tension … eventually everyone overcomes [this] because you realise that the student has to come to the school and has to be engaged. Of course, the manner and consequences of a student’s engagement in school cannot be predicted. In the scenario described above students may have been given a fair chance to reform themselves, which is their positive right but if they turn out to be at “high risk” it would appear that the Juvenile Department protected the negative right of the students by supporting “freedom from” interference by others. Likewise, a school health nurse in the project considered confidentiality or the Privacy Act an important factor in the security of the student “at-risk”: I was trying to think about this kid who’s one of the children who has been sexually abused, who’s a client of DCD, and I guess if police got involved there and wanted to know details and DCD didn’t want to give that information out then I’d guess I’d say to the police “Well no, you’ll have to talk to the parents about getting further information.” I guess that way, recognising these students are minor and that they are very vulnerable, their information … where it’s going, where is it leading? Who wants to know? Where will it be stored? What will be the outcomes in the future for this kid? As a 14 year old, if they’re reckless and get into things, you know, do they get a black record against them by the time they’re 19? What will that information be used for if it’s disclosed? So I guess I become an advocate for the student in that way? Thus the nurse considers a sexually abused child should not be identified. It is a positive right in the interest of the person. Once again, though, if the student turns out to be at “high risk” or suicidal, then it would appear that the nurse was protecting the youth’s negative right—“freedom from” interference by others. Since collaboration is a positive right and aims at the students’ welfare, the workable solution to prevent the students from suicide would be to develop inter-agency trust and to share vital information about “high-risk” students. Dilemmas of Collaboration Some recent cases of the deaths of young non-Caucasian girls in Western countries, either because of the implications of the Privacy Act or due to a lack of efficient and effective communication and coordination amongst agencies, have raised debates on effective child protection. For example, the British Laming report (2003) found that Victoria Climbié, a young African girl, was sent by her parents to her aunt in Britain in order to obtain a good education and was murdered by her aunt and aunt’s boyfriend. However, the risk that she could be harmed was widely known. The girl’s problems were known to 6 local authorities, 3 housing authorities, 4 social services, 2 child protection teams, and the police, the local church, and the hospital, but not to the education authorities. According to the Laming Report, her death could have been prevented if there had been inter-agency sharing of information and appropriate evaluation (Balnaves and Luca 49). The agencies had supported the negative rights of the young girl’s “freedom from” interference by others, but at the cost of her life. Perhaps Victoria’s racial background may have contributed to the concealment of information and added to her disadvantaged position. Similarly, in Western Australia, the Gordon Inquiry into the death of Susan Taylor, a 15 year old girl Aboriginal girl at the Swan Nyungah Community, found that in her short life this girl had encountered sexual violation, violence, and the ravages of alcohol and substance abuse. The Gordon Inquiry reported: Although up to thirteen different agencies were involved in providing services to Susan Taylor and her family, the D[epartment] of C[ommunity] D[evelopment] stated they were unaware of “all the services being provided by each agency” and there was a lack of clarity as to a “lead coordinating agency” (Gordon et al. quoted in Scott 45). In this case too, multiple factors—domestic, racial, and the Privacy Act—may have led to Susan Taylor’s tragic end. In the United Kingdom, Harry Ferguson noted that when a child is reported to be “at-risk” from domestic incidents, they can suffer further harm because of their family’s concealment (204). Ferguson’s study showed that in 11 per cent of the 319 case sample, children were known to be re-harmed within a year of initial referral. Sometimes, the parents apply a veil of secrecy around themselves and their children by resisting or avoiding services. In such cases the collaborative efforts of the agencies and education may be thwarted. Lack of cultural education among teachers, youth workers, and agencies could also put the “at-risk” cultural minorities into a high risk category. For example, an “at-risk” Muslim student may not be willing to share personal experiences with the school or agencies because of religious sensitivities. This happened in the UK when Khadji Rouf was abused by her father, a Bangladeshi. Rouf’s mother, a white woman, and her female cousin from Bangladesh, both supported Rouf when she finally disclosed that she had been sexually abused for over eight years. After group therapy, Rouf stated that she was able to accept her identity and to call herself proudly “mixed race”, whereas she rejected the Asian part of herself because it represented her father. Other Asian girls and young women in this study reported that they could not disclose their abuse to white teachers or social workers because of the feeling that they would be “letting down their race or their Muslim culture” (Rouf 113). The marginalisation of many Muslim Australians both in the job market and in society is long standing. For example, in 1996 and again in 2001 the Muslim unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total (Australian Bureau of Statistics). But since the 9/11 tragedy and Bali bombings visible Muslims, such as women wearing hijabs (headscarves), have sometimes been verbally and physically abused and called ‘terrorists’ by some members of the wider community (Dreher 13). The Howard government’s new anti-terrorism legislation and the surveillance hotline ‘Be alert not alarmed’ has further marginalised some Muslims. Some politicians have also linked Muslim asylum seekers with terrorists (Kabir 303), which inevitably has led Muslim “at-risk” refugee students to withdraw from school support such as counselling. Under these circumstances, Muslim “at-risk” students and their parents may prefer to maintain a low profile rather than engage with agencies. In this case, arguably, federal government politics have exacerbated the barriers to collaboration. It appears that unfamiliarity with Muslim culture is not confined to mainstream Australians. For example, an Aboriginal liaison police officer engaged in the Smart Communities project in Western Australia had this to say about Muslim youths “at-risk”: Different laws and stuff from different countries and they’re coming in and sort of thinking that they can bring their own laws and religions and stuff … and when I say religions there’s laws within their religions as well that they don’t seem to understand that with Australia and our laws. Such generalised misperceptions of Muslim youths “at-risk” would further alienate them, thus causing a major hindrance to collaboration. The “at-risk” factors associated with Aboriginal youths have historical connections. Research findings have revealed that indigenous youths aged between 10-16 years constitute a vast majority in all Australian States’ juvenile detention centres. This over-representation is widely recognised as associated with the nature of European colonisation, and is inter-related with poverty, marginalisation and racial discrimination (Watson et al. 404). Like the Muslims, their unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total in 2001 (ABS). However, in 1998 it was estimated that suicide rates among Indigenous peoples were at least 40 per cent higher than national average (National Advisory Council for Youth Suicide Prevention, quoted in Elliot-Farrelly 2). Although the wider community’s unemployment rate is much lower than the Aboriginals and the Muslims, the “at-risk” factors of mainstream Australian youths are often associated with dysfunctional families, high conflict, low-cohesive families, high levels of harsh parental discipline, high levels of victimisation by peers, and high behavioural inhibition (Watson et al. 404). The Macquarie Fields riots in 2005 revealed the existence of “White” underclass and “at-risk” people in Sydney. Macquarie Fields’ unemployment rate was more than twice the national average. Children growing up in this suburb are at greater risk of being involved in crime (The Age). Thus small pockets of mainstream underclass youngsters also require collaborative attention. In Western Australia people working on the Smart Communities project identified that lack of resources can be a hindrance to collaboration for all sectors. As one social worker commented: “government agencies are hierarchical systems and lack resources”. They went on to say that in their department they can not give “at-risk” youngsters financial assistance in times of crisis: We had a petty cash box which has got about 40 bucks in it and sometimes in an emergency we might give a customer a couple of dollars but that’s all we can do, we can’t give them any larger amount. We have bus/metro rail passes, that’s the only thing that we’ve actually got. A youth worker in Smart Communities commented that a lot of uncertainty is involved with young people “at-risk”. They said that there are only a few paid workers in their field who are supported and assisted by “a pool of volunteers”. Because the latter give their time voluntarily they are under no obligation to be constant in their attendance, so the number of available helpers can easily fluctuate. Another youth worker identified a particularly important barrier to collaboration: because of workers’ relatively low remuneration and high levels of work stress, the turnover rates are high. The consequence of this is as follows: The other barrier from my point is that you’re talking to somebody about a student “at-risk”, and within 14 months or 18 months a new person comes in [to that position] then you’ve got to start again. This way you miss a lot of information [which could be beneficial for the youth]. Conclusion The Privacy Act creates a dilemma in that it can be either beneficial or counter-productive for a student’s security. To be blunt, a youth who has suicided might have had their privacy protected, but not their life. Lack of funding can also be a constraint on collaboration by undermining stability and autonomy in the workforce, and blocking inter-agency initiatives. Lack of awareness about cultural differences can also affect unity of action. The deepening inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the Australian society, and the Howard government’s harshness on national security issues, can also pose barriers to collaboration on youth issues. Despite these exigencies and dilemmas, it would seem that collaboration is “the only game” when it comes to helping students “at-risk”. To enhance this collaboration, there needs to be a sensible modification of legal restrictions to information sharing, an increase in government funding and support for inter-agency cooperation and informal information sharing, and an increased awareness about the cultural needs of minority groups and knowledge of the mainstream underclass. Acknowledgments The research is part of a major Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, Smart Communities. The authors very gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the interviewees, and thank *Donald E. Scott for conducting the interviews. References Australian Bureau of Statistics. 1996 and 2001. Balnaves, Mark, and Joe Luca. “The Impact of Digital Persona on the Future of Learning: A Case Study on Digital Repositories and the Sharing of Information about Children At-Risk in Western Australia”, paper presented at Ascilite, Brisbane (2005): 49-56. 10 April 2006. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/ 06_Balnaves.pdf>. Dreher, Tanya. ‘Targeted’: Experiences of Racism in NSW after September 11, 2001. Sydney: University of Technology, 2005. Elliot-Farrelly, Terri. “Australian Aboriginal Suicide: The Need for an Aboriginal Suicidology”? Australian e-Journal for the Advancement of Mental Health, 3.3 (2004): 1-8. 15 April 2006 http://www.auseinet.com/journal/vol3iss3/elliottfarrelly.pdf>. Farmer, James. A. High-Risk Teenagers: Real Cases and Interception Strategies with Resistant Adolescents. Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas, 1990. Ferguson, Harry. Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. Rouf, Khadji. “Myself in Echoes. My Voice in Song.” Ed. A. Bannister, et al. Listening to Children. London: Longman, 1990. Scott E. Donald. “Exploring Communication Patterns within and across a School and Associated Agencies to Increase the Effectiveness of Service to At-Risk Individuals.” MS Thesis, Curtin University of Technology, August 2005. The Age. “Investing in People Means Investing in the Future.” The Age 5 March, 2005. 15 April 2006 http://www.theage.com.au>. Watson, Malcolm, et al. “Pathways to Aggression in Children and Adolescents.” Harvard Educational Review, 74.4 (Winter 2004): 404-428. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid, and Mark Balnaves. "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>. APA Style Kabir, N., and M. Balnaves. (May 2006) "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>.

What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not homogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-homogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. These two axes are constantly reshuffled and renegotiated online where, thanks to the technological possibilities of HTML hypertext, a whole range of identities and identifications may be brought together at any given time. We trust that these insights will be of interest in future discussion of online networks, transnational communities, identity formation, and hypertext aesthetics where much urgent and topical work remains to be done. References Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. “You Are What You Link.” 2001 Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong. 26 Apr. 2010. ‹http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm›. Ali B. “Leipe Mocro Flavour.” ALIB.NL / SPEC Entertainment. 2007. 4 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www3.alib.nl/popupAlibtv.php?catId=42&contentId=544›. Alonso, Andoni, and Pedro J. Oiarzabal. Diasporas in the New Media Age. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. 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How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011. Van Doorn, Niels, and Liesbeth van Zoonen. “Theorizing Gender and the Internet: Past, Present, and Future.” Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics. Ed. Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard. London: Routledge. 261-74.

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don’t know from one day to the next what’s remembered and what’s made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning’s the same, the meter’s identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it’s right and you’re wrong. What I give you is the day’s edition. Tomorrow it may be different. The Giant’s House: A Romance (8) I am a book lover. Not in the conventional sense. I am a lover who gives books as tokens of my affection. I think my fascination with the exchange of the written word extends back to notes I wrote to my Middle School crushes. Bronwyn Garrity, in her study of the Internet practices of American pre-teen and teenaged girls, asserts, “Adolescence is the societally condoned window in which we may shuffle identities with abandon” (28). This rather utopian description is a stark contrast to the identity fixing that I remember experiencing at the ages of twelve and thirteen, especially in the domestic and corpor(e)al space of those grades between elementary school and high school. Personally, I prefer the term “Middle School” to “Junior High”; it more succinctly describes pre-teen ontology. We were in the middle of everything – in the middle of puberty, principally. The muddle middle of desires we had no language to explain. Desires that some of us – a romantic few – attempted to articulate. We were ridiculed for our efforts; or, at least that is how I remember it. Although I mastered intricate note folding techniques (mimicking origami) from more “experienced” girls and learned abbreviations, codes, nicknames that should have frustrated discovery of the sender’s identification, my purple prose too often found its audience not in the private eyes of my beloveds but in public places – the lunchroom, locker room, playground and bus. It wasn’t so much the humiliation of the revealed secret that I remember; it was the identity to which the notes bound me. I was (and still am) the girl who reveals too much. I came to see my own writing as an inadequate, even clumsy expression of feelings. Undeterred, I thought if I found someone who was a better writer, then my desires would be understood, appreciated, reciprocated. When I entered college, I was prepared. Schooled by another romantic who utilized e.e. cummings’ poetry to seduce me, I became an aficionado of loving by books, poetry, by any words other than my own. Poets, novelists and playwrights became my Cyranos, providing the raw material through which I fashioned love – “She loved the taste of other people’s words in her mouth” (McCracken 13). And like Peggy Cort, the solitary but sensual librarian narrator of Elizabeth McCracken’s A Giant’s House, who loves (through) the words of others, I too believed that “people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. … Knowledge is love” (10). My father is a book lover too. A book lover like me. From my childhood I remember his gifts of books to me and, when I grew old enough to know what to select, my gifts of books back to him. Of course, my mother says we give each other books because it is “easy,” easier than picking out something “more personal.” I wonder if she misreads the depth of our exchanges on purpose, that she deliberately refuses to see that books are the most intimate gifts we give each other because she is not a book lover too. Not in the way we are. An English major in college, she is one of the few people I know who resists reading. She marks what she terms my father’s “antisocial” behavior by criticizing his constant reading. “It’s the way he avoids dealing with people,” she has been known to charge. For my mother, actions and interaction speak whereas the written word is simply fiction. For my father, the written word is interactive, and interaction is a dance he finds too intricate for his clumsy step. It has become a running joke in our family that when we go to the mall it only takes my father five minutes after entering the over-air conditioned, over-stimulating labyrinth to query, “So. Where can I meet you guys and at what time?” He doesn’t bother to tell us anymore that he’s off to prowl the bookstores; we just know that when we meet (hours later) he will be sitting in the food court, cup of coffee in hand, tell-tale plastic shopping bag folded upon his table and a new love in his hand. My father used to gift my mother with books – mostly self-help titles – overtly, to assist her with her Master’s education in counseling and, covertly, to hint at her need to seek help with lifelong depression. For a while I remember these gifts were received with joy. It was a way he could share her studies, and she appreciated his desire to be near her intellectually. After she finished her studies, however, he continued to present her with similar offerings because while the study had been mastered the despair had not. Outside an educational context, she saw these books as coercive hints, pushing her to work on her emotional troubles without talking to her directly. She rebelled. The gifts no longer had what Alphonse Lingis calls the “element of impetuousness, recklessness” in them. She accused him of giving not as “a passionate act” but as a calculated one (Dangerous Emotions 174-5). He was crushed and, to my dismay, stopped the flow of books to both of us, afraid that I too would misunderstand his gestures. Now, in the light of memory, I can understand both his sadness and her anger. I have also been disillusioned by contrived gifts. The teenaged lover who chronicled my heart with cummings’ verse proceeded to give the same gift to another after leaving me. This convenient exchange of love object, while maintaining the same vehicle of desire, made me realize that the words were not specific to me, rather, they were part of a package of romance unfolded and displayed as easily to one consumer as the next. Lingis extols his reader, Gift-giving requires a specific kind of divination of the individual human heart; it is not a matter of just asking someone what he or she wants. For a gift is not a mere gratification of need or want; it involves a grandeur that cannot be measured by itemizing one’s wants; it transfigures the soul of the recipient. (177) I am determined not to be that kind of charlatan. Of course, Lingis also cautions that prowess with giving does not insure proficiency with receiving, “Receiving is as difficult as giving a gift.” I believe it is harder for exactly the reasons he delineates, “deciding to make it in life by oneself, deciding to achieve and to deserve whatever one needs and wants, how many gifts one refuses!” (179). Generosity is something I was schooled in by my father, but only in a way that extended out from self. I trace such proffering back to my Middle School moments of misplaced desire. One way that I soothed myself about a failed gift was by giving even more to the same people who never reciprocated my attentions. The more my generosity continues, the more difficult it becomes to accept gifts given to me. Reciprocity undermines my status as giver and exposes my own needs. To acknowledge those needs would be to acknowledge vulnerability – something a giver does not have because she believes she controls the gift exchange. Her desires are fulfilled not just in the act of giving but in the joy the receiver feels. This desire is risky, subject to failure, not to mention parasitic and fleeting because the giver is only excited again by another exchange, another, and another. Lingis counsels me, “It is the extravagant and passionate heart that can recognize and receive a gift” (175), but as a giver, I convince myself of my passion by insistent repetition, denial of need, and emotional silence. My beloved says it was my generosity that first attracted her to me. I was generous not just with material things but also with my mind, my body and my time. I think she says this to make me feel better about not being able to receive. She allows me to maintain the fiction that my giving is fulfilling. “Sometimes we need people to lie for us,” Peggy Cort reminds me. “That lie was a gift I shouldn’t have accepted: inappropriate, unethical and much too generous. But I did; I took it silently; I nodded” (McCracken 103). I nodded and presented her with … a book. Works Cited Garrity, Bronwyn. “Some Cyberspace of Her Own: Escapes from the Dark, Horrible, Sticking Trail of the Lost Voice.” The Nation. 19 Mar. 2001: 25-30. Lingis, Alphonse. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley, CA: U of CA Press, 2000. McCracken, Elizabeth. The Giant’s House: A Romance. New York, NY: Bard Books, 1996. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Odendahl, Jules. "Giving and Loving" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/givingandloving.php>. APA Style Odendahl, J., (2002, Nov 20). Giving and Loving. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/givingandloving.html

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

The word 'nigger' is arguably the most charged epithet in American English; thus it is surprising that this word has been appropriated by some African Americans to refer to themselves. To be precise, the African-American version of this term is not 'nigger' but 'nigga', a word that has, as Geneva Smitherman notes, "a variety of meanings ranging from positive to negative to neutral" (Black Talk 167). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his study of African-American literature, provides a theoretical foundation for understanding why some African Americans use this word and how it operates rhetorically. Building on Gates's work, I will argue that the co-optation of the slur often involves a complex of three rhetorical devices that fall under the rubric of an African-American rhetorical strategy called Signifyin(g)—a term that will be discussed at length later. The first of these devices is agnominatio, defined as "the repetition of a word with an alteration of both one letter and a sound" (Gates 46). The second, semantic inversion, is the reversal of the meaning of a term (Holt qtd. in Smitherman, "Chain"). Chiastic slaying, the third rhetorical strategy, is a critique that transforms the status of a group or individual.1 Through these three modes of rhetorical transfiguration, the slur 'nigger' becomes 'nigga' a positive term that carries with it a critique of racism. I will further argue that all of these rhetorical devices operate through a principle I term "semantic looping" in which a new term derives meaning by continual reference to an older, existing term. This principle is a key to understanding how Signifyin(g) works in the appropriation of 'nigger' and helps to reveal how, in the words of Michel Foucault, the appropriation is a culturally rooted form of "reverse discourse" (101). Ultimately, this rhetorical analysis reveals that the African-American usage of 'nigga' is a strategy for asserting the humanity of black people in the face of continuing racism, a strategy that celebrates an anti-assimilationist vision of African-American identity. Foucault has argued that while the naming of oppressed groups by those in power serves as an instrument for oppression, such naming can also engender group identification and resistance to oppression (101). The coining of the word 'homosexual', for example, allowed for the repression of gay people but also allowed homosexuals to organise a gay rights movement using the very terminology utilized to oppress them (Foucault 101). One strategy for resisting hostile slurs like 'queer' or 'nigger' is for the oppressed group to appropriate the name and transform it into a rallying cry or "reverse discourse". An understanding of how 'nigga' operates as a reverse discourse requires a culturally rooted rhetorical analysis of the term. Gates, in The Signifyin(g) Monkey, provides background for such an analysis. Because his project is ultimately to derive an African-American theory of literary criticism, he touches on the appropriation of 'nigger' only briefly, asserting that a "political offensive" was mounted against the term by African-Americans through a black rhetorical strategy called Signifyin(g) (47). Gates, however, does not explain precisely how Signifyin(g) works in this case, except to suggest that it involves agnominatio (46). Thus 'nigger' becomes 'nigga', a word that differs from the racial slur but originates from and recalls it.2 Although Gates's commentary on the appropriation of 'nigger' amounts to little more than a sentence, much of his explication of the term Signifyin(g) implicitly applies to the co-optation of 'nigger'. The rhetorical analysis presented in this paper is a logical extension of Gates's initial linkage of the appropriation of 'nigger' with the rhetorical practice of Signifyin(g). The social baggage attached to 'nigga' assures that every use of the term is double-voiced in the Bakhtinian sense. More precisely, 'nigga' is a Bakhtinian parody of 'nigger'; the new connotation parodies or comments on the original because the new term carries with it the history of its pejorative use as well as the refashioned connotation of defiant group pride.3 This kind of rhetorical turn or critique is an example of the African-American rhetorical practice Gates identifies as Signifyin(g). Pinning down exactly what constitutes Signifyin(g) is difficult. Numerous black language scholars have commented on the expansiveness of the term.4 Gates argues that in its broadest sense, to Signify means to be "figurative," further noting that "to define it in practice is to define it through any number of its embedded tropes" (81).5 For our purposes it can be described as a rhetorical action that indirectly critiques another term or sign by revising it. Gates explains that, fundamentally, this revision and critique involve "repetition, with a signal difference" (51). Gates distinguishes the African-American term, 'Signifyin(g)', from the word 'signifying' by capitalizing the 'S' and bracketing the 'g' (46). It is helpful to think of the former term as 'Signifyin(g) on' (or critiquing) something whereas the latter word 'signifies' (or means) something but does not inherently involve a critique. Thus, to parody the motions of a police officer behind his or her back 'Signifies on' the officer and 'signifies' one's disrespect.6 Signifyin(g) is inherently a counter-puncher's strategy, an act of resistance against an oppressive force. Gates even goes so far as to call it the "slave's trope" (52). In Signifyin(g), the revised term, through its parodic double-voicedness, enters into a semantic loop with the original term; recollection of past oppressive usage must occur to fuel the term's new meaning. Figure 1 - Semantic Loop of Semantic Inversion and Agnominatio This semantic loop recalls what W.E. B. Dubois termed African-American double consciousness, a consciousness that yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (16-17) While 'nigga' recalls how blacks have been measured by the tape of the world, it also defies this estimation through ironic revision of the name. Although Dubois would criticize this pathway through the white term as a road to false consciousness, others might insist that since revision of the white term occurs through distinctly African-American rhetorical strategies, the revision is emblematic of an authentically African-American consciousness—which is a double consciousness. In this view the revision does not attempt to reconcile what DuBois calls the "two unreconciled strivings" of the black person as "an American and a Negro" but instead involves them in an endless interplay (17). The interplay of the two signs sustains an antagonistic stand toward the dominant white community through the polemical comment: "this is how whites see us but we are something more". 'Nigga', then, is "authentically black" speech because it recognizes and maintains the divide between black and white worlds. As Smitherman notes: [e]ncoded within the rhetoric of racial resistance, nigga is used to demarcate (Black) culturally rooted from (white) culturally assimilated African Americans. Niggaz are those Bloods (Blacks) who are down for Blackness and identify with the trials as well as triumphs of the Black experience… ("Chain") The defiance implied by the revision of the white slur is also an assertion of human subjectivity. Gates identifies a parallel strategy in African-American slave narratives. Referring to Frederick Douglass's famous chiasmus—"You have seen how a man became a slave, you will see how a slave became a man."—Gates asserts that "Douglass's major contribution to the slave narrative was to make chiasmus the central trope of slave narration, in which a slave-object writes himself or herself into a human subject through the act of writing" (172). By comparison, through the semantic inversion of 'nigger'/'nigga', dehumanized blacks speak themselves into human subjects through the act of speaking. This transfiguration conforms to what Gates terms "chiastic slaying" (66). His somewhat off-hand phrase is inspired by the African-American use of chiasmus, which is defined as, "a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other" (Oxford English Dictionary qtd. in Grothe). Chiasmus is often represented as an ABBA pattern (so Douglass's chiasmus would be reduced to: (A) man - (B) slave - (B) slave - (A) man). In Gates's usage, chiastic slaying involves repetition and reversal but not necessarily a literal ABBA pattern of chiasmus. In the same vein, 'nigga' is a repetition of 'nigger' that reverses the position of African Americans (from objects to subjects). Analogously, 'nigger to nigga' can be conceived of as the inverted second clause of a chiastic statement like Douglass's 'man - slave - slave - man' in which personhood and agency are re-affirmed. This re-affirmation of humanity implicit in 'nigga' is not likely to be understood by many whites given, as Smitherman notes, that they often fail to recognize the semantic difference between 'nigger' and 'nigga'.7 Since whites are frequently unaware of the Signification of 'nigga', it is impossible for African Americans to kill (i.e. end) the white use of the racist term. In the context of Signification, chiastic slaying does not put an end to the idea Signified upon. In fact, Signification must be activated by what Gates calls the "absent presence" of the original term (48). The critique of racism and assertion of subjectivity implicit in the employment of 'nigga' is not aimed at white people or the elimination of their sign; it is aimed at a black audience that must survive in a continually racist environment. What, then, is the "slaying" of chiastic slaying? It must be seen as a refutation of the original term or sign. In the case of 'nigga', it is a rejection of the dehumanization implied by 'nigger' with the recognition that African Americans will still be continually subjected to this libel despite its refutation. Thus, the chiastic slaying of 'nigger' by 'nigga' requires a continual interplay or semantic loop between the two terms. The context of continuing racism, then, requires 'nigga' to recurrently signify on (i.e. assert the falsity of) the slur. The recurrent Signification can be thought of as a loop inscribed upon the linear chiastic pattern: Figure 2 - Semantic Loop Inscribed on the Chiastic PatternThe context of continuing racism is one factor that accounts for the value of semantic looping in African-American rhetoric. Since the semantic loops of African-American culture draw their strength from the oppression to which they react, they are continually useful. This kind of resistance does not attempt to overcome racism but instead draws African-American attention to it so blacks can survive it. The first step in this survival is to be aware, as DuBois might say, that blacks in America are perceived of as a "problem" (15). The Signification of 'nigga' also "keeps it real", by reminding African Americans of the harsh truth of racism and by continually enacting a refutation of racism through a complex of culturally familiar rhetorical strategies. In this respect, the appropriation of the white slur is, to borrow the words of Foucault, a culturally inspired "reverse discourse" aimed at responding to white oppression. The identification of semantic looping in this case opens up an array of other questions. How does semantic looping function in the appropriation of other epithets by other groups? (A few cases that may be worth investigating in addition to the previously mentioned 'queer', are 'dyke', 'girl'/'grrl' by young feminists and 'anorexia'/'ana' as well as 'bulimia'/'mia' by pro-eating-disorder advocates.) Do the cultural differences of various groups affect how semantic looping operates? What does semantic looping reveal about the struggle over authenticity or identity, especially with respect to gender, class and subculture? And lastly, how do groups respond to re-appropriations by dominant groups? (In particular I am thinking of the increasing use of 'nigga' by white American teenagers.) I hope others will find these questions worth pursuing. Notes 1. While Gates suggests that agnominatio is involved in the co-optation of 'nigger', he does not mention the term 'semantic inversion' at all (although he is obviously aware that Signifyin(g) often involves this rhetorical action). Gates's phrase, chiastic slaying, occurs only in the context of a general discussion of Signifyin(g). See 66 in Gates for his use of chiastic slaying. 2. Other English speakers including Australians and the English may find it difficult to distinguish between these spoken words and 'hear' them both as 'nigguh'. But to those from the United States the distinction is noticeable. 3. Gates identifies Bakhtin's notion of the double voiced word and his concept of narrative parody as relevant to African-American rhetoric. See 50, 110-13 and 131 in Gates. Bakhtin's most comprehensive discussion of double-voiced discourse can be found in 185-186, and 190-99. Bakhtin's distinction between parody and other types of discourse can be found in 193-99. 4. Gates lists the following as providing substantive definitions of Signifyin(g): H. Rap Brown, Roger D. Abrahams, Thomas Kochman, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Geneva Smitherman and Ralph Ellison (71). Gates considers Mitchell Kernan's data to be more representative than the others' and even she states that she could not get consensus from her informants regarding Signifyin(g) (Gates 80-81). 5. Gates has identified numerous rhetorical strategies that can be involved in Signifyin(g). See 52 in Gates for a complete list of these tropes. 6. I build on an example from Abrahams who states that "... it is signifying to make fun of a policeman by parodying his motions behind his back..." (52). 7. Smitherman notes that the semantic inversion of 'nigger' (or 'flippin the script' as it is known in the hip-hop world) "... is often misunderstood by European Americans and castigated by some African Americans" (Chain). Smitherman's comment suggests that the ability to discriminate between the two terms (as well as one's comfort level with the usage of 'nigga') is not racially monolithic. Whites who participate in hip-hop culture, for example, are likely to see the distinction between 'nigger' and 'nigga'. Some factors that seem likely to complicate any generalization about understanding and comfort level with 'nigga' are race, affinity for hip-hop, class, age and geographic location. References Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine, 1970. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. DuBois, W.E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1961. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Grothe, Mardy. Chiasmus.com. Online. Internet. 9 Oct. 2001. Available <http://www.chiasmus.com/whatischiasmus.shtml>. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford U P, 1988. Smitherman, Geneva. "'The Chain Remain the Same'." Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997): n.pag. Online. Academic Search Elite. 10 May 2002. - - -. Black Talk. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Links http://www.chiasmus.com/whatischiasmus.shtml Citation reference for this article MLA Style Jacobs, Andrew T.. "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php>. Chicago Style Jacobs, Andrew T., "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Jacobs, Andrew T.. (2002) Appropriating a Slur. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php> ([your date of access]).

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

In this article I discuss a story told by the South Australian Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Aunty Hilda Wilson (nee Varcoe), about the time when, at not quite sixteen, she was sent from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station to work in the Adelaide Hills, some 500 kilometres away, as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”. Her secondment was part of a widespread practice in early and mid-twentieth century Australia of placing young Aboriginal women “of marriageable age” from missions and government reserves into domestic service. Consciously deploying Indigenous storytelling practices as pedagogy, Hilda Wilson recounted this episode in a number of distinct ways during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across these iterations, each building on the other, she exhibited a personal resilience in her subjectivity, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work, which informed her agency and determination in a challenging situation in which she was both caring for a white socially-privileged family of five, while simultaneously grappling with the injustices of a state system of segregated indentured labour. Kirmayer and colleagues propose that “notions of resilience emerging from developmental psychology and psychiatry in recent years address the distinctive cultures, geographic and social settings, and histories of adversity of indigenous peoples”. Resilience is understood here as an ability to actively engage with traumatic change, involving the capacity to absorb stress and to transform in order to cope with it (Luthar et al.). Further to this, in an Indigenous context, Marion Kickett has found the capacity for resilience to be supported by three key factors: family connections, culture and belonging as well as notions of identity and history. In exploring the layers of this autobiographical story, I employ this extended psychological notion of resilience in both a domestic ambit as well as the broader social context for Indigenous people surviving a system of external domination. Additionally I consider the resilience Aunty Hilda demonstrates at a pivotal interlude between girlhood and womanhood within the trajectory of her overall long and productive life, and within an intergenerational history of resistance and accommodation. What is especially important about her storytelling is its refusal to be contained by the imaginary of the settler nation and its generic Aboriginal-female subject. She refuses victimhood while at the same time illuminating the mechanisms of injustice, hinting also at possibilities for alternative and more equitable relationships of family and work across cultural divides. Considered through this prism, resilience is, I suggest, also a quality firmly connected to ideas of Aboriginal cultural-sovereignty and standpoint and to, what Victoria Grieves has identified as, the Aboriginal knowledge value of sharing (25, 28, 45). Storytelling as Pedagogy The story I discuss was verbally recounted in a manner that Westphalen describes as “a continuation of Dreaming Stories”, functioning to educate and connect people and country (13-14). As MacGill et al. note, “the critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller.” Hilda told me that as a child she was taught not to ask questions when listening to the stories of an Elder, and her own children were raised in this manner. Hilda's oldest daughter described this as a process involving patience, intrigue and surprise (Elva Wanganeen). Narratives unfold through nuance and repetition in a complexity of layers that can generate multiple levels of meaning over time. Circularity and recursivity underlie this pedagogy through which mnemonic devices are built so that stories become re-membered and inscribed on the body of the listener. When a perceived level of knowledge-transference has occurred, a narrator may elect to elaborate further, adding another detail that will often transform the story’s social, cultural, moral or political context. Such carefully chosen additional detail, however, might re-contextualise all that has gone before. As well as being embodied, stories are also emplaced, and thus most appropriately told in the Country where events occurred. (Here I use the Aboriginal English term “Country” which encompasses home, clan estate, and the powerful complex of spiritual, animate and inanimate forces that bind people and place.) Hilda Wilson’s following account of her first job as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”, Dr Frank Swann, provides an illustration of how she expertly uses traditional narrative forms of incrementally structured knowledge transmission within a cross-cultural setting to tell a story that expresses practices of resilience as resistance and transformation at its core. A “White Doctor” Story: The First Layer Aunty Hilda first told me this story when we were winding along the South Eastern Freeway through the Adelaide hills between Murray Bridge and Mount Barker, in 1997, on our way home to Adelaide from a trip to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri cultural education centre co-founded by her granddaughter. She was then 86 years old. Ahead of us, the profile of Mt Lofty rose out of the plains and into view. The highest peak in the Mount Lofty ranges, Yurrebilla, as it is known to Kaurna Aboriginal people, or Mt Lofty, has been an affluent enclave of white settlement for Adelaide’s moneyed elite since early colonial times. Being in place, or in view of place, provided the appropriate opportunity for her to tell me the story. It belongs to a group of stories that during our initial period of working together changed little over time until one day two years later she an added contextual detail which turned it inside out. Hilda described the doctor’s spacious hill-top residence, and her responsibilities of caring for Dr Swann’s invalid wife (“an hysteric who couldn't do anything for herself”), their twin teenage boys (who attended private college in the city) along with another son and younger daughter living at home (pers. com. Hilda Wilson). Recalling the exhilaration of looking down over the sparkling lights of Adelaide at night from this position of apparent “privilege” on the summit, she related this undeniably as a success story, justifiably taking great pride in her achievements as a teenager, capable of stepping into the place of the non-Indigenous doctor's wife in running the large and demanding household. Successfully undertaking a wide range of duties employed in the care of a family, including the disabled mother, she is an active participant crucial to the lives of all in the household, including to the work of the doctor and the twin boys in private education. Hilda recalled that Mrs Swann was unable to eat without her assistance. As the oldest daughter of a large family Hilda had previously assisted in caring for her younger siblings. Told in this way, her account collapses social distinctions, delineating a shared social and physical space, drawing its analytic frame from an Indigenous ethos of subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity and care. Moreover Hilda’s narrative of domestic service demonstrates an assertion of agency that resists colonial and patriarchal hegemony and inverts the master/mistress-servant relationship, one she firmly eschews in favour of the self-affirming role of the lady of the house. (It stands in contrast to the abuse found in other accounts for example Read, Tucker, Kartinyeri. Often the key difference was a continuity of family connections and ongoing family support.) Indeed the home transformed into a largely feminised and cross-culturalised space in which she had considerable agency and responsibility when the doctor was absent. Hilda told me this story several times in much the same way during our frequent encounters over the next two years. Each telling revealed further details that fleshed a perspective gained from what Patricia Hill Collins terms an “epistemic privilege” via her “outsider-within status” of working within a white household, lending an understanding of its social mechanisms (12-15). She also stressed the extent of her duty of care in upholding the family’s well-being, despite the work at times being too burdensome. The Second Version: Coming to Terms with Intersecting Oppressions Later, as our relationship developed and deepened, when I began to record her life-narrative as part of my doctoral work, she added an unexpected detail that altered its context completely: It was all right except I slept outside in a tin shed and it was very cold at night. Mount Lofty, by far the coldest part of Adelaide, frequently experiences winter maximum temperatures of two or three degrees and often light snowfalls. This skilful reframing draws on Indigenous storytelling pedagogy and is expressly used to invite reflexivity, opening questions that move the listener from the personal to the public realm in which domestic service and the hegemony of the home are pivotal in coming to terms with the overlapping historical oppressions of class, gender, race and nation. Suddenly we witness her subjectivity starkly shift from one self-defined and allied with an equal power relationship – or even of dependency reversal cast as “de-facto doctor's wife” – to one diminished by inequity and power imbalance in the outsider-defined role of “mistreated servant”. The latter was signalled by the dramatic addition of a single signifying detail as a decoding device to a deeper layer of meaning. In this parallel stratum of the story, Hilda purposefully brings into relief the politics in which “the private domain of women's housework intersected with the public domain of governmental social engineering policies” (Haskins 4). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, what for White Australia was cheap labour and a civilising mission, for Indigenous women constituted stolen children and slavery. Protection and then assimilation were government policies under which Indigenous women grew up. (96) Hilda was sent away from her family to work in 1927 by the universally-feared Sister Pearl McKenzie, a nurse who too-zealously (Katinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Calling, 23) oversaw the Chief Protector’s policies of “training” Aboriginal children from the South Australian missions in white homes once they reached fourteen (Haebich, 316—20). Indeed many prominent Adelaide hills’ families benefited from Aboriginal labour under this arrangement. Hilda explained her struggle with the immense cultural dislocation that removal into domestic service entailed, a removal her grandfather William Rankine had travelled from Raukkan to Government House to protest against less than a decade earlier (The Register December 21, 1923). This additional layer of story also illuminates Hilda’s capacity for resilience and persistence in finding a way forward through the challenge of her circumstances (Luthar et al.), drawing on her family networks and sense of personhood (Kickett). Hilda related that her father visited her at Mount Lofty twice, though briefly, on his way to shearing jobs in the south-east of the state. “He said it was no good me living like this,” she stated. Through his active intervention, reinforcement was requested and another teenager from Point Pearce, Hilda’s future husband’s cousin, Annie Sansbury, soon arrived to share the workload. But, Hilda explained, the onerous expectations coupled with the cultural segregation of retiring to the tin shed quickly became too much for Annie, who stayed only three months, leaving Hilda coping again alone, until her father applied additional pressure for a more suitable placement to be found for his daughter. In her next position, working for the family of a racehorse trainer, Hilda contentedly shared the bedroom with the small boy for whom she cared, and not long after returned to Point Pearce where she married Robert Wilson and began a family of her own. Gendered Resilience across Cultural Divides Hilda explicitly speaks into these spaces to educate me, because all but a few white women involved have remained silent about their complicity with state sanctioned practices which exploited Indigenous labour and removed children from their families through the policies of protection and assimilation. For Indigenous women, speaking out was often fraught with the danger of a deeper removal from family and Country, even of disappearance. Victoria Haskins writes extensively of two cases in New South Wales where young Aboriginal women whose protests concerning their brutal treatment at the hands of white employers, resulted in their wrongful and prolonged committal to mental health and other institutions (147-52, 228-39). In the indentured service of Indigenous women it is possible to see oppression operating through Eurocentric ideologies of race, class and gender, in which Indigenous women were assumed to take on, through displacement, the more oppressed role of white women in pre-second world war non-Aboriginal Australian society. The troubling silent shadow-figure of the “doctor’s wife” indeed provides a haunting symbol of - and also a forceful rebellion against – the docile upper middle-class white femininity of the inter-war era. Susan Bordo has argued that that “the hysteric” is archetypal of a discourse of ‘pathology as embodied protest’ in which the body may […] be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view in extreme or hyperliteral form. (20) Mrs Swann’s vulnerability contrasts markedly with the strength Hilda expresses in coping with a large family, emanating from a history of equitable gender relations characteristic of Ngarrindjeri society (Bell). The intersection of race and gender, as Marcia Langton contends “continues to require deconstruction to allow us to decolonise our consciousness” (54). From Hilda’s brief description one grasps a relationship resonant with that between the protagonists in Tracy Moffat's Night Cries, (a response to the overt maternalism in the film Jedda) in which the white mother finds herself utterly reliant on her “adopted” Aboriginal daughter at the end of her life (46-7). Resilience and Survival The different versions of story Hilda deploys, provide a pedagogical basis to understanding the broader socio-political framework of her overall life narrative in which an ability to draw on the cultural continuity of the past to transform the future forms an underlying dynamic. This demonstrated capacity to meet the challenging conditions thrown up by the settler-colonial state has its foundations in the connectivity and cultural strength sustained generationally in her family. Resilience moves from being individually to socially determined, as in Kickett’s model. During the onslaught of dispossession, following South Australia’s 1836 colonial invasion, Ngarrindjeri were left near-starving and decimated from introduced diseases. Pullume (c1808-1888), the rupuli (elected leader of the Ngarrindjeri Tendi, or parliament), Hilda’s third generation great-grandfather, decisively steered his people through the traumatic changes, eventually negotiating a middle-path after the Point McLeay Mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 (Jenkin, 59). Pullume’s granddaughter, the accomplished, independent-thinking Ellen Sumner (1842—1925), played an influential educative role during Hilda’s youth. Like other Ngarrindjeri women in her lineage, Ellen Sumner was skilled in putari practice (female doctor) and midwifery culture that extended to a duty of care concerning women and children (teaching her “what to do and what not to do”), which I suggest is something Hilda herself drew from when working with the Swann family. Hilda’s mother and aunties continued aspects of the putari tradition, attending births and giving instruction to women in the community (Bell, 171, Hughes Grandmother, 52-4). As mentioned earlier, when the South Australian government moved to introduce The Training of Children Act (SA) Hilda’s maternal grandfather William Rankine campaigned vigorously against this, taking a petition to the SA Governor in December 1923 (Haebich, 315-19). As with Aunty Hilda, William Rankine used storytelling as a method to draw public attention to the inequities of his times in an interview with The Register which drew on his life-narrative (Hughes, My Grandmother, 61). Hilda’s father Wilfred Varcoe, a Barngarrla-Wirrungu man, almost a thousand kilometres away from his Poonindie birthplace, resisted assimilation by actively pursuing traditional knowledge networks using his mobility as a highly sought after shearer to link up with related Elders in the shearing camps, (and as we saw to inspect the conditions his daughter was working under at Mt Lofty). The period Hilda spent as a servant to white families to be trained in white ways was in fact only a brief interlude in a long life in which family connections, culture and belonging (Kickett) served as the backbone of her resilience and resistance. On returning to the Point Pearce Mission, Hilda successfully raised a large family and activated a range of community initiatives that fostered well-being. In the 1960s she moved to Adelaide, initially as the sole provider of her family (her husband later followed), to give her younger children better educational opportunities. Working with Aunty Gladys Elphick OBE through the Council of Aboriginal Women, she played a foundational role in assisting other Aboriginal women establish their families in the city (Mattingly et al., 154, Fisher). In Adelaide, Aunty Hilda became an influential, much loved Elder, living in good health to the age of ninety-six years. The ability to survive changing circumstances, to extend care over and over to her children and Elders along with qualities of leadership, determination, agency and resilience have passed down through her family, several of whom have become successful in public life. These include her great-grandson and former AFL football player, Michael O’Loughlin, her great-nephew Adam Goodes and her-grand-daughter, the cultural weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Arguably, resilience contributes to physical as well as cultural longevity, through caring for the self and others. Conclusion This story demonstrates how sociocultural dimensions of resilience are contextualised in practices of everyday lives. We see this in the way that Aunty Hilda Wilson’s self-narrated story resolutely defies attempts to know, subjugate and categorise, operating instead in accord with distinctively Aboriginal expressions of gender and kinship relations that constitute an Aboriginal sovereignty. Her storytelling activates a revision of collective history in ways that valorise Indigenous identity (Kirmayer et al.). Her narrative of agency and personal achievement, one that has sustained her through life, interacts with the larger narrative of state-endorsed exploitation, diffusing its power and exposing it to wider moral scrutiny. Resilience in this context is inextricably entwined with practices of cultural survival and resistance developed in response to the introduction of government policies and the encroachment of settlers and their world. We see resilience too operating across Hilda Wilson’s family history, and throughout her long life. The agency and strategies displayed suggest alternative realities and imagine other, usually more equitable, possible worlds. References Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was and Will Be. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 90-110. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fisher, Elizabeth M. "Elphick, Gladys (1904–1988)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 29 Sep. 2013. ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/elphick-gladys-12460/text22411>. Grieves, Victoria. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing, Melbourne University: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009. Haebich, Anna. Broken Circles: The Fragmenting of Indigenous Families. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 2000. Haskins, Victoria. My One Bright Spot. London: Palgrave, 2005. Hughes, Karen. "My Grandmother on the Other Side of the Lake." PhD thesis, Department of Australian Studies and Department of History, Flinders University. Adelaide, 2009. ———. “Microhistories and Things That Matter.” Australian Feminist Studies 27.73 (2012): 269-278. ———. “I’d Grown Up as a Child amongst Natives.” Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge 28 (2013). 29 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/karen-hughes>. Jenkin, Graham. Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979. Kartinyeri, Doris. Kick the Tin. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000. Kartinyeri, Doreen. My Ngarrindjeri Calling, Adelaide: Wakefield, 2007. Kickett, Marion. “Examination of How a Culturally Appropriate Definition of Resilience Affects the Physical and Mental Health of Aboriginal People.” PhD thesis, Curtin University, 2012. Kirmayer, L.J., S. Dandeneau, E. Marshall, M.K. Phillips, K. Jenssen Williamson. “Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56.2 (2011): 84-91. Luthar, S., D. Cicchetti, and B. Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543-62. MacGill, Bindi, Julie Mathews, Ellen Trevorrow, Alice Abdulla, and Deb Rankine. “Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” M/C Journal 15.3 (2012). Mattingly, Christobel, and Ken Hampton. Survival in Our Own Land, Adelaide: Wakefield, 1988. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. St Lucia: UQP, 2000. Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy. Dir. Tracy Moffatt. Chili Films, 1990. Read, Peter. A Rape of the Soul So Profound. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977. Wanganeen, Elva. Personal Communication, 2000. Westphalen, Linda. An Anthropological and Literary Study of Two Aboriginal Women's Life Histories: The Impacts of Enforced Child Removal and Policies of Assimilation. New York: Mellen Press, 2011.

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

In the last three years a new filthy vocabulary of social class has emerged in Britain. The word “chav”, and its various synonyms and regional variations, has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for white working class subjects. An entire slang vocabulary has emerged around chav. Acronyms, such as “Council Housed and Vile” have sprung up to explain the term. Folk etymologies and some scholarly sources suggest that the term chav might derive from a distortion of a Romany word for a child, while others suggests it is a derivative of the term charver, long used in the North East of England to describe the disenfranchised white poor (see Nayak). In current parlance, the term chav is aligned “with stereotypical notions of lower-class” and is above all “a term of intense class-based abhorrence” (Haywood and Yar 16). Routinely demonized within news media, television comedy programmes, and internet sites (such as the chavscum) the level of disgust mobilized by the figure of the chav is suggestive of a heightened class antagonism that marks a new episode of class struggle in Britain. Social class is often represented through highly caricatured figures—the toff, the chav—figures that are referred to in highly emotive terms. One of the ways in which social class is emotionally mediated is through repeated expressions of disgust at the habits and behaviour of those deemed to belong to a lower social class. An everyday definition of disgust would be: an emotion experienced and expressed as a sickening feeling of revulsion, loathing, or nausea. The physicality of disgust reactions means that the communication of disgust draws heavily on metaphors of sensation. As William Miller notes, disgust “needs images of bad taste, foul smells, creepy touchings, ugly sights, bodily secretions and excretions to articulate the judgments it asserts” (218). Our disgust reactions are often revealing of wider social power relations. As Sara Ahmed notes: When thinking about how bodies become objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations. … Disgust at “that which is below” functions to maintain the power relations between above and below, through which “aboveness” and “belowness” become properties of particular bodies, objects and spaces (89). Ahmed’s account of the connection between disgust and power relations echoes Beverly Skeggs’ influential account of “class making”. As Skeggs suggests, class as a concept, and as a process of classification and social positioning, is not pre-given but is always in production and is continually re-figured (3). Social class virtually disappeared as a central site of analysis within cultural and media studies in the late 1980s, a disappearance that was mirrored by a similar retreat from the taxonomy of class within wider social and political discourse (Skeggs 45). This is not to say that class distinctions, however we measure them, have been eroded or are in decline. On the contrary, class disappeared as a central site of analysis at precisely the same time that “economic polarization” reached “unparalleled depths” in Britain (ibid.). As the term “working class” has been incrementally emptied of meaning, teaching and researching issues of class inequality is now often seen as “paranoid” and felt to be embarrassing and shameful (see Sayer). (Roland Barthes uses the concept of ‘ex-nomination’ to explain how (and why) social class is emptied of meaning in this way. According to Barthes, this process is one of the central mechanisms through which dominant classes naturalise their values.) In the last two decades academics from working class backgrounds and, perhaps most perversely, those who work within disciplines that were founded upon research on class, have increasingly experienced their own class origins as a “filthy secret”. If social class “directly articulated” and as “the object of analysis, has largely disappeared” (Skeggs 46) within the academy and within wider social and political discourses, portrayals of class differences have nevertheless persisted within popular media. In particular, the emergence of the grotesque and comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media, primarily television comedy, reality-genre television, Internet forums and newspapers, has made class differences and antagonisms explicitly visible in contemporary Britain. Class-based discrimination and open snobbery is made socially acceptable through claims that this vicious name-calling has a ‘satirical’ function. Laughing at something is “an act of expulsion” that closely resembles the rejecting movement of disgust reactions (Menninghaus 11). In the case of laughter at those of a lower class, laughter is boundary-forming; it creates a distance between “them” and “us”, and asserts moral judgments and a higher class position. Laughter at chavs is a way of managing and authorizing class disgust, contempt, and anxiety. Popular media can be effective means of communicating class disgust and in so doing, work to produce ‘class communities’ in material, political and affective senses. In the online vocabulary of chav hate, we can further discern the ways in which class disgust is performed in ways that are community-forming. The web site, urbandictionary.com is an online slang dictionary that functions as an unofficial online authority on English language slang. Urbandictionary.com is modelled on an internet forum in which (unregistered) users post definitions of new or existing slang terms, which are then reviewed by volunteer editors. Users vote on definitions by clicking a thumb up or thumb down icon and posts are then ranked according to the votes they have accrued. Urbandictionary currently hosts 300,000 definitions of slang terms and is ranked as one of the 2000 highest web traffic sites in the world. There were 368 definitions of the term chav posted on the site at the time of writing and I have extracted below a small number of indicative phrases taken from some of the most highly ranked posts. all chavs are filth chavs …. the cancer of the United Kingdom filthy, disgusting, dirty, loud, ugly, stupid arseholes that threaten, fight, cause trouble, impregnate 14 year olds, ask for money, ask for fags, ….steal your phones, wear crap sports wear, drink cheap cider and generally spread their hate. A social underclass par excellence. The absolute dregs of modern civilization The only good chav is dead one. The only thing better than that is a mass grave full of dead chavs and a 24 hour work crew making way for more… This disgust speech generates a set of effects, which adhere to and produce the filthy figure and qualities of chav. The dictionary format is significant here because, like the accompanying veneer of irony, it grants a strange authority to the dehumanising bigotry of the posts. Urbandictionary illustrates how class disgust is actively made through repetition. Through the repetition of disgust reactions, the negative properties attributed to chav make this figure materialize as representative of a group who embodies those disgusting qualities – a group who are “lower than human or civil life” (Ahmed 97). As users add to and build the definition of “the chav” within the urban dictionary site, they interact with one another and a conversational environment emerges. The voting system works on this site as a form of peer authorization that encourages users to invoke more and more intense and affective disgust reactions. As Ngai suggests, disgust involves an expectation of concurrence, and disgust reactions seek “to include or draw others into its exclusion of its object, enabling a strange kind of sociability” (336). This sociability has a particular specificity within online communities in which anonymity gives community members license to express their disgust in extreme and virulent ways. The interactivity of these internet forums, and the real and illusory immediacy they transmit, makes online forums intensely affective communal spaces/places within which disgust reactions can be rapidly shared and accrued. As the web becomes more “writable”, through the development and dissemination of shared annotation software, web users are moving from consuming content to creating it ‘in the form of discussion boards, weblogs, wikis, and other collaborative and conversational media” (Golder 2). Within new media spaces such as urbandictionary, we are not only viewers but active users who can go into, enter and affect representational spaces and places. In the case of chavs, users can not only read about them, but have the power to produce the chav as a knowable figure. The chav thread on urbandictionary and similar chav hate forums work to constitute materially the exaggerated excessive corporeality of the chav figure. These are spaces/places in which class disgust is actively generated – class live. With each new post, there is an accruement of disgust. Each post breathes life into the squalid and thrillingly affective imaginary body of the filthy chav. Class disgust is intimately tied to issues of racial difference. These figures constitute an unclean “sullied urban “underclass”“, “forever placed at the borders of whiteness as the socially excluded, the economically redundant” (Nayak 82, 102-3). Whilst the term chav is a term of abuse directed almost exclusively towards the white poor, chavs are not invisible normative whites, but rather hypervisible “filthy whites”. In a way that bears striking similarities to US white trash figure, and the Australian figure of the Bogan, the chav figure foregrounds a dirty whiteness – a whiteness contaminated with poverty. This borderline whiteness is evidenced through claims that chavs appropriate black American popular culture through their clothing, music, and forms of speech, and have geographical, familial and sexual intimacy with working class blacks and Asians. This intimacy is represented by the areas in which chavs live and their illegitimate mixed race children as well as, more complexly, by their filthy white racism. Metaphors of disease, invasion and excessive breeding that are often invoked within white racist responses to immigrants and ethnic minorities are mobilized by the white middle-class in order to differentiate their “respectable whiteness” from the whiteness of the lower class chavs (see Nayak 84). The process of making white lower class identity filthy is an attempt to differentiate between respectable and non-respectable forms of whiteness (and an attempt to abject the white poor from spheres of white privilege). Disgust reactions work not only to give meaning to the figure of the chav but, more complicatedly, constitute a category of being – chav being. So whilst the figures of the chav and chavette have a virtual existence within newspapers, Internet forums and television shows, the chav nevertheless takes symbolic shape in ways that have felt material and physical effects upon those interpellated as “chav”. We can think here of the way in which” signs of chavness”, such as the wearing of certain items or brands of clothing have been increasingly used to police access to public spaces, such as nightclubs and shopping centres since 2003. The figure of the chav becomes a body imbued with negative affect. This affect travels, it circulates and leaks out into public space and shapes everyday perceptual practices. The social policing of chavs foregrounds the disturbing ease with which imagined “emotional qualities slide into corporeal qualities” (Ngai 573). Chav disgust is felt and lived. Experiencing the frisson of acting like a chav has become a major leisure occupation in Britain where middle class students now regularly hold “chav nites”, in which they dress up as chavs and chavettes. These students dress as chavs, carry plastic bags from the cut-price food superstores, drink cider and listen to ‘chav music’, in order to enjoy the affect of being an imaginary chav. In April 2006 the front page of The Sun featured Prince William dressed up as a chav with the headline, “Future Bling of England”, The story details how the future king: “joined in the fun as his platoon donned chav-themed fancy dress to mark the completion of their first term” at Sandhurst military academy. William, we were told, “went to a lot of trouble thinking up what to wear” (white baseball cap, sweatshirt, two gold chains), and was challenged to “put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a royal”. These examples of ironic class–passing represent a new era of ‘slumming it’ that recalls the 19th century Victorian slummers, who descended on the East End of London in their many thousands, in pursuit of abject encounters – touristic tastes of the illicit pleasures associated with the immoral, urban poor. This new chav ‘slumming it’ makes no pretence at any moral imperative, it doesn’t pretend to be sociological, there is no “field work”, no ethnography, no gathering of knowledge about the poor, no charity, no reaching out to touch, and no liberal guilt, there is nothing but ‘filthy pleasure’. The cumulative effect of disgust at chavs is the blocking of the disenfranchised white poor from view; they are rendered invisible and incomprehensible. Nevertheless, chav has become an increasingly complex identity category and some of those interpellated as filthy chavs have now reclaimed the term as an affirmative sub-cultural identity. This trans-coding of chav is visible within popular music acts, such as white teenage rapper Lady Sovereign and the acclaimed pop icon and urban poet Mike Skinner (who releases records as The Streets). Journalist Julie Burchill has repeatedly attempted both to defend, and claim for herself, a chav identity and in 2005, the tabloid newspaper The Sun, a propagator of chav hate, ran a ‘Proud to be Chav’ campaign. Nevertheless, this ‘chav pride’ is deceptive, for like the US term ‘white trash’ – now widely adopted within celebrity culture – this ‘pride’ works as an enabling identity category only for those who have acquired enough cultural capital and social mobility to ‘rise above the filth’. Since the publication in English of Julia Kristeva’s Power’s of Horror: An Essay on Abjection in 1982, an entire theoretical paradigm has emerged that celebrates the ‘transgressive’ potential of encounters with filth. Such theoretical ‘abject encounters’ are rarely subversive but are on the contrary an increasingly normative and problematic feature of a media and cultural studies devoid of political direction. Instead of assuming that confrontations with ‘filth’ are ‘necessarily subversive and disruptive’ we need to rethink abjection as a violent exclusionary social force. As Miller notes, ‘disgust does not so much solve the dilemma of social powerlessness as diagnose it powerfully’ (353). Theoretical accounts of media and culture that invoke ‘the transformative potential of filth’ too often marginalize the real dirty politics of inequality. References Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP and New York: Routledge, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972 [1949]. Birchill, Julie. “Yeah But, No But, Why I’m Proud to Be a Chav.” The Times 18 Feb. 2005. Chav Scum. 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.chavscum.co.uk>. Golder, Scott. “Webbed Footnotes: Collaborative Annotation on the Web.” MA Thesis 2003. 31 Oct. 2006 http://web.media.mit.edu/~golder/projects/webbedfootnotes/ golder-thesis-2005.pdf>. Hayward, Keith, and Majid Yar. “The ‘Chav’ Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and the Construction of a New Underclass.” Crime, Media, Culture 2.1 (2006): 9-28. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Larcombe, Duncan. “Future Bling of England.” The Sun 10 April 2006. Menninghaus, Winfried. Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation. Trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. State University of New York Press, 2003. Miller, William. The Anatomy of Disgust. Harvard UP, 1998. Nayak, Anoop. Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings: Literature, Affect, and Ideology. Harvard UP, Cambridge, 2005. “Proud to be Chav.” The Sun. 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.thesun.co.uk>. Sayer, Andrew. “What Are You Worth? Why Class Is an Embarrassing Subject.” Sociological Research Online 7.3 (2002). 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.socresonline.org.uk/7/3/sayer.html>. Skeggs, Beverly. Class, Self and Culture. London. Routledge, 2005. Urbandictionary. “Chav.” 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chav>. Wray, Matt, and Annalee Newitz, eds. White Trash: Race and Class in America. London: Routledge, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Tyler, Imogen. "Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/09-tyler.php>. APA Style Tyler, I. (Nov. 2006) "Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/09-tyler.php>.

In recent years a number of dramas focussing on Indigenous Australians and Australian history have appeared on the ABC, one of Australia's two public television channels. These dramas have different foci but all represent some aspects of Australian Indigenous history and how it interacts with 'mainstream' representations of Australian history. The four programs I will look at are Cleverman (Goalpost Pictures, 2016-ongoing), Glitch (Matchbox Films, 2015-ongoing), The Secret River (Ruby Entertainment, 2015) and Redfern Now (Blackfella Films, 2012), each of which engages with the past in a unique way.Clearly, different creators, working with different plots and in different genres will have different ways of representing the past. Redfern Now and Cleverman are both produced by Indigenous creators whereas the creators of The Secret River and Glitch are white Australians. Redfern Now and The Secret River are in a realist mode, whereas Glitch and Cleverman are speculative fiction. My argument proceeds on two axes: first, speculative genres allow for more creative ways of representing the past. They give more freedom for the creators to present affective representations of the historical past. Speculative genres also allow for more interesting intellectual examinations of what we consider to be history and its uncertainties. My second axis argues, because it is hard to avoid when looking at this group of texts, that Indigenous creators represent the past in different ways than non-Indigenous creators. Indigenous creators present a more elliptical vision. Non-Indigenous creators tend to address historical stories in more overt ways. It is apparent that even when dealing with the same histories and the same facts, the understanding of the past held by different groups is presented differently because it has different affective meanings.These television programs were all made in the 2010s but the roots of their interpretations go much further back, not only to the history they represent but also to the arguments about history that have raged in Australian intellectual and popular culture. Throughout most of the twentieth century, indigenous history was not discussed in Australia, until this was disturbed by WEH Stanner's reference in the Boyer lectures of 1968 to "our great Australian silence" (Clark 73). There was, through the 1970s and 80s, increased discussion of Indigenous history, and then in the 1990s there was a period of social and cultural argument known locally as the 'History Wars'. This long-running public disagreement took place in both academic and public arenas, and involved historians, other academics, politicians, journalists and social commentators on each side. One side argued that the arrival of white people in Australia led to frontier wars, massacre, attempted genocide and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous people (Reynolds). The other posited that when white people arrived they killed a few Aborigines but mostly Aboriginal people were killed by disease or failure to 'defend' their culture (Windschuttle). The first viewpoint was revisionist from the 1960s onwards and the second represented an attempt at counter-revision – to move the understanding of history back to what it was prior to the revision. The argument took place not only among historians, but was taken up by politicians with Paul Keating, prime minister 1993-1996, holding the first view and John Howard, prime minister 1996-2007, aggressively pursuing the second. The revisionist viewpoint was championed by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan and academics and Aboriginal activists such as Tony Birch and Aileen Moreton Robinson; whereas the counter-revisionists had Keith Windschuttle and Geoffrey Blainey. By and large the revisionist viewpoint has become dominant and the historical work of the counter-revisionists is highly disputed and not accepted.This argument was prominent in Australian cultural discourse throughout the 1990s and has never entirely disappeared. The TV shows I am examining were not made in the 1990s, nor were they made in the 2000s - it took nearly twenty years for responses to the argument to make the jump from politicians' speeches and opinion pieces to television drama. John Ellis argues that the role of television in popular discourse is "working through," meaning contentious issues are first raised in news reports, then they move to current affairs, then talk shows and documentaries, then sketch comedy, then drama (Ellis). Australian Indigenous history was extensively discussed in the news, current affairs and talk shows in the 1990s, documentaries appeared somewhat later, notably First Australians in 2008, but sketch comedy and drama did not happen until in 2014, when Black Comedy's programme first aired, offering sketches engaging often and fiercely with indigenous history.The existence of this public discourse in the political and academic realms was reflected in film before television. Felicity Collins argues that the "Blak Wave" of Indigenous film came to exist in the context of, and as a response to, the history wars (Collins 232). This wave of film making by Indigenous film makers included the works of Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton and Ivan Sen – whose films chronicled the lives of Indigenous Australians. There was also what Collins calls "back-tracking films" such as Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and The Tracker (2010) made by white creators that presented arguments from the history wars for general audiences. Collins argues that both the "blak wave" and the "back track" created an alternative cultural sphere where past injustices are acknowledged. She says: "the films of the Blak Wave… cut across the history wars by turning an Indigenous gaze on the colonial past and its afterlife in the present" (Collins 232). This group of films sees Indigenous gazes relate the past and present whereas the white gaze represents specific history. In this article I examine a similar group of representations in television programs.History is not an innocent discourse. In western culture 'history' describes a certain way of looking at the past that was codified in the 19th century (Lloyd 375). It is however not the only way to look at the past, theorist Mark Day has described it as a type of relation with the past and argues that other understandings of the past such as popular memory and mythology are also available (Day). The codification of history in the 19th century involved an increased reliance on documentary evidence, a claim to objectivity, a focus on causation and, often though not always, a focus on national, political history. This sort of history became the academic understanding of history – which claims to be, if not objective, at least capable of disinterest; which bases its arguments on facts and which can establish its facts through reference to documentary records (Froeyman 219). Aileen Moreton-Robinson would call this "white patriarchal knowledge" that seeks to place the indigenous within its own type of knowledge production ("The White Man's Burden" 414). The western version of history tends to focus on causation and to present the past as a coherent narrative leading to the current point in time. This is not an undisputed conception of history in the western academy but it is common and often dominant.Post-colonialist analyses of history argue that western writing about non-western subjects is biased and forces non-westerners into categories used to oppress them (Anderson 44). These categories exist ahistorically and deny non-westerners the ability to act because if history cannot be perceived then it is difficult to see the future. That is to say, because non-western subjects in the past are not seen as historical actors, as people whose actions effected the future, then, in the present, they are unable to access to powerful arguments from history. Historians' usual methodology casts Indigenous people as the 'subjects' of history which is about them, not by them or for them (Tuhiwai Smith 7, 30-32, 144-5). Aboriginal people are characterised as prehistoric, ancient, timeless and dying (Birch 150). This way of thinking about Indigenous Australia removes all agency from Aboriginal actors and restoring agency has been a goal of Aboriginal activists and historians. Aileen Moreton Robinson discusses how Aboriginal resistance is embodied through "oral history (and) social memory," engaging with how Aboriginal actors represent themselves and are represented in relation to the past and historical settings is an important act ("Introduction" 127).Redfern Now and Cleverman were produced through the ABC's Indigenous Department and made by Indigenous filmmakers, whereas Glitch and The Secret River are from the ABC drama department and were made by white Australians. The different programs also have different generic backgrounds. Redfern Now and The Secret River are different forms of realist texts; social realism and historical realism. Cleverman and Glitch, however, are speculative fiction texts that can be argued to be in the mode of magical realism, they "denaturalise the real and naturalise the marvellous" they are also closely tied ideas of retelling colonial stories and "resignify(ing) colonial territories and pasts" (Siskind 834-5).Redfern Now was produced by Blackfella Films for the ABC. It was, with much fanfare, released as the first drama made for television, by Aboriginal people and about Aboriginal people (Blundell). The central concerns of the program are issues in the present, its plots and settings are entirely contemporary. In this way it circumvents the idea and standard representation of Indigenous Australians as ancient and timeless. It places the characters in the program very much in the present.However, one episode "Stand Up" does obliquely engage with historical concerns. In this episode a young boy, Joel Shields, gets a scholarship to an expensive private school. When he attends his first school assembly he does not sing the national anthem with the other students. This leads to a dispute with the school that forms the episode's plot. As punishment for not singing Joel is set an assignment to research the anthem, which he does and he finds the song off-putting – with the words 'boundless plains to share' particularly disconcerting. His father supports him saying "it's not our song" and compares Joel singing it to a "whitefella doing a corrobboree". The national anthem stands metaphorically for the white hegemony in Australia.The school itself is also a metaphor for hegemony. The camerawork lingers on the architecture which is intended to imply historical strength and imperviousness to challenge or change. The school stands for all the force of history white Australia can bring to bear, but in Australia, all architecture of this type is a lie, or at least an exaggeration – the school cannot be more than 200 years old and is probably much more recent.Many of the things the program says about history are conveyed in half sentences or single glances. Arguably this is because of its aesthetic mode – social realism – that prides itself on its mimicry of everyday life and in everyday life people are unlikely to set out arguments in organised dot-point form. At one point the English teacher quotes Orwell, "those who control the past control the future", which seems overt but it is stated off-screen as Joel walks into the room. This seeming aside is a statement about history and directly recalls central arguments of the history wars, which make strong political arguments about the effects of the past, and perceptions of the past, on the present and future. Despite its subtlety, this story takes place within the context of the history wars: it is about who controls the past. The subtlety of the discussion of history allows the film makers the freedom to comment on the content and effects of history and the history wars without appearing didactic. They discuss the how history has effected the present history without having to make explicit historical causes.The other recent television drama in the realist tradition is The Secret River. This was an adaptation of a novel by Kate Grenville. It deals with Aboriginal history from the perspective of white people, in this way it differs from Redfern Now which discusses the issues from the perspective of Aboriginal people. The plot concerns a man transported to Australia as a convict in the early 19th century. The man is later freed and, with his family, attempts to move to the Hawksbury river region. The land they try to settle is, of course, already in use by Aboriginal people. The show sets up the definitional conflict between the idea of settler and invader and suggests the difference between the two is a matter of perspective. Of the shows I am examining, it is the most direct in its representation of historical massacre and brutality. It represents what Felicity Collins described as a back-tracking text recapitulating the colonial past in the light of recovered knowledge. However, from an Indigenous perspective it is another settler tale implying Aboriginal people were wiped out at the time of colonisation (Godwin).The Secret River is told entirely from the perspective of the invaders. Even as it portrays their actions as wrong, it also suggests they were unavoidable or inevitable. Therefore it does what many western histories of Indigenous people do – it classifies and categorises. It sets limits on interpretation. It is also limited by its genre, as a straightforward historical drama and an adaptation, it can only tell its story in a certain way. The television series, like the book before it, prides itself on its 'accurate' rendition of an historical story. However, because it comes from such a very narrow perspective it falls into the trap of categorising histories that might have usefully been allowed to develop further.The program is based on a novel that attracted controversy of its own. It became part of ongoing historiographical debate about the relationship between fiction and history. The book's author Kate Grenville claimed to have written a kind of affectively accurate history that actual history can never convey because the emotions of the past are hidden from the present. The book was critiqued by historians including Inge Clendinnen, who argued that many of the claims made about its historical accuracy were largely overblown (Clendinnen). The book is not the same as the TV program, but the same limitations identified by Clendinnen are present in the television text. However, I would not agree with Clendinnen that formal history is any better. I argue that the limitation of both these mimetic genres can be escaped in speculative fiction.In Glitch, Yurana, a small town in rural Victoria becomes, for no apparent reason, the site of seven people rising from the dead. Each person is from a different historical period. None are Indigenous. They are not zombies but simply people who used to be dead. One of the first characters to appear in the series is an Aboriginal teenager, Beau, we see from his point of view the characters crawling from their graves. He becomes friendly with one of the risen characters, Patrick Fitzgerald, who had been the town's first mayor. At first Fitzgerald's story seems to be one of working class man made good in colonial Australia - a standard story of Australian myth and historiography. However, it emerges that Fitzgerald was in love with an Aboriginal woman called Kalinda and Beau is his descendant. Fitzgerald, once he becomes aware of how he has been remembered by history, decides to revise the history of the town – he wants to reclaim his property from his white descendants and give it to his Indigenous descendants. Over the course of the six episodes Fitzgerald moves from being represented as a violent, racist boor who had inexplicably become the town's mayor, to being a romantic whose racism was mostly a matter of vocabulary. Beau is important to the plot and he is a sympathetic character but he is not central and he is a child. Indigenous people in the past have no voice in this story – when flashbacks are shown they are silent, and in the present their voices are present but not privileged or central to the plot.The program demonstrates a profoundly metaphorical relationship with the past – the past has literally come to life bringing with it surprising buried histories. The program represents some dominant themes in Australian historiography – other formerly dead characters include a convict-turned-bush-ranger, a soldier who was at Gallipoli, two Italian migrants and a girl who died as a result of sexual violence – but it does not engage directly with Indigenous history. Indigenous people's stories are told only in relation to the stories of white people. The text's magical realism allows a less prescriptive relationship with the past than in The Secret River but it is still restricted in its point of view and allows only limited agency to Aboriginal actors.The text's magical realism allows for a thought-provoking representation of relationships with the past. The town of Yurana is represented as a place deeply committed to the representation and glorification of its past. Its main street contains statues of its white founders and war memorials, one of its main social institutions is the RSL, its library preserves relics of the past and its publican is a war history buff. All these indicate that the past is central to the town's identity. The risen dead however dispute and revise almost every aspect of this past. Even the history that is unmentioned in the town's apparent official discourse, such as the WWII internment camp and the history of crimes, is disputed by the different stories of the past that the risen dead have to tell. This indicates the uncertainty of the past, even when it seems literally set in stone it can still be revised. Nonetheless the history of Indigenous people is only revised in ways that re-engage with white history.Cleverman is a magical realist text profoundly based in allegory. The story concerns the emergence into a near future society of a group of people known as the "Hairies." It is never made clear where they came from or why but it seems they appeared recently and are unable to return. They are an allegory for refugees. Hairypeople are part of many Indigenous Australian stories, the show's creator, Ryan Griffen, stated that "there are different hairy stories throughout Australia and they differ in each country. You have some who are a tall, some are short, some are aggressive, some are friendly. We got to sort of pick which ones will fit for us and create the Hairies for our show" (Bizzaca).The Hairies are forced to live in an area called the Zone, which, prior to the arrival of the Hairy people, was a place where Aboriginal people lived. This place might be seen as a metaphor for Redfern but it is also an allegory for Australia's history of displacing Aboriginal people and moving and restricting them to missions and reserves. The Zone is becoming increasingly securitised and is also operating as a metaphor for Australia's immigration detention centres. The prison the Hairy characters, Djukura and Bunduu, are confined to is yet another metaphor, this time for both the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison and the securitisation of immigration detention. These multiple allegorical movements place Australia's present refugee policies and historical treatment of Aboriginal people within the same lens. They also place the present, the past and the future within the same narrative space.Most of the cast is Aboriginal and much of the character interaction is between Aboriginal people and Hairies, with both groups played by Indigenous actors. The disadvantages suffered by Indigenous people are part of the story and clearly presented as affecting the behaviour of characters but within the story Aboriginal people are more advantaged than Hairies, as they have systems, relationships and structures that Hairy people lack. The fact that so much of the interaction in the story is between Indigenous people and Hairies is important: it can be seen to be an interaction between Aboriginal people and Aboriginal mythology or between Indigenous past and present. It demonstrates Aboriginal identities being created in relation to other Aboriginal identities and not in relation to white people, where in this narrative, Aboriginal people have an identity other than that allowed for in colonialist terms.Cleverman does not really engage with the history of white invasion. The character who speaks most about this part of Aboriginal history and whose stated understanding of himself is based on that identity is Waruu. But Waruu is also a villain whose self-identity is also presented as jealous and dishonest. However, despite only passing mentions of westernised history the show is deeply concerned with a relationship with the past. The program engages with Aboriginal traditions about the past that have nothing to do with white history. It presents a much longer view of history than that of white Australia. It engages with the Aboriginal tradition of the Cleverman - demonstrated in the character of Uncle Jimmy who passes a nulla nulla (knob-headed hardwood club), as a symbol of the past, to his nephew Koen and tells him he is the new Cleverman. Cleverman demonstrates a discussion of Australian history with the potential to ignore white people. It doesn't ignore them, it doesn't ignore the invasion but it presents the possibility that it could be ignored.There is a danger in this sort of representation of the past that Aboriginal people could be relegated to the type of ahistorical, metahistorical myths that comprise colonialist history's representation of Indigenous people (Birch). But Cleverman's magical realist, near future setting tends to undermine this. It grounds representation in history through text and metaphor and then expands the definition.The four programs have different relationships with the past but all of them engage with it. The programs are both restrained and freed by the genres they operate in. It is much easier to escape the bounds of formal history in the genre of magical realism and both Glitch and Cleverman do this but have significantly different ways of dealing with history. "Stand up" and The Secret River both operate within more formally realist structures. The Secret River gives us an emotional reading of the past and a very affective one. However, it cuts off avenues of interpretation by presenting a seemingly inevitable tragedy. Through use of metaphor and silence "Stand up" presents a much more productive relationship with the past – seeing it as an ongoing argument rather than a settled one. Glitch engages with the past as a topic that is not settled and that can therefore be changed whereas Cleverman expands our definition of past and understanding of the past through allegory.It is possible to draw further connections. Those stories created by Indigenous people do not engage with the specifics of traditional dominant Australian historiography. However, they work with the assumption that everyone already knows this historiography. They do not re-present the pain of the past, instead they deal with it in oblique terms with allegory. Whereas the programs made by non-Indigenous Australians are much more overt in their representation of the sins of the past, they overtly engage with the History Wars in specific historical arenas in which those wars were fought. The non-Indigenous shows align themselves with the revisionist view of history but they do so in a very different way than the Indigenous shows.ReferencesAnderson, Ian. 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