Статті в журналах з теми "Organisational fluidity"

This article explores the encounter between parkour as an unstructured and culturally innovative practice, challenging both physical as well as organisational spaces, and UISP (Unione Italiana Sport per Tutti/Italian Union of Sport for All) as a sport-promotion body open to organisational and cultural experimentation. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative approach (analysis of documentary material, interviews and focus groups), it looks at the role of UISP in the diffusion and legitimisation of parkour within the Italian context, investigating the interplay between the cultural and organisational logics of both this new practice itself on the one hand, and the organisations that are trying to accommodate it on the other. The incorporation in a sport-for-all organisation like UISP provides traceurs with a safe and legitimised space, which is, however, ‘loose' enough to maintain the fluidity of the practice. Nonetheless, by enabling the coexistence of different and competing definitions and uses of parkour, this fluid organisational space reproduces tensions among traceurs and weakens their voice in UISP's decision-making processes.

The Australian health care industry prior to the 1990s was notable for its relative stability and uniformity in relation to organisational design.Since then, new organisational designs have proliferated and a diversity of approaches is evident.The new fluidity in organisational design is particularly evident amongst the allied health professions. The aim of this paper is two-fold.Firstly,to summarise recent changes in organisational design as they relate to the allied health professions and secondly,to move beyond design issues to focus on service level enhancement in an organisational change context. This later aim is achieved by presenting data from an in-depth study of one institution's experience with wide-ranging organisational reforms. The recent formation of the National Allied Health Organisational Structures Network (NAHOSN) has given energy to the impetus of placing a research-based framework around the change experiences reported by Allied Health groups. An objective of the network is to foster research,rather than rely on commentary and anecdote, in the often highly contested arena of organisational design and reform.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to outline an empirical study of how professionals experience work and learning in complex adaptive organisations. The study uses a complex adaptive systems approach, which forms the basis of a specifically developed conceptual framework for explaining professionals’ experiences of work and learning. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 professionals from a variety of organisations, industry sectors and occupations in Sydney, Australia. The transcripts were subjected to an adapted phenomenographic analysis, and an analysis using the complex adaptive organisations conceptual framework (CAOCF). Findings The findings indicated that professionals experienced learning mainly through work, where work was experienced as fluid and influenced by varying degrees of emergence, agency, complex social networks and adaptation. Further, the greater the degree of work fluidity, the greater the impetus towards learning through work, empirically indicating that the experience of learning in contemporary organisations is entwined with work. Originality/value This study used the concept of complex adaptive organisations as a conceptual framework, coupled with an adapted phenomenographic methodology, to investigate individual professionals’ experiences of work and learning. The adoption of the concept of complex adaptive organisations provided a rigorous way to adopt a complexity approach. In particular, the concept of emergence provides insights into how organisational complexity influences work and, subsequently, learning and adaptation.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the operating factors influencing a cross-organisational mentoring initiative created to support leadership development. The research provides insight on participants’ views and mentoring practices around planning and preparation of mentoring relationships, to inform future training of leaders. Design/methodology/approach The research is inductive in nature, using an exploratory approach via a two-stage qualitative analysis. The qualitative data were gathered via interviews with the initiative partners and questionnaires distributed to all mentors and mentees involved. Data were gathered at the outset of the initiative and one year later. Findings Emergent themes revealed that centrally driven criterion-based matching was deemed effective, with skills and experience of mentors perceived as more important than seniority. Support from senior management was of paramount importance at all stages. Clear personal and professional objective setting was vital at the outset of the mentoring relationship; however, a degree of fluidity in direction occurred over time. Planned periodic meetings to share experiences, aid reflection and gather feedback from individual mentors and mentees groups was requested. Finally, while the mentees should drive the process, it was recognised that mentors may be required to take the lead initially. Research limitations/implications It is recognised that wider generalisations are limited; the initiative would require replication with a number of different participants to increase validity. However, as the research is exploratory in nature, there is value in the initial research findings with potential for replication within other organisations and for other cross-organisational mentoring initiatives. Practical implications The research provides a number of useful themes which practitioners could use to explore the creation of a cross-organisational mentoring scheme and provides benchmarking indicators for this. Originality/value This is an innovative approach to leadership training that can be seen in the limited literature and theory related to cross-organisational mentoring as a leadership training tool that the design team, a partnership of HR academics and HRD professionals, were able to access.

Digital business ecosystems and platforms have emerged as collaborative tools, but few studies have investigated the competitive value that defines winners in the competition among platforms. This study examines the effects of experiential fit on identification, cocreation reward, and cocreation-supportive behaviours by considering the theories of organisational fluidity, service-dominant logic, and social support. Data collected from 1,090 respondents are analysed using AMOS and SPSS. The service-dominant approach is incorporated with a dynamic view of individual value fit to explore user identification, rewards, and cocreation value. The statistical results reveal that a mobile-based ecosystem may provide value convergence for its users (i.e., experiential fit) and thus enable value reservation (i.e., identification), achievement (i.e., cocreation reward), and value dissemination (i.e., cocreation-supportive behaviours). This study offers a new dynamic approach regarding cocreation-supportive behaviours for the digital business ecosystem literature

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospitality workforce in situ between mid-April and June 2020. Design/methodology/approach This is a viewpoint paper that brings together a variety of sources and intelligence relating the impacts on hospitality work of the COVID-19 pandemic at three levels: macro (global, policy, government), meso (organisational) and micro (employee). It questions whether the situations faced by hospitality workers as a result of the pandemic are seed-change different from the precarious lives they normally lead or just a (loud) amplification of the “normal”. Findings In light of the fluid environment relating to COVID-19, conclusions are tentative and question whether hospitality stakeholders, particularly consumers, governments and the industry itself, will emerge from the pandemic with changed attitudes to hospitality work and hospitality workers. Practical implications This raises questions about hospitality work for key stakeholders to address in the future, some of which are systemic in terms of how precarious labour forces, critical to the global economy are to be considered by policy makers, organisations in a re-emerging competitive market for talent and for those who chose (or not) to work in hospitality. Social implications This paper contributes to ongoing debates about precarious work and the extent to which such practices are institutionalised and adopts an “amplification model” that may have value in futures-orientated analysis about hospitality and tourism. Originality/value This paper is wholly original and a reflection on the COVID-19 crisis. It provides a point of wider reference with regard to responses to crises and their impact on employment in hospitality, highlighting how ongoing change, fluidity and uncertainty serve to magnify and exacerbate the precarious nature of work in the industry.

Abstract In this article, the historical circumstances that led up to the 1997 non-binding plebiscite on gender parity in what was soon-to-be Nunavut are considered. Firstly, traditional gender egalitarianism and fluidity in Inuit culture are described and exemplified by the values instilled in language, naming system, gendered roles and sexuality. Then, the political circumstances around the establishment of Nunavut and the way gender is played out on a political level are taken into account. The barriers against women in the electoral system are analysed and the arguments made for and against creating gender parity are evaluated. The vote on gender parity and the reasons why gender parity was finally rejected are reflected on. In the second part, the manners in which various organisations outside of government interact in order to address gender issues are scrutinised. Political and artistic bodies that represent women within Nunavut are contrasted against an organisation that contains Inuit men's voices, but does not represent them. Paradoxically, Inuit men still garner far more representation in the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut while at the social level they suffer more than women who are themselves more economically stable. The article ends with a discussion on the future of gender issues in Nunavut including the views held amongst Inuit youth on the topic.

Purpose Traditional architecture and urban form is a harmonious and interrelated blend of social relations, cultural beliefs and religious principles forming coherent spatial organisation living in harmony despite diversity of religious beliefs, social class or cultural practices of different communities. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the theoretical background of social cohesion and solidarity in the everyday life of the Mahalla with reference to its religious background in Islam. Design/methodology/approach The study of Beit Hadawi and Beit Hammadi el-Hassan as distinct evidences of prominent families within the boundaries of Mahallat El Mahdia in Old Hilla offers an empirical investigation on how values of the past informed and, to some extent, governed the very organic organisation of interlocking residential units in Iraq. Findings It investigates the architecture of home and the spatial organisation of Mahalla’s social activities through highlighting the effect of previous factors in creating a responsive environment that sustained its operational mechanism and fluidity over centuries. Originality/value This paper examines how previous values, traditions and rituals are behind the organic tissue of traditional quarters and thus providing an effective criterion to be considered when discussing sustainable development or creating a responsive environment in societies with exceptional privacy.

Rapid changes in the skill set needed in a profession make it easier to differentiate jobs and employment opportunities by the skills required. From this point of view, people's point of contact with organisations is their skills, not professions. Therefore, what matters is people's skills, competencies needed to get the job done, and people's potential in terms of skills development. In this sense, the present proposal aims to establish a framework to identify congruences between the skills mastered by people and the necessary skills in the work context and how to bridge the gap between them. For this purpose, a set of propositions are made: i) competences are the people’s point of contact with the organisation; ii) skills do not shape people, people shape their skills, iii) professions can be defined through associated skills, iv) people more easily acquire skills that are closer to those they already possess. Based on these premises, a skills model is postulated, which can be named Person-delivery Environment-work Context (PEC). This model is interested in the fluidity of a person's skills and the autonomy over the development of these skills. To put it into practice, this model needs the following five steps: i) identify the most common skills in the labour market, ii) classify the skills identified to make exploration possible, iii) identify the representation and frequency of a given skill in each profession and the labour market, iv) create a methodology for identifying and measuring personal skills, v) create a way to calculate proximity between the person's competences (P) and the work context (C). In the proposed model, there are two observable data: the existence of competence in the universe of the work context and the presence of competence in a person. It is expected that this model will make possible the identification of congruences between people and organisations and the skill development possibilities for a person. Some limitations can be listed, but the main one is that people and work are reduced to skills in this model. However, its applications can only be thought of as part of a broader career development process that considers people and their potential and the means of developing them, obtaining satisfaction, and having decent living and working conditions.

IntroductionLes sociétés gbaya et mkako de l'Est-Cameroun constituent une frontière entre deux mondes. Les Mkako sont à la limite bantoue du nord-ouest du bassin congolais tandis que les Gbaya représentent le monde oubanguien dans les savanes à galeries forestières. Qualifiées autrefois d'anarchiques, ces sociétés partagent des caractéristiques communes: acéphales, dénuées de pouvoir politique centralisé, de règies de succession relatives au rôle de leader, sans hiérarchie lignagère ni organisation segmentaire, sans toujours de référence au territoire, elles reposent sur une organisation patriclanique caractérisée par la fluidité des unités sociales dans une disposition où le clan ne constitue pas toujours à proprement parler un groupe «corporate». Enfin, l'un de leurs traits marquant réside dans l'antagonisme entre l'idéologie égalitaire sans cesse affirmée et la compétition des homines importants, ou bien l'émergence de leaders, qui se fondent sur des rapports d'inégalité, aussi ténus qu'ils puissent être.

Résumé Les formes de rémunération du travail immigré chinois dans le monde colonial sont très diversifiées. Elles ne peuvent être réduites à celles de l’indentured labor. Cette contribution se propose de mettre en lumière quelques-unes de ces formes, en étudiant une organisation qui combine travail à forfait et salariat, rémunération à la pièce et au rendement. Elle émerge au Sud de la Malaysia actuelle, dans l’archipel de Riau, au début du XVIIIe s., puis se déplace vers le Nord et connait une forme d’institutionnalisation lorsqu’elle atteint le Johor, au milieu du siècle suivant, avant de disparaître en 1919. Un entrepreneur, appelé le kangchu, presque toujours chinois, intermédiaire entre le travail et ses financiers chinois à Singapour ainsi qu’entre les cultivateurs et la tutelle administrative malaise, est la cheville ouvrière d’une organisation de la production agricole dont il garantit une forme de fluidité, idéale aux yeux de ses compatriotes immigrés, venus dans la région dans le but de repartir au pays le plus vite possible.

Abstract Despite the constitutional inscription of the territorial rights of indigenous and quilombola peoples, a new kind of conflict has emerged between differently classified populations. This article documents this conflict through the study of a disagreement between 'quilombola' and 'indigenous' populations in central Amazonia. The solutions of various actors reveal doubts concerning the real 'ethnic contrast' between the protagonists. The current organisation in ethnic territories is seen as the most recent instance of a series of socioterritorial reorganisations already adopted by the populations in interaction with diverse bodies. The article reconstructs the shifting alliances between opposed factions, highlighting the modalities involved in their formation. When the rights granted by the State to groups of populations due to their exceptionality come under threat, as at present, it is essential to recognise that the fluidity between legal categories reflects their shared struggle for survival.

AbstractDrawing upon a qualitative exploration of the role of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in service provision for homeless people in the UK, this paper examines the ways in which the ‘faith’ in ‘faith-based’ services is articulated and experienced ‘on the ground’. It demonstrates that the ‘F’ in FBO is expressed in a myriad of nuanced ways, and that the strength of ‘coupling’ between many welfare agencies and organised religion has diminished over time such that some projects’ faith affiliation or heritage is now evident in palimpsest only. Homeless people do in fact often find it difficult to discern tangible differences between avowedly ‘faith-based’ and ‘secular’ projects, given a blurring of boundaries between the religious and the secular. These findings problematise FBO typologies, and highlight the complexity and fluidity of the very concept of ‘FBO’ itself. Certainly, they suggest that the differences between faith-based and secular provision should not be exaggerated, whilst recognising the importance of faith to the motivations of many service providers and the potential value of the (optional) ‘spiritual’ support offered by most FBOs.

RésuméDans cet article, l’auteur explore les limites que pose la police guidée par le renseignement (intelligence led policing– ILP) pour les organisations policières. Il tente de montrer que la fonction de renseignement criminel ne doit pas être comprise comme un instrument produisant des résultats tangibles dans l’application de la loi, mais bien comme une activité de production de connaissance dont l’objectif ultime est d’assurer l’apprentissage des organisations policières. Sur la base de cet apprentissage, les services de police sont en mesure de concevoir et d’affiner leurs stratégies de lutte contre la criminalité. Néanmoins, le renseignement est contraint par des facteurs organisationnels, structuraux et culturels propres à la complexité des bureaucraties professionnelles. D’une part, les limites inhérentes à l’usage des renseignements dans la conduite des affaires policières montrent à quel point cette activité est difficilement mesurable en ce qui a trait aux résultats quantifiables. D’autre part, pour être utile, le renseignement doit s’appuyer sur une structure organisationnelle favorisant la fluidité des échanges d’informations ainsi qu’une forte culture du renseignement.

The notion of plurality amongst the Indian population is one of the most prominent features of early modern German discourse on India. This article combines the concepts ‘diversity’ and ‘transculturality’ to analyse how German speaking mercenaries of the Dutch East India Company perceived this plurality. These mercenaries were a specific group of travellers, quite different from the well-known, erudite globetrotter. I analyse the group labels that mercenaries used to describe, understand and categorise India’s diverse population. The categories that the mercenaries used reflected their own understanding and fluidity of the terms nation, religion and social status. In contrast to the assumed relevance of religion and social status for early modern societies, the authors predominantly chose the term ‘nation’ for the different people in India. Moreover, their notion of a ‘nation’ did not imply a social hierarchy, but rather a juxtaposition. Based on this evidence, this article concludes that the organisation of diversity depended crucially on the individual author and his social position.

Personal name usage in Zambia, as is common elsewhere, has undergone changes – reflecting the overall cultural and historical changes in the nation. This article identifies the changes which took place in personal naming patterns in Zambia since independence and discusses the wider socio-cultural and political factors which caused the changes in personal naming patterns in independent Zambia. The period after independence in 1964 represents a complex of various interacting histories of the nation, which have significantly impacted naming patterns. These include, transitions from mandatory requirement for adherents of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian organisations to adopt baptismal names of European saints and enforcement, by school authorities, of usage of European first names by indigenous Northern Rhodesians during British colonial domination, to freedom to choose first names following political independence. Further developments include the closer mingling of local tribes/languages, the rise of charismatic churches, and Islam, among others. The methodology includes quantitative text analysis of the publicly available comprehensive University of Zambia (UNZA) graduate directory which contains names of all the institution’s graduates for the fifty-year period from its foundation in 1966 to 2016. This work samples 2504 names extracted from the graduate directory between 1976 and 2016 in ten-year-intervals as follows: 1976, 1986, 1996, 2006 and 2016. The highest institution of learning in Zambia is located in the capital, Lusaka. UNZA students are drawn from multi-ethnic backgrounds, mostly featuring Zambian language groups. The period under consideration includes both people who were born/named before and after independence. Other methods used in the context of the wider thesis were ethnographic field interviews with 23 respondents in Chongwe, Kafue and Lusaka districts, and personal communication with seven others by electronic means. Among the field respondents, four were aged between their mid-60s and 73, while the rest were of varying ages between 20 and 52. The purposive selection criteria for the four elderly participants included age – those who had some experience of life under British colonial rule. The other group was randomly selected, observing balance in gender, socio-economic status and political views. The study confirms an increase in the usage of first names drawn from local languages. Over the study period, usage of indigenous Zambian personal names increased from 7.9 per cent to 31.6 per cent. The study also shows different generic patterns of first name usage among the different ethnic groups.

Aucune approche méthodologique ne s'est révélée jusqu'à présent satisfaisante pour cerner l'identité de la ville médiévale, y compris à la fin du Moyen Age. Ainsi l'analyse du vocabulaire des lieux que j'ai pu mener en étudiant les archives judiciaires, et en particulier les lettres de rémission des rois de France aux XIVe et XVe siècles, ne fait que confirmer l'emploi prioritaire du mot « ville » pour désigner une localité, tout en ne pouvant lui donner un contenu économique, social ou politique homogène. Si cette quête des mots est nécessaire, elle est loin d'être convaincante. Ou plutôt elle ne fait que confirmer l'extrême fluidité d'une réalité qui nous échappe et qui interdit, me semble-t-il, de faire référence à des critères familiers, chiffres de population, superficies et paysages habités, organisations administratives et institutionnelles, formes d'activités secondaires ou tertiaires.

This paper aims to identify the determinants of return to work after maternity leave in Russia. Can an organisation influence employees’ decision about withdrawal from the market after leave arrangement, or does it fully depend on the contextual and personal characteristics of the employee, as assumed by the discourses of merit and choice? Logistic regression analysis helps to answer the raised questions, referring to responses of 721 mothers with previous working experience. The research revealed that employers indeed can improve inclusion of employees with childcare commitments, fostering their return after the maternity leave. Despite high regional diversity of Russian population, contextual specificity barely influences the decision of employees regarding their returning to work with the same employer, similarly to their level of education, firms’ equity or amount of children. Among personal characteristics, income was found to play an important role in return decisions, as well as the age of the smallest child. The paper contributes to the debates on the fluidity of gender and work identity as well as organizational control over the identity work.

Cet article propose une analyse linguistique d’un corpus de français traduit de façon automatique depuis l’anglais, en comparaison d’un corpus de français original. Deux outils de traduction automatique ont été retenus pour cette étude, l’un générique, grand public et neuronal tandis que l’autre est un outil spécifique, utilisé par une grande organisation internationale et à base de statistiques. Selon la méthodologie de la traductologie de corpus, à travers une analyse quantitative de phénomènes linguistiques (lexicaux et grammaticaux) connus pour poser problème aux traducteurs anglais-français, nous montrons que l’usage linguistique, au-delà des règles et dont le respect permet d’atteindre la fluidité et l’idiomaticité de la langue cible attendues sur le marché, n’est pas pris en compte par les outils de traduction automatique actuels. L’objectif est de mettre au jour la valeur ajoutée de la traduction humaine, tout particulièrement auprès des traducteurs en formation.

Abstract The US Environmental Protection Agency's voluntary National Radon Proficiency Programmes: Radon Measurement, and Reduction Proficiency are described, including their history and development, current status and future directions. The Radon Measurement Proficiency (RMP) and Radon Contractor Proficiency (RCP) programmes are fundamental to the Agency's programme to reduce the health risk associated with exposure to elevated radon levels in indoor air. Originally developed to provide technical assistance to States, the proficiency programmes now offer US consumers assurance of the quality of their radon measurements and reduction jobs. In other words, the proficiency programmes provide a means to consumers for deciding from which organisations or individuals to purchase radon services. This is especially important in the United States where most radon services are acquired through private enterprises rather than through the public sector. The Agency encourages the public to purchase radon measurement and reduction services only from organisations or individuals that have met the requirements of EPA's proficiency programmes. An increasing number of States require an EPA proficiency listing for their radon registration, licensing, and certification programmes. EPA estimates that about 85% of US companies offering radon services are participating in its proficiency programmes. Consequently, the Agency believes that the development and growth of quality radon services has kept pace with consumer demand. The United States markeplace for residential radon measurement and mitigation services has been dynamic since its inception in the mid-1980s. The fluidity of the market is likely to continue, with some significant changes appearing imminent. The US Congress is now considering legislation that would require participation in the Agency's radon proficiency programmes. In addition, this legislation contains provisions that would encourage consumer testing. Increased testing, coupled with a mandatory national proficiency programme, is likely to result in an increase in the quality of radon services available to the US public.

AbstractThis Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2015, delivered by Professor Stephen Mayson2, explores the commercial evolution of law as a business, and draws attention to the disconnect between this development and continuing significant unmet need for legal services and prohibitively high fees for consumers and small businesses. The evolution is therefore supposed to be far from complete, and is hampered by the broken business model of law firms. A further shortcoming is the regulatory framework for legal services. Although this, too, has evolved in recent years with the introduction of the Legal Services Act 2007, the framework is nevertheless built on the still-complex and limiting structure of reserved activities, regulatory objectives and prescriptive detail. The author then explores the implications for information professionals, and highlights the opportunities for them to contribute to the development of ‘knowing management’, to the better education and training of legal practitioners, to helping them and their organisations address greater complexity and fluidity in regulation, and to harnessing market and client intelligence to improve the quality and relevance of legal services and the value of client relationships. The themes of cooperation, collaboration and connectivity underpin all of these opportunities, and contribute to the possibility of shaping and re-forming the role of the information professional in the 21st century.

AbstractCell membrane fatty acids influence fundamental properties of the plasma membrane, including membrane fluidity, protein functionality, and lipid raft signalling. Evidence suggests that dietary n-3 PUFA may target the plasma membrane of immune cells by altering plasma membrane lipid dynamics, thereby regulating the attenuation of immune cell activation and suppression of inflammation. As lipid-based immunotherapy might be a promising new clinical strategy for the treatment of inflammatory disorders, we conducted in vitro and in vivo experiments to examine the effects of n-3 PUFA on CD4+ T cell membrane order, mitochondrial bioenergetics and lymphoproliferation. n-3 PUFA were incorporated into human primary CD4+ T cells phospholipids in vitro in a dose-dependent manner, resulting in a reduction in whole cell membrane order, oxidative phosphorylation and proliferation. At higher doses, n-3 PUFA induced unique phase separation in T cell-derived giant plasma membrane vesicles. Similarly, in a short-term human pilot study, supplementation of fish oil (4 g n-3 PUFA/d) for 6 weeks in healthy subjects significantly elevated EPA (20 : 5n-3) levels in CD4+ T cell membrane phospholipids, and reduced membrane lipid order. These results demonstrate that the dynamic reshaping of human CD4+ T cell plasma membrane organisation by n-3 PUFA may modulate down-stream clonal expansion.

An obvious sign of ageing is the loss of hair colour due to a decrease or lack of melanin in hair fibres. An examination of the lipid levels and structure of grey hair determined using µ–FTIR revealed a high correlation between the characteristics of lipids located in the cuticle and the water dynamics of the fibres. Therefore, a deep study based on external and internal lipid extraction, an analysis using thin layer chromatography coupled to an automated flame ionisation detector, calorimetric analyses and the physico-chemical evaluation of the delipidated fibres were performed. Hairs were evaluated to identify changes in the organisation of these lipids using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and their effect on the water dynamics of the fibres. The primary differences observed for the lipid extracts from white hair compared to brown hair were the lower amount of the internal lipids extracted, which were primarily composed of free fatty acids (FFAs) and ceramides, with a higher content of lower phase transition peaks, indicating increased unsaturated compounds that promote higher fluidity of the lipid bilayers. The virgin white fibres exhibited lower levels of embedded water, with lower binding energies and higher water diffusion, indicating higher permeability. The IR study confirmed the low lipid levels and the greater disorder of white hair. These results may be of interest for cosmetic treatments to which patients with grey hair may be subjected.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the orientations of collaborative networks (CNs) for managing integrated information flow. It seeks to analyse and shed light into the main priorities of firms for sharing and coordinating information with CN partners. These priorities are needed to enhance practices to trade-off and integrate flows where appropriate for maximising profits and performance. Design/methodology/approach – In this study, inductive multiple-case logic is applied to research how six industrial firms manage integrated information flow in relation to their collaborative networked organisations (CNOs). Guided by an interpretivism epistemology, 22 face-to-face and 13 telephonic semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 key informants in six industrial firms. Interview data were analysed in line with the research agenda to understand orientations for integrated information flow. Findings – The research finds that CN management is enhanced when flow integration for industrial firms is skill, project, agreement and relationship oriented. The investigation also finds that CNO flow integration could be enhanced when industrial firms confront and prioritise schemes for fluidity prevention, systematised templates, procedural prompts, implementation checklists, confidence building, issuance policies and concern separation. Originality/value – The major contribution of this paper is an exposition on priorities for integrated information flow within CNs. It also offers insights that suggest industrial firms can boost the performance of their CNOs by: working in small knit highly skilled teams, tactically implementing manufacturability and marketability programmes, strategising their production contracts and strengthening their company-customer-supplier ties.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to encourage initiatives to train large cohorts of undergraduate students for creativity understanding. The authors describe a case study of a creativity exercise developed within a corporate setting that accommodates a large cohort and discuss the results of empirical research on this teaching experience at a French Business School. The authors reflect on the transferability of this exercise by other educators to similar educational contexts and the usefulness of training future managers to a structured creativity methodology to be exploited in the workplace. Design/methodology/approach – A case study explains the features of the exercise. Hard data on students’ perceptions and motivation/satisfaction prior to and after the creativity exercise was collected through an internet self-completed survey instrument. In total, 245 pairs of survey responses from first-year students were analysed using prototypical analysis, paired samples t-test and content analysis. Findings – The exercise proved an effective tool to help large cohorts of undergraduates to better understand that creativity is a managerial competence that can be trained. The authors particularly underlined the need for fluidity in the organisation of the exercise; use of a clear creativity process and methodology; the necessity to involve an external creativity consultant; and the importance of the chosen topic being non art related. In the workplace, this understanding of creativity methodologies will enable future managers to support, promote and manage creativity endeavours. Originality/value – This paper encourages initiatives and provides insights into the difficulties of training large cohorts of undergraduate students for understanding the concept of creativity.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to link crowdsourcing, operations management (OM) and project management (PM). The study demonstrates how crowdsourcing as an open innovation mechanism is operationalised within a complex PM context. Specifically, the study seeks to understand how crowdsourcing as a novel form of OM improves key outcomes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted exploratory research involving five pure-play crowdsourcing firms based in the USA and Australia.FindingsThe findings indicate that the firms practise a form of crowdsourcing that allows flexible, efficient and low risk operations and links to contemporary notions of PM such as projectification and project society. The crowd can be used in a new manner to boost success factors tied to PM through open innovation and operational novelty. In terms of OM, crowdsourcing offers flexibility, speed, dynamism and scalability to project processes.Research limitations/implicationsThis research is based on five case studies. Further fine-grained, longitudinal research is required to fully understand this phenomenon in a wider range of contexts.Practical implicationsThe paper contributes to practices tied to open innovation and provides guidance on how organisations might use large crowds to enhance PM success.Originality/valueThe study represents early scholarship on crowdsourcing and project operations. It makes three contributions. First, the authors introduce a new theoretical framework linking PM and novel aspects of crowdsourcing to extend understandings of projectification, as well as open innovation frameworks. Second, the authors showcase the flexibility and fluidity of the crowdsourcing project process. Third, the authors examine crowdsourcing operations in terms of size, efficiency and scalability which results in timely and efficient output due to innovative technology, along with the element of trust among stakeholders.

Despite what the furore over Uniform Civil Code and more recently Triple Talaq might suggest, Muslim women have very little discursive space to voice their concerns in Indian political arena. Dominant discourses on Islam and gender, including those propagated by Muslim male organisations pose Islam as a monolithic entity completely alien to the modern gender-egalitarian ideals. Feminist movements, on the other hand, hold Islam to be irrelevant at best and an obstacle at worst in promotion of gender-egalitarian norms within the community. There are concerns about the extent to which Islamic feminism can go in its demands for egalitarianism while staying within an Islamic paradigm. This paper contests those assumptions about Islam and women that foreclose any dialogue for change by exploring the role of human interpretative choices in formation and development of the Islamic religious tradition. As demonstrated by feminist exegetes, how religious texts are read is shaped deeply by human contingencies and choices. In Indian scenario, such changes are visible in formation of Muslim personal law as well. Post-independence, political contingencies within the subcontinent made it difficult to revisit the laws resulting in the loss of fluidity in the tradition. As formative scholars’ choices became enshrined in the tradition as authentic and canonical, the human element in the canonical became forgotten. The inertia to review the moral choices made by earlier authors became the hallmark of authenticity and therefore authority within the tradition. This paper argues that appreciating the role of human choices and hermeneutical flexibility involved in the formation of gender norms in Muslim societies throughout the history of Islamic legal tradition might prove effective in resolving moral dilemmas faced by modern Muslims while maintaining continuity with the tradition.

This article highlights an action research project that sparked transformation regarding how early years practitioners documented children’s learning. The dominant discourse of standardisation and narrowing of early childhood education, encapsulated in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s International Early Learning Study, has resulted in the ‘shaping’ and ‘testing’ of young children around the globe. The OECD has become very interested in early childhood education and is a very instrumental player today (Moss, 2018). Consequently, the testing of young children has been instigated by governments to ensure children gain the accepted knowledge, skills and dispositions required to be successful learners. Situated within this context of testing and standardisation, this article will share knowledge gained from a small action research project that took place in one Scottish early years setting. The study was stimulated by the early years practitioners of the setting, who strongly opposed the ‘reductionist’ formal ‘tick-box’ assessments produced by their local authority. These types of didactic formal assessments suggest that pedagogy is underpinned by a desire to tame, predict, prepare, supervise and evaluate learning. This article is of critical importance as it examines the imposition of didactic assessment from the practitioners’ perspective. The practitioners in the study contested that ‘tick-box’ assessments diminished children’s identities down to a list of judgements about their academic abilities, or lack thereof. The introduction of the ‘tick-box’ assessments presented a dilemma for the practitioners, in terms of the different views of the government and practitioners of what knowledge is worth knowing and what individuals and groups are able to learn. Many of the practitioners from the early childcare and learning setting positioned themselves and their work as being consciously different from what was going on in the wider sector. The early childcare and learning setting employed in this article introduced a new method to capture children’s learning, which they named the ‘Lived Story’ approach. In this article, we argue that Lived Stories are a form of narrative assessment which are designed to track children’s progress whilst respecting the complexity of their learning, their position within the learning process, the flow/fluidity of their ways of being and their ability to act in radical, creative and innovative ways. We conclude that by using ‘Lived Stories’ practitioners were able to lessen the surety of the language we use. The article highlights that as practitioners write Lived Stories and assess children’s progress they are freed to use language such as ‘wondering, puzzling, thinking, exploring’. In turn, we demonstrate that this language, and the ideas it enables, are on a continuum; a journey that spans a lifetime.

Refrigeration of ovine spermatozoa is a valuable tool for genetic progress. Sugars, in particular disaccharides, have been shown to have positive effects in semen extender, providing energy substrate during cell incubation, decreasing osmotic pressure, causing cell dehydration and ultimately reducing cold shock and cryodamage. Several authors have reported changes in plasma membrane protein organisation and membrane fluidity during cooling. Trehalose, a non-reducing disaccharide has been associated with stabilisation of cellular proteins and interaction with membrane phospholipids due to its ability to replace water at the membrane-solution interface. Many studies have confirmed the beneficial effect of the addition of trehalose during cryopreservation at –196°C; however, its effects during refrigeration (5–7°C) have not been reported. Ejaculates form four fertile Corriedale rams were collected by electroejaculation during the ovine reproductive season in the Southern Hemisphere (May–August); the study was conducted in 12 replicates. After initial quality assessment, ejaculates were pooled into heterospermic samples, diluted in Tris-buffered extender and separated into treatments consisting of (a) no refrigeration (kept at room temperature 22–25°C), (b) refrigeration (cooling rate of 2°C/3 min to reach a final temperature of 5–7°C), or (c) refrigeration with the addition of 150 mOsm trehalose. Samples were evaluated for total motility, progressive motility, hyposmotic swelling test (HOST) and eosin Y (1 step, WHO protocol) live/dead stain at 0, 6, 12, 24 and 48 h post-refrigeration. Results were analysed using 1-way ANOVA with Tukey post-hoc multiple comparison test. Compared with refrigeration without the addition of disaccharides, the refrigeration in presence of trehalose significantly increased (P < 0.05) total motility at 48 h (32 ± 0.9 vs 50 ± 1.1) and progressive motility at 24 (40 ± 0.9 vs 65 ± 0.6) and 48 h (0 vs 38 ± 1.0) post-refrigeration. Trehalose also decreased (P < 0.05) the percentage of damaged spermatozoa as evidenced by HOST and live/dead stain after 12 (42 ± 1.1 vs 29 ± 0.7), 24 (52 ± 0.9 vs 37 ± 0.6) and 48 h (74 ± 0.8 vs 60 ± 1.0) of refrigeration. Although no statistical difference was detected, there was a trend of trehalose to improve total and progressive motility parameters at the initiation of treatments (0 h). In addition, spermatozoa refrigerated in the presence of trehalose was the only treatment group to retain progressive motility after 48 h of storage. Our results indicate that trehalose could be used to extend the in vitro viability of refrigerated ovine spermatozoa for up to 48 h. Further studies are needed to assess the in vivo fertility (pregnancy rate) of refrigerated spermatozoa in the presence of this non-permeating cryoprotectant sugar.

Abstract The introduction of BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) has revolutionized the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). However, although the majority of patients with chronic phase (CP)-CML obtain durable complete cytogenetic and major molecular responses, there is low level disease persistence postulated to be due to a population of TKI-insensitive leukemia stem cells (LSC). The aims of this study were (1) to fully characterize differences in gene expression between normal hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) and CP-CML LSC and (2) identify potential novel therapeutic targets specific to CML LSC. Lin-CD34+CD38- CD45RA-CD90+ normal HSC (n=3) and CP-CML LSC (n=6 patients at diagnosis), populations were isolated using a FACSAria and applied to Affymetrix HuGene 1.0ST arrays. The raw data (.CEL files) was imported into Partek Genomics Suite and Ingenuity Pathway Analysis software and principal component analysis and gene ontology ANOVA performed. A total of 1217 genes were significantly deregulated between normal HSC and CP-CML LSC. The most significantly deregulated genes and pathways were involved with the molecular and cellular functions of cell cycle, cell assembly and organisation, cellular movement, cell death and DNA replication, recombination and repair. These results suggested that CML LSC were less quiescent than normal HSC. Importantly, complimentary functional studies indicated that CML LSC have significantly increased proliferation (14 fold expansion; P<0.001) compared to normal HSC (no expansion) after 5 days in vitro culture. In addition, equivalent numbers of CML LSC produce ~4-fold more colonies in colony forming cell (CFC) assays than normal HSC (329±56 versus 86±17 per 2,000 cells, respectively; P<0.05). Fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) demonstrated that >90% of lin- CD34+ CD38- CD45RA- CD90+ CML LSC from all patient samples were BCR-ABL positive (+). In addition to these deregulated intracellular pathways, we sought to assess if there were differences in expression of cell surface molecules that may be amenable to therapeutic manipulation. Of particular interest, our microarray studies demonstrated that CD93 was highly upregulated in CP-CML LSC (6 fold, p = 2.5x10-6). Increased CD93 expression was validated by Fluidigm digital PCR (6 fold increase, p = 0.02; n=6). Furthermore, using flow cytometry, we demonstrated significant upregulation of CD93 protein expression on lin-CD34+ CD38- CD45RA- CD90+ CML LSC from peripheral blood and bone marrow of CP-CML patients (n= 17; mean = 63.8% CD93+) compared to normal HSC from healthy peripheral blood stem cell donors (n=7; mean = 0.8% CD93+) and bone marrow donors (n=4; mean = 0.2% CD93+; p < 0.0001). FISH confirmed that 100% of lin-CD34+ CD38- CD90+ CD93+ CML cells were BCR-ABL+ in all samples assessed. CD93 (also known as C1qRp) is a C-type lectin-like domain (CTLD)-containing glycoprotein which regulates phagocytosis, with roles in cell adhesion and leukocyte migration. It is normally expressed on endothelial cells, hematopoietic precursors and mature cells including neutrophils, monocytes and platelets. Previous studies have shown CD93 to be upregulated in a proportion of AML patients (Saito et al, Sci Transl Med, 2010. 2(17): p. 17ra9). Short term (24h) in vitro exposure of lin-CD34+CD38- CD45RA- CD90+ CML LSC to TKIs (Imatinib or Dasatinib; n=3) reduced, but did not fully eliminate CD93 expression (Imatinib, 48.5% to 22.9%; Dasatinib, 47.7% to 9.2%). Importantly, following long-term TKI treatment of patients, lin-CD34+CD38-CD45RA-CD90+ cells from CP-CML patient bone marrow samples (n=2) taken in major molecular response demonstrated a small, but persistent population of CD93+ LSC which were BCR-ABL+ by FISH. Furthermore, in xenograft transplantation experiments (n = 5), after 16 weeks, CD34+CD93+ CML LSC engrafted lethally irradiated NOD/SCID/IL-2Rg-/- (NSG) mice with BCR-ABL+ cells, whereas CD34+CD93- cells from the same patient samples failed to engraft to significant levels (3.5-30 fold increase in engraftment with CD34+CD93- cells; p < 0.03). FISH confirmed that engrafted human cells were BCR-ABL+. Taken together, our results identify CD93 as a potential novel biomarker of CML LSC, which may also be helpful in assessing minimal residual disease at the LSC level. Further studies are ongoing to assess the therapeutic potential of inhibiting CD93 in CML LSC. Disclosures Copland: Ariad: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Pfizer: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; BMS: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding.

The Routledge Handbook of language and culture represents a comprehensive study on the inextricable relationship between language and culture. It is structured into seven parts and 33 chapters. Part 1, Overview and historical background, by Farzad Sharifian, starts with an outline of the book and a synopsis of research on language and culture. The second chapter, John Leavitt’s Linguistic relativity: precursors and transformations discusses further the historical development of the concept of linguistic relativity, identifying different schools’ of thought views on the relation between language and culture. He also tries to demystify some misrepresentations held towards Boas, Sapir, and Whorf’ theories (pp. 24-26). Chapter 3, Ethnosyntax, by Anna Gladkova provides an overview of research on ethnosyntax, starting from the theoretical basis laid by Sapir and Whorf and investigates the differences between a narrow sense of ethnosyntax, which focuses on cultural meanings of various grammatical structures and a broader sense, which emphasises the pragmatic and cultural norms’ impact on the choice of grammatical structures. John Leavitt presents in the fourth chapter, titled Ethnosemantics, a historical account of research on meaning across cultures, introducing three traditions, i.e. ‘classical’ ethnosemantics (also referred to as ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology), Boasian cultural semantics (linguistically inspired anthropology) and Neohumboldtian comparative semantics (word-field theory, or content-oriented Linguistics). In Chapter 5, Goddard underlines the fact that ethnopragmatics investigates emic (or culture-internal) approaches to the use of different speech practices across various world languages, which accounts for the fact that there exists a connection between the cultural values or norms and the speech practices peculiar to a speech community. One of the key objectives of ethnopragmatics is to investigate ‘cultural key words’, i.e. words that encapsulate culturally construed concepts. The concept of ‘linguaculture’ (or languaculture) is tackled in Risager’s Chapter 6, Linguaculture: the language–culture nexus in transnational perspective. The author makes reference to American scholars that first introduced this notion, Paul Friedrich, who looks at language and culture as a single domain in which verbal aspects of culture are mingled with semantic meanings, and Michael Agar, for whom culture resides in language while language is loaded with culture. Risager himself brought forth a new global and transnational perspective on the concept of linguaculture, i.e. the use of language (linguistic practice) is seen as flows in people’s social networks and speech communities. These flows enhance as people migrate or learn new languages, in permanent dynamics. Lidia Tanaka’s Chapter 7, Language, gender, and culture deals with research on language, gender, and culture. According to her, the language-gender relationship has been studied by researchers from various fields, including psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, who mainly consider gender as a construct that preserves inequalities in society, with the help of language, too. Tanaka lists diachronically different approaches to language and gender, focusing on three specific ones: gender stereotyped linguistic resources, semantically, pragmatically or lexically designated language features (including register) and gender-based spoken discourse strategies (talking-time imbalances or interruptions). In Chapter 8, Language, culture, and context, Istvan Kecskes delves into the relationship between language, culture, and context from a socio-cognitive perspective. The author considers culture to be a set of shared knowledge structures that encapsulate the values, norms, and customs that the members of a society have in common. According to him, both language and context are rooted in culture and carriers of it, though reflecting culture in a different way. Language encodes past experience with different contexts, whereas context reflects present experience. The author also provides relevant examples of formulaic language that demonstrate the functioning of both types of context, within the larger interplay between language, culture, and context. Sara Miller’s Chapter 9, Language, culture, and politeness reviews traditional approaches to politeness research, with particular attention given to ‘discursive approach’ to politeness. Much along the lines of the previous chapter, Miller stresses the role of context in judgements of (im)polite language, maintaining that individuals represent active agents who challenge and negotiate cultural as well as linguistic norms in actual communicative contexts. Chapter 10, Language, culture, and interaction, by Peter Eglin focuses on language, culture and interaction from the perspective of the correspondence theory of meaning. According to him, abstracting language and culture from their current uses, as if they were not interdependent would not lead to an understanding of words’ true meaning. David Kronenfeld introduces in Chapter 11, Culture and kinship language, a review of research on culture and kinship language, starting with linguistic anthropology. He explains two formal analytic definitional systems of kinship terms: the semantic (distinctions between kin categories, i.e. father vs mother) and pragmatic (interrelations between referents of kin terms, i.e. ‘nephew’ = ‘child of a sibling’). Chapter 12, Cultural semiotics, by Peeter Torop deals with the field of ‘semiotics of culture’, which may refer either to methodological instrument, to a whole array of methods or to a sub-discipline of general semiotics. In this last respect, it investigates cultures as a form of human symbolic activity, as well as a system of cultural languages (i.e. sign systems). Language, as “the preserver of the culture’s collective experience and the reflector of its creativity” represents an essential component of cultural semiotics, being a major sign system. Nigel Armstrong, in Chapter 13, Culture and translation, tackles the interrelation between language, culture, and translation, with an emphasis on the complexities entailed by translation of culturally laden aspects. In his opinion, culture has a double-sided dimension: the anthropological sense (referring to practices and traditions which characterise a community) and a narrower sense, related to artistic endeavours. However, both sides of culture permeate language at all levels. Chapter 14, Language, culture, and identity, by Sandra Schecter tackles several approaches to research on language, culture, and identity: social anthropological (the limits at play in the social construction of differences between various groups of people), sociocultural (the interplay between an individual’s various identities, which can be both externally and internally construed, in sociocultural contexts), participatory-relational (the manner in which individuals create their social–linguistic identities). Patrick McConvell, in Chapter 15, Language and culture history: the contribution of linguistic prehistory reviews research in this field where historical linguistic evidence is exploited in the reconstruction and understanding of prehistoric cultures. He makes an account of research in linguistic prehistory, with a focus on proto- and early Indo-European cultures, on several North American language families, on Africa, Australian, and Austronesian Aboriginal languages. McConvell also underlines the importance of interdisciplinary research in this area, which greatly benefits from studies in other disciplines, such as archaeology, palaeobiology, or biological genetics. Part four starts with Ning Yu’s Chapter 16, Embodiment, culture, and language, which gives an account of theory and research on the interplay between language, culture, and body, as seen from the standpoint of Cultural Linguistics. Yu presents a survey of embodiment (in embodied cognition research) from a multidisciplinary perspective, starting with the rather universalistic Conceptual Metaphor Theory. On the other hand, Cultural Linguistics has concentrated on the role played by culture in shaping embodied language, as various cultures conceptualise body and bodily experience in different ways. Chapter 17, Culture and language processing, by Crystal Robinson and Jeanette Altarriba deals with research in the field of how culture influence language processing, in particular in the case of bilingualism and emotion, alongside language and memory. Clearly, the linguistic and cultural character of each individual’s background has to be considered as a variable in research on cognition and cognitive processing. Frank Polzenhagen and Xiaoyan Xia, in Chapter 18, Language, culture, and prototypicality bring forth a survey of prototypicality across different disciplines, including cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. According to them, linguistic prototypes play a critical part in social (re-)cognition, as they are socially diagnostic and function as linguistic identity markers. Moreover, individuals may develop ‘culturally blended concepts’ as a result of exposure to several systems of conceptual categorisation, especially in the case of L2 learning (language-contact or culture-contact situations). In Chapter 19, Colour language, thought, and culture, Don Dedrick investigates the issue of the colour words in different languages and how these influence cognition, a question that has been addressed by researchers from various disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, or neuroscience. He cannot but observe the constant debate in this respect, and he argues that it is indeed difficult to reach consensus, as colour language occasionally reveals effects of language on thought and, at other times, it is impervious to such effects. Chapter 20, Language, culture, and spatial cognition, by Penelope Brown concentrates on conceptualisations of space, providing a framework for thinking about and referring to objects and events, along with more abstract notions such as time, number, or kinship. She lists three frames of reference used by languages in order to refer to spatial relations, i.e. a) an ‘absolute’ coordinate system, like north, south, east, west; b) a ‘relative’ coordinate system envisaged from the body’s standpoint; and c) an intrinsic, object-centred coordinate system. Chris Sinha and Enrique Bernárdez focus on, in Chapter 21, Space, time, and space–time: metaphors, maps, and fusions, research on linguistic and cultural concepts of time and space, starting with the seminal Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which they denounce for failing to situate space–time mapping within the broader patterns of culture and world perspective. Sinha and Bernárdez further argue that although it is possible in all cultures for individuals to experience and discuss about events in terms of their duration and succession, the specific words and concepts they use to refer to temporal landmarks temporal and duration are most of the time language and culture specific. Chapter 22, Culture and language development, by Laura Sterponi and Paul Lai provides an account of research on the interplay between culture and language acquisition. They refer to two widely accepted perspectives in this respect: a developmental mechanism inherent in human beings and a set of particular social contexts in which children are ‘initiated’ into the cultural meaning systems. Both perspectives define culture as “both related to the psychological make-up of the individual and to the socio-historical contexts in which s/he is born and develops”. Anna Wierzbicka presents, in Chapter 23, Language and cultural scripts discusses representations of cultural norms which are encoded in language. She contends that the system of meaning interpretation developed by herself and her colleagues, i.e. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), may easily be used to capture and convey cultural scripts. Through NSM cross-cultural experiences can be captured in a thorough manner by using a reduced number of conceptual primes which seem to exist in all languages. Chapter 24, Culture and emotional language, by Jean-Marc Dewaele brings forth the issue of the relationship between language, culture, and emotion, which has been researched by cultural and cognitive psychologists and applied linguists alike, although with some differences in focus. He considers that within this context, it is important to see differences between emotion contexts in bilinguals, since these may lead to different perceptions of the self. He infers that generally, culture revolves around the experience and communication of emotions, conveyed through linguistic expression. The fifth part starts with Chapter 25, Language and culture in sociolinguistics, by Meredith Marra, who underlines that culture is a central concept in Interactional Sociolinguistics, where language is considered as social interaction. In linguistic interaction, culture, and especially cultural differences are deemed as a cause of potential miscommunication. Mara also remarks that the paradigm change in sociolinguistics, from Interactional Sociolinguistics to social constructionism reshaped ‘culture’ into a more dynamic as well as less rigid concept. Claudia Strauss’ Chapter 26, Language and culture in cognitive anthropology deals with the relationship between human society and human thought/thinking. The author contends that cognitive anthropologists may be subdivided into two groups, i.e. ones that are concerned with the process of thinking (cognition-in-practice scholars), and the others focusing on the product of thinking or thoughts (concerned with shared cultural understandings). She goes on to explore how different approaches to cognitive anthropology have counted on units of language, i.e. lexical items and their meanings, along with larger chunks of discourse, as information, which may represent learned cultural schemata. Part VI starts with Chapter 27, Language and culture in second language learning, by Claire Kramsch, in which she makes a survey of the definition of ‘culture’ in foreign language learning and its evolution from a component of literature and the arts to a more comprehensive purport, that of culturally appropriate use of language, along with an appropriate use of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic norms. According to her, in the postmodern era, communication is not only mere transmission of information, it represents construal and positioning of the self and of self-identity. Chapter 28, Writing across cultures: ‘culture’ in second language writing studies, by Dwight Atkinson focuses on the usefulness of culture in second-language writing (SLW). He reviews several approaches to the issue: contrastive rhetoric (dealing with the impact of first-language patterns of text organisation on writers in a second language), or even alternate notions, like‘ cosmopolitanism’, ‘critical multiculturalism’, and hybridity, as of late native culture is becoming irrelevant or at best far less significant. Ian Malcolm tackles, in Chapter 29, Language and culture in second dialect learning, the issue of ‘standard’ Englishes (e.g., Standard American English, Standard Australian English) versus minority ‘non-standard’ speakers of English. He deplores the fact that in US specialist literature, speaking the ‘non-standard’ variety of English was associated with cognitive, cultural, and linguistic insufficiency. He further refers to other specialists who have demonstrated that ‘non-standard’ varieties can be just as systematic and highly structured as the standard variety. Chapter 30, Language and culture in intercultural communication, by Hans-Georg Wolf gives an account of research in intercultural education, focusing on several paradigms, i.e. the dominant one, investigating successful functioning in intercultural encounters, the minor one, exploring intercultural understanding and the ‘deconstructionist, and or postmodernist’. He further examines different interpretations of the concepts associated with intercultural communication, including the functionalist school, the intercultural understanding approach and a third one, the most removed from culture, focusing on socio-political inequalities, fluidity, situationality, and negotiability. Andy Kirkpatrick’s Chapter 31, World Englishes and local cultures gives a synopsis of research paradigm from applied linguistics which investigates the development of Englishes around the world, through processes like indigenisation or nativisation of the language. Kirkpatrick discusses the ways in which new Englishes accommodate the culture of the very speech community which develops them, e.g. adopting lexical items to express to express culture-specific concepts. Speakers of new varieties could use pragmatic norms rooted in cultural values and norms of the specific new speech community which have not previously been associated with English. Moreover, they can use these new Englishes to write local literatures, often exploiting culturally preferred rhetorical norms. Part seven starts with Chapter 32, Cultural Linguistics, by Farzad Sharifian gives an account of the recent multidisciplinary research field of Cultural Linguistics, which explores the relationship between language and cultural cognition, particularly in the case of cultural conceptualisations. Sharifian also brings forth illustrations of how cultural conceptualisations may be linguistically encoded. The last chapter, A future agenda for research on language and culture, by Roslyn Frank provides an appraisal of Cultural Linguistics as a prospective path for research in the field of language and culture. She states that ‘Cultural Linguistics could potentially create a paradigm that “successfully melds together complementary approaches, e.g., viewing language as ‘a complex adaptive system’ and bringing to bear upon it concepts drawn from cognitive science such as ‘distributed cognition’ and ‘multi-agent dynamic systems theory’.” She further asserts that Cultural Linguistics has the potential to function as “a bridge that brings together researchers from a variety of fields, allowing them to focus on problems of mutual concern from a new perspective” and most likely unveil new issues (as well as solutions) which have not been evident so far. In conclusion, the Handbook will most certainly serve as clear and coherent guidelines for scholarly thinking and further research on language and culture, and also open up new investigative vistas in each of the areas tackled.

Current debates and definitions of professionalism are primarily grounded in organisations, either as employing bureaucracies or service firms, that control and structure expert labour. This is problematic as it neglects the many neo-professionals that are self-employed. We draw on interviews with 50 independent consultants and find that, outside of organisational boundaries, they pursue a strategy of professional fluidity. This is a relational and market-driven approach that requires a multiplicity of roles and chameleon-like tactics. As opposed to notions of collegial, organisational and corporate professionalisation, professional fluidity is a co-constructed and agentic approach where validity and legitimacy are achieved primarily through relations with clients and collaborators rather than institutions or employing organisations. Through professional fluidity we contribute to a more holistic understanding of professionalism that is sensitive to the employment mode rather than knowledge domain and develops existing notions of who is a professional. This is important for wider debates on the current and future state of professions.

PurposeThis paper examines how human resources (HR) professionals in the UK have supported employee wellbeing during the coronavirus disease (COVID) pandemic. It considers the extent to which HR professionals were prepared for the crisis and their readiness in supporting the wellbeing of their people.Design/methodology/approachSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 senior HR professionals working across the public and private sectors in the UK. Using an in-depth interview structure, the research explored how respondents both reacted to and managed the crisis in their respective organisations. Template analysis was used to analyse the data allowing a certain degree of fluidity in the establishment of ordered relationships between the themes.FindingsThis study finds that business continuity plans turned out to be useless during the pandemic because they focussed on data, not people. It highlights the tension between home-working and burn-out as online presenteeism increased due to staff changing their behaviour in response to self-surveillance. The paper emphasises the importance of soft skills and authentic leadership and the tensions in respect of equity.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was conducted with HR professionals in the UK, not internationally. Although the sample did include HR professionals from across the public, private and third sectors, the experience may not be representative of all those working in HR.Originality/valueThis research found that those organisations that had engaged in business continuity planning prior to the pandemic focussed on the retrieval and accessibility of data rather than people. This prioritises staff as a resource rather than emphasising people as an organisation's most valuable asset. Furthermore, the study found that staff worked harder and for longer periods of time as a consequence of self-imposed surveillance. Organisational responses were contradictory as despite implementing well-being strategies to promote physical and mental health, there was little evidence of an effective response to this online presenteeism.

In the Grundrisse, Marx argued that the circulation of productive capital was “a process of transformation, a qualitative process of value”. As capitalists sought to overcome the barriers to this transformatory process, they worked to revolutionise both the means of production via organisational and technological change, and circulation time via transportation and communication changes. Reducing friction in the production and circulation of capital is critical to the extraction of surplus value, and Marx argued that in this transformation “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier [and]… the annihilation of space by time - becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.” Higher education is increasingly a space which is being recalibrated so as to increase the mobility or fluidity of intellectual production and circulation. Thus, technology, technical services and techniques are deployed to collapse the interfaces between space and time, and to subsume academic labour inside processes for valorisation. However, this collapse also reveals the stresses and strains of antagonisms, as the friction of neoliberal higher education reform deforms existing cultures and histories. Through such a deformation, it also reminds us of alternative historical and material re-imaginings and alternatives like the Chilean CyberSyn project, the Ecuadorian National Plan for Good Living, the Hornsey Experiment, and so on. This presentation argues that inside the University, the deployment of technologies, technical services and techniques enables education and academic labour to be co-opted for value-production. As a result, academics and students are defined as entrepreneurial subjects with limited power-to produce a world beyond value. A question is the extent to which pedagogical and transitional alternatives might be described, and whether in the process it is possible to uncover ways in which education might be used for co-operation rather than competition, as a form of resistance.Acknowledgement: This podcast is an audio recording of a talk Richard Hall gave in the Communication and Media Research Institute's (CAMRI) Seminar Series at the University of Westminster on March 25, 2015.

Purpose The lack of authority of the sponsoring firm in online communities raises questions about how to orchestrate members of an online community in value co-creation. Hence, this study aims to examine how online communities co-create value with community members. The authors draw upon service-dominant logic (SDL) to study two comparable, and yet different, Indonesian firm-sponsored online communities. Design/methodology/approach The authors build on an earlier systematic literature review and triangulate it with semi-structured interviews of 28 community members and content analysis of over 35,000 online comments. The data collection was conducted from February to October 2018. Findings The findings revealed that (1) value co-creation in online communities is orchestrated through the fluidity of the online community, which is represented by three mechanisms: consensus-making, consensus settlement and changing boundaries, and (2) the mechanisms can be conditioned by switching firm roles (as a co-creator and facilitator). Research limitations/implications The study has enriched the body of knowledge in fluid organisations by explicating three mechanisms, consensus-making, consensus settlement and changing boundaries, that explain the coordination efforts between individuals who have options to participate or not and changing boundaries, that reveals actors' responses in online communities. The mechanisms demonstrate the dynamics of a service ecosystem. Originality/value This study offers valuable insights into how sponsoring firms orchestrate value creation in online communities where they do not have full control of participants' reactions. The authors hereby contribute to enriching the understanding of co-creating value with customers in a fluid organisation, such as online communities.

Despite the fact that leaders may be constrained as far as the structure of relational networks function restricts the flow of information, knowledge and resources, leadership is responsible to have clear insight of the goals of the organization and its administrative tasks or function,, appreciate strongly the nature of fluidity and dynamics of the social structures in the organisation and how they affect the organisation over before they can be effective. This paper investigates the relationship between transformational leadership attributes and employee’s commitment. The study further investigates the extent to which work engagement mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and employee commitment. The analysis shows that the entire hypothesis must be accepted. This is because a leader’s intellectual stimulation significantly influences the commitment of healthcare professionals and it’s statistically significant at 95% confidence interval. The same applies to the fact that the relationship between intellectual stimulation and employee commitment is mediated by work engagement. Again the analysis accepts the fact that a leader’s idealised influence significantly influences the commitment of healthcare professionals and also that the relationship between idealised influence and employee commitment is mediated by work engagement.

La promesse d’une société de l’information portée par l’Internet a auguré un espace de liberté qui devait dépasser la démarcation des territoires physiques au moyen de lignes de séparation topographique. L’avènement des réseaux sociaux a consacré un techno-pouvoir qui organise l’espace cybernétique en des territoires numériques dont la fluidité des frontières masque une logique d’organisation orchestrée par l’industrie algorithmique. Le phénomène de l’attention est au cœur des enjeux de cette organisation. Les discours cybernétiques en sont la manifestation et en constituent un paramètre heuristique. L’analyse textométrique et stylométrique d’un corpus de discours collectés dans deux réseaux sociaux permet de révéler les contours des territoires numériques sous fond de spécificités discursives. Les territoires numériques des réseaux sociaux semblent reproduire les territoires sociologiques au lieu de les reconfigurer, fondamentalement.

Abstract This article offers the first systematic investigation of the institution of opera censorship in Russia during the reign of Nicholas I. Drawing on new archival sources, it examines censorship legislation, the organisation of dramatic (i.e., theatre) censorship, the workings of its bureaucracy, censors’ reports and protocols and Nicholas's personal decrees on productions of specific operas, and printed and manuscript librettos. From these, it distils the patterns of state intervention in opera, revealing a remarkable fluidity – even capriciousness – of approaches. Decisions to ban or permit, and specific intrusions into the texts, were based on the censors’ adherence to or disregard for the Empire's censorship laws, Nicholas's inclinations and impulses, changes in cultural policy, practical needs of the Imperial Theatres, the shifting political climate at home and abroad, and, most of all, the national point of origin of the operatic work under review. In addition to surveying the trends, the article offers three case studies: Glinka's Zhizn’ za Tsarya (A Life for the Tsar), Verdi's Rigoletto and Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.

During morphogenesis, epithelial sheets remodel into complex geometries. How cells dynamically organise their contact with neighbouring cells in these tightly packed tissues is poorly understood. We have used light-sheet microscopy of growing mouse embryonic lung explants, three-dimensional cell segmentation, and physical theory to unravel the principles behind 3D cell organisation in growing pseudostratified epithelia. We find that cells have highly irregular 3D shapes and exhibit numerous neighbour intercalations along the apical-basal axis as well as over time. Despite the fluidic nature, the cell packing configurations follow fundamental relationships previously described for apical epithelial layers, that is, Euler's polyhedron formula, Lewis’ law, and Aboav-Weaire's law, at all times and across the entire tissue thickness. This arrangement minimises the lateral cell-cell surface energy for a given cross-sectional area variability, generated primarily by the distribution and movement of nuclei. We conclude that the complex 3D cell organisation in growing epithelia emerges from simple physical principles.

The Romanian government encountered unexpected difficulties after the First World War with the increase of religious minorities, particularly evangelicals in the newly acquired border region of Bessarabia. International affiliations and increasing success in rural areas led government officials and the Romanian Orthodox Church to label these groups as foreign pawns or socially deviant sectarians. The Baptist Church in Chișinău proved a special case of concern as its leadership included a Jewish man, Lev Averbuch. Averbuch's congregation was a diverse religious community, filled with Romanians, Russians, Bulgarians, Jews, Greeks, and others. Their multi-ethnic composition, multi-lingual services, ties to international organisations, and controversial sermons speaking out against nationalism and antisemitism were used by police and Orthodox Church authorities to paint them as a threat to national security. The analysis of Averbuch's interwar community of Jewish Christians in Chișinău shows the region was not a homogenous religious space and that religious identity was of greater value than national identity. It provides insight into the fluidity of religious, ethnic, and even geographic borders, and how policies of national consolidation were challenged at the local level by religious minorities during Europe's tumultuous interwar years.

This reflective piece tells the story of how I started out doing Conversation Analysis (CA) and have been transitioning into doing mixed methods for some years now. My basic argument is that language learning talk is too complex a phenomenon to analyse using a single methodology. Specifically, it is extremely difficult to isolate from the interaction concrete evidence of the learning of specific individual items in terms of change of cognitive state. This is owing to the singular complexity of language learning, which adds an extra level of complexity to language learning talk, hence supercomplexity. Of course, the counter-argument to this would be that CA as a methodology is designed to reveal the complexity and fluidity of spoken interaction. The complex organisation of ordinary conversation (Sacks et al., 1974) and of varieties of institutional interaction (Drew & Heritage, 1992) have been very well established for a very long time. CA has been extremely successful and popular as a methodology for the analysis of spoken interaction in a huge range of settings. There have been many CA studies of language learning talk over the last few decades, including my own. So why do I now feel that it cannot portray the full complexity of language learning talk on its own? There is an idiosyncratic problem with language learning talk, namely that it has an additional level of complexity superimposed on top of the regular problems of analysing spoken interaction. This is because language is the object as well as the vehicle of language learning talk.

Introduction The pandemic spread of SARS-CoV-2, a novel, highly contagious and easily transmissible pathogen, has profoundly affected all aspects of human interaction. Guided by the need to reduce face-to-face contacts, medical organisations have rapidly shifted group activities to virtual platforms. Over 1 year into the pandemic, the necessity to maintain public health restrictions ensures that virtual meetings will be the norm for the foreseeable future.It has yet to be understood how virtual technologies shape healthcare and academic cultures, affect interactions, or influence strategic decisions and policies within these systems.Conclusion In this article, the authors reflect on the move from historically situated activity systems of team leadership in healthcare to ones that now exist in virtual formats. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is a framework that explains complex human actions, and how they unfold over time through interaction with mediational tools (eg, technology) and various people representing their own communities, roles and perceived divisions of labour. The authors use the lens of CHAT as a framework to understand the shifting dynamics at play and offer strategies for leaders to co-establish activity systems with team members to make goals of group activities explicit and to deliberately work toward them. Five specific strategies proposed are: (1) use software platforms that fit your needs and give voice to all attendees with technical support present in meetings; (2) converse explicitly about roles and emerging role fluidity during times of change and pandemic response; (3) co-construct something new intentionally; (4) engage in implementation science at this time; and (5) lead intentionally while honouring cultural norms and values. It is imperative that any changes, even the ones that are a part of the pandemic response, are made consistent with the core shared values of the medical community as this necessary new way of coming together is embraced with collective wisdom.

Aims and objectives: This paper captures social dimensions of language in highly diverse small-scale multilingual contexts that appear to pose challenges for (socio)linguistic description and documentation. I focus on the seeming contradiction of monolingual imaginations of places with heterogeneous and multilingual inhabitants, on great fluidity and variability of language use and the concomitant limits of reification-based identification of codes, and on personalised repertoires shaped by individual trajectories and relational, rather than categorical, stances. Approach: I propose patterns and perspectives as two interrelated dimensions to guide research in configurations of this kind, illustrating epistemological and methodological points through data from multilingual settings in Casamance, Senegal. Data and analysis: I focus on data collected in the village of Agnack Grand and its surroundings, but also include data from across the Lower Casamance and adjacent regions of Guinea-Bissau, discussing patterns of multilingual organisation and extracts from conversation and how their speech forms are categorised. Findings: The paper brings sociohistorical dimensions of small-scale multilingualism to the fore and identifies their lasting influences on spatial representations of language regimes. Linguistic spaces influence perspectives on speech events taking place in them and circumscribe speech participants’ and observers’ choices in describing repertoires, producing and analysing speech forms. Beyond the selection of language modes, perspective also determines how speech forms are categorised. I demonstrate that the patterns speakers and observers have experienced and the perspectives they assume are decisive in shaping their perception. Originality: My central observation is that there is no objective, neutral viewpoint on (multilingual) speech, but that positionality frames it at all levels. I develop new epistemologies for studying these dimensions. Significance: Putting the categorisation processes employed by speakers and observers and their underlying motivations centre stage and integrating sociolinguistic and anthropological linguistic methods and historical knowledge into linguistic description and documentation constitutes an innovative research programme.

Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). It also suggests that the transnational feminist ethic lies not in the global North and global South paradigm but in the fluidity of migration between and among cultures rather than geographical boundaries and military borders. All this argues that across the imperial cartography of discrimination and oppression, women’s solidarity is only possible through intercultural and syncretistic negotiation that respects the individual and the community.ReferencesAbdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? Sydney: Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005.———. “Ending Oppression in the Middle East: A Muslim Feminist Call to Arms.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 29 April 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/29/3747543.htm>.———. “On ‘Nine Parts Of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks.” Griffith Review. <https://griffithreview.com/on-nine-parts-of-desire-by-geraldine-brooks/>.Agarwal, Bina. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994.Amissah, Edith Kohrs. Aspects of Feminism and Gender in the Novels of Three West African Women Writers. Nairobi: Africa Resource Center, 1999.Andolina, Robert, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe. Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power, and Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. “Fabricating Identities: Survival and the Imagination in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Fashion Theory 10.3 (2006): 1–24.Basu, Amrita (ed.). Women's Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2010.Bulbeck, Chilla. Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Connell, Raewyn. “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale.” Feminist Theory 16.1 (2015): 49–66.———. “Rethinking Gender from the South.” Feminist Studies 40.3 (2014): 518-539.Daniel, Eniola. “I Work toward the Liberation of Women, But I’m Not Feminist, Says Buchi Emecheta.” The Guardian, 29 Jan. 2017. <https://guardian.ng/art/i-work-toward-the-liberation-of-women-but-im-not-feminist-says-buchi-emecheta/>.Devi, Mahasveta. "Draupadi." Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 381-402.Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.Hale, Sondra. “Transnational Gender Studies and the Migrating Concept of Gender in the Middle East and North Africa.” Cultural Dynamics 21.2 (2009): 133-52.hooks, bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Langton, Marcia. “‘Grandmother’s Law’, Company Business and Succession in Changing Aboriginal Land Tenure System.” Traditional Aboriginal Society: A Reader. Ed. W.H. Edward. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Macmillan, 2003.Lazreg, Marnia. “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria.” Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 81-107.Liew, Stephanie. “Subtle Racism Is More Problematic in Australia.” Interview. music.com.au 2015. <http://themusic.com.au/interviews/all/2015/03/06/randa-abdel-fattah/>.Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Keynoted presented at National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Conn., 1981.Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Basic Books, 1991.Moghadam, Valentine. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003.Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2000.Morgan, Robin (ed.). Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology. New York: The Feminist Press, 1984.Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism, 1997.

Indigenous cross-cultural training has been around since the 1980s. It is often seen as a way to increase the skills and competency of staff engaged in providing service to Indigenous clients and customers, teaching Indigenous students within universities and schools, or working with Indigenous communities (Fredericks and Bargallie, “Indigenous”; “Which Way”). In this article we demonstrate how such training often exposes power, whiteness, and concepts of an Indigenous “other”. We highlight how cross-cultural training programs can potentially provide a setting in which non-Indigenous participants can develop a deeper realisation of how their understandings of the “other” are formed and enacted within a “white” social setting. Revealing whiteness as a racial construct enables people to see race, and “know what racism is, what it is not and what it does” (Bargallie, 262). Training participants can use such revelations to develop their racial literacy and anti-racist praxis (Bargallie), which when implemented have the capacity to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations.What Does the Literature Say about Cross-Cultural Training? An array of names are used for Indigenous cross-cultural training, including cultural awareness, cultural competency, cultural responsiveness, cultural safety, cultural sensitivity, cultural humility, and cultural capability. Each model takes on a different approach and goal depending on the discipline or profession to which the training is applied (Hollinsworth). Throughout this article we refer to Indigenous cross-cultural training as “cultural competence” or “cultural awareness” and discuss these in relation to their application within higher education institutions. While literature on health and human services programs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other nation states provide clear definitions of terms such as “cultural safety”, cultural competence or cultural awareness is often lacking a concise and consistent definition.Often delivered as a half day or a one to two-day training course, it is unrealistic to think that Indigenous cultural competence can be achieved through one’s mere attendance and participation. Moreover, when courses centre on “cultural differences” and enable revelations about those differences they are in danger of presenting idealised notions of Indigeneity. Cultural competence becomes a process through which an Indigenous “other” is objectified, while very little is offered by way of translating knowledge and skills into practice when working with Indigenous peoples.What this type of learning has the capacity to do is oversimplify and reinforce racism and racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous cultures. What is generally believed is that if non-Indigenous peoples know more about Indigenous peoples and cultures, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will somehow improve. The work of Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson is vital to draw on here, when she asks, has the intellectual investment in defining our cultural differences resulted in the valuing of our knowledges? Has the academy become a more enlightened place in which to work, and, more important, in what ways have our communities benefited? (xvii)What is revealed in a range of studies – whether centring on racism and discrimination or the ongoing disparities across health, education, incarceration, employment, and more – is that despite forty plus years of training focused on understanding cultural differences, very little has changed. Indigenous knowledges continue to be devalued and overlooked. Everyday and structural racisms shape everyday experiences for Indigenous employees in Australian workplaces such as the Australian Public Service (Bargallie) and the Australian higher education sector (Fredericks and White).As the literature demonstrates, the racial division of labour in such institutions often leaves Indigenous employees languishing on the lower rungs of the employment ladder (Bargallie). The findings of an Australian university case study, discussed below, highlights how power, whiteness, and concepts of “otherness” are exposed and play out in cultural competency training. Through their exposure, we argue that better understandings about Indigenous Australians, which are not based on culture difference but personal reflexivity, may be gained. Revealing What Was Needed in the Course’s Foundation and ImplementationThis case study is centred within a regional Australian university across numerous campuses. In 2012, the university council approved an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy, which included a range of initiatives, including the provision of cross-cultural training for staff. In developing the training, a team explored the evidence as it related to university settings (Anning; Asmar; Butler and Young; Fredericks; Fredericks and Thompson; Kinnane, Wilks, Wilson, Hughes and Thomas; McLaughlin and Whatman). This investigation included what had been undertaken in other Australian universities (Anderson; University of Sydney) and drew on the recommendations from earlier research (Behrendt, Larkin, Griew and Kelly; Bradley, Noonan, Nugent and Scales; Universities Australia). Additional consultation took place with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.While some literature on cross-cultural training centred on the need to understand cultural differences, others exposed the problems of focusing entirely on difference (Brach and Fraser; Campinha-Bacote; Fredericks; Spencer and Archer; Young). The courses that challenged the centrality of cultural difference explained why race needed to be at the core of its training, highlighting its role in enabling discussions of racism, bias, discrimination and how these may be used as means to facilitate potential individual and organisational change. This approach also addressed stereotypes and Eurocentric understandings of what and who is an Indigenous Australian (Carlson; Gorringe, Ross and Forde; Hollinsworth; Moreton-Robinson). It is from this basis that we worked and grew our own training program. Working on this foundational premise, we began to separate content that showcased the fluidity and diversity of Indigenous peoples and refrained from situating us within romantic notions of culture or presenting us as an exotic “other”. In other words, we embraced work that responded to non-Indigenous people’s objectified understandings and expectations of us. For example, the expectation that Indigenous peoples will offer a Welcome to Country, performance, share a story, sing, dance, or disseminate Indigenous knowledges. While we recognise that some of these cultural elements may offer enjoyment and insight to non-Indigenous people, they do not challenge behaviours or the nature of the relationships that non-Indigenous people have with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Bargallie; Fredericks; Hollinsworth; Westwood and Westwood; Young).The other content which needed separating were the methods that enabled participants to understand and own their standpoints. This included the use of critical Indigenous studies as a form of analysis (Moreton-Robinson). Critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic) was also used as a means for participants to interrogate their own cultural positionings and understand the pervasive nature of race and racism in Australian society and institutions (McLaughlin and Whatman). This offered all participants, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, the opportunity to learn how institutional racism operates, and maintains discrimination, neglect, abuse, denial, and violence, inclusive of the continued subjugation that exists within higher education settings and broader society.We knew that the course needed to be available online as well as face-to-face. This would increase accessibility to staff across the university community. We sought to embed critical thinking as we began to map out the course, including the theory in the sections that covered colonisation and the history of Indigenous dispossession, trauma and pain, along with the ongoing effects of federal and state policies and legislations that locates racism at the core of Australian politics. In addition to documenting the ongoing effects of racism, we sought to ensure that Indigenous resistance, agency, and activism was highlighted, showing how this continues, thus linking the past to the contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples.Drawing on the work of Bargallie we wanted to demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience racism through systems and structures in their everyday work with colleagues in large organisations, such as universities. Participants were asked to self-reflect on how race impacts their day-to-day lives (McIntosh). The final session of the training focused on the university’s commitment to “Closing the Gap” and its Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). The associated activity involved participants working individually and in small groups to discuss and consider what they could contribute to the RAP activities and enact within their work environments. Throughout the training, participants were asked to reflect on their personal positioning, and in the final session they were asked to draw from these reflections and discuss how they would discuss race, racism and reconciliation activities with the governance of their university (Westwood and Westwood; Young).Revelations in the Facilitators, Observers, and Participants’ Discussions? This section draws on data collected from the first course offered within the university’s pilot program. During the delivery of the in-person training sessions, two observers wrote notes while the facilitators also noted their feelings and thoughts. After the training, the facilitators and observers debriefed and discussed the delivery of the course along with the feedback received during the sessions.What was noticed by the team was the defensive body language of participants and the types of questions they asked. Team members observed how there were clear differences between the interest non-Indigenous participants displayed when talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and a clear discomfort when they were asked to reflect on their own position in relation to Indigenous people. We noted that during these occasions some participants crossed their arms, two wrote notes to each other across the table, and many participants showed discomfort. When the lead facilitator raised this to participants during the sessions, some expressed their dislike and discomfort at having to talk about themselves. A couple were clearly unhappy and upset. We found this interesting as we were asking participants to reflect and talk about how they interpret and understand themselves in relation to Indigenous people and race, privilege, and power.This supports the work of DiAngelo who explains that facilitators can spend a lot of time trying to manage the behaviour of participants. Similarly, Castagno identifies that sometimes facilitators of training might overly focus on keeping participants happy, and in doing so, derail the hard conversations needed. We did not do either. Instead, we worked to manage the behaviours expressed and draw out what was happening to break the attempts to silence racial discussions. We reiterated and worked hard to reassure participants that we were in a “safe space” and that while such discussions may be difficult, they were worth working through on an individual and collective level.During the workshop, numerous emotions surfaced, people laughed at Indigenous humour and cried at what they witnessed as losses. They also expressed anger, defensiveness, and denial. Some participants revelled in hearing answers to questions that they had long wondered about; some openly discussed how they thought they had discovered a distant Aboriginal relative. Many questions surfaced, such as why hadn’t they ever been told this version of Australian history? Why were we focusing on them and not Aboriginal people? How could they be racist when they had an Aboriginal friend or an Aboriginal relative?Some said they felt “guilty” about what had happened in the past. Others said they were not personally responsible or responsible for the actions of their ancestors, questioning why they needed to go over such history in the first place? Inter-woven within participants’ revelations were issues of racism, power, whiteness, and white privilege. Many participants took a defensive stance to protect their white privilege (DiAngelo). As we worked through these issues, several participants started to see their own positionality and shared this with the group. Clearly, the revelation of whiteness as a racial construct was a turning point for some. The language in the group also changed for some participants as revelations emerged through the interrogation and unpacking of stories of racism. Bargallie’s work exploring racism in the workplace, explains that “racism”, as both a word and theme, is primarily absent in conversations amongst non-Indigenous colleagues. Despite its entrenchment in the dialogue, it is rarely, if ever addressed. In fact, for many non-Indigenous people, the fear of being accused of racism is worse than the act of racism itself (Ahmed; Bargallie). We have seen this play out within the media, sport, news bulletins, and more. Lentin describes the act of denying racism despite its existence in full sight as “not racism”, arguing that its very denial is “a form of racist violence” (406).Through enhancing racial literacy, Bargallie asserts that people gain a better understanding of “what racism is, what racism is not and how race works” (258). Such revelations can work towards dismantling racism in workplaces. Individual and structural racism go hand-in-glove and must be examined and addressed together. This is what we wanted to work towards within the cultural competency course. Through the use of critical Indigenous studies and critical race theory we situated race, and not cultural difference, as central, providing participants with a racial literacy that could be used as a tool to challenge and dismantle racism in the workplace.Revelations in the Participant Evaluations?The evaluations revealed that our intention to disrupt the status quo in cultural competency training was achieved. Some of the discussions were difficult and this was reflected in the feedback. It was valuable to learn that numerous participants wanted to do more through group work, conversations, and problem resolution, along with having extra reading materials. This prompted our decision to include extra links to resource learning materials through the course’s online site. We also opted to provide all participants with a copy of the book Indigenous Australia for Dummies (Behrendt). The cost of the book was built into the course and future participants were thankful for this combination of resources.One unexpected concern raised by participants was that the course should not be “that hard”, and that we should “dumb down” the course. We were astounded considering that many participants were academics and we were confident that facilitators of other mandatory workplace training, for example, staff Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Fire Safety, Risk Management, Occupational Health and Safety, Discrimination and more, weren’t asked to “dumb down” their content. We explained to the participants what content we had been asked to deliver and knew their responses demonstrated white fragility. We were not prepared to adjust the course and dumb it down for white understandings and comfortabilities (Leonardo and Porter).Comments that were expected included that the facilitators were “passionate”, “articulate”, demonstrated “knowledge” and effectively “dealt with issues”. A couple of the participants wrote that the facilitators were “aggressive” or “angry”. This however is not new for us, or new to other Aboriginal women. We know Aboriginal women are often seen as “aggressive” and “angry”, when non-Indigenous women might be described as “passionate” or “assertive” for saying exactly the same thing. The work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Australia, and the works of numerous other Aboriginal women provide evidence of this form of racism (Fredericks and White; Bargallie; Bond). Internationally, other Indigenous women and women of colour document the same experiences (Lorde). Participants’ assessment of the facilitators is consistent with the racism expressed through racial microaggression outside of the university, and in other organisations. This is despite working in the higher education sector, which is normally perceived as a more knowledgeable and informed environment. Needless to say, we did not take on these comments.The evaluations did offer us the opportunity to adjust the course and make it stronger before it was offered across the university where we received further evaluation of its success. Despite this, the university decided to withdraw and reallocate the money to the development of a diversity training course that would cover all equity groups. This meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be covered along with sexual diversity, gender, disability, and people from non-English speaking backgrounds. The content focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was reduced to one hour of the total course. Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this way is not based on evidence and works to minimise Indigenous Australians and their inherent rights and sovereignty to just another “equity group”. Conclusion We set out to develop and deliver a cross-cultural course that was based on evidence and a foundation of 40 plus years’ experience in delivering such training. In addition, we sought a program that would align with the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan and the directions being undertaken in the sector and by Universities Australia. Through engaging participants in a process of critical thinking centring on race, we developed a training program that successfully fostered self-reflection and brought about revelations of whiteness.Focusing on cultural differences has proven ineffective to the work needed to improve the lives of Indigenous Australian peoples. Recognising this, our discussions with participants directly challenged racist and negative stereotypes, individual and structural racism, prejudices, and white privilege. By centring race over cultural difference in cultural competency training, we worked to foster self-revelation within participants to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations. The institution’s disbandment and defunding of the program however is a telling revelation in and of itself, highlighting the continuing struggle and importance of placing additional pressure on persons, institutions, and organisations to implement meaningful structural change. ReferencesAhmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.Anderson, Ian. “Advancing Indigenous Health through Medical Education”. Focus on Health Professional Education: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal 13.1 (2011): 1-12.Anning, Beres. “Embedding an Indigenous Graduate Attribute into University of Western Sydney’s Courses”. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 39 (2010): 40-52.Asmar, Christine. Final Report on the Murrup Barak of Indigenous Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Melbourne, 2010-2011. Murrup Barak – Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development, University of Melbourne, 2011.Bargallie, Debbie. Unmasking The Racial Contract: Everyday Racisms and the Impact of Racial Microaggressions on “Indigenous Employees” in the Australian Public Service. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2020. Behrendt, Larissa. Indigenous Australia for Dummies. Wiley Publishing, 2010.Behrendt, Larissa, Steven Larkin, Robert Griew, Robert, and Patricia Kelly. Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People: Final Report. Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations, 2012.Brach, Cindy, and Irene Fraser. “Can Cultural Competency Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities? A Review and Conceptual Model”. Medical Care Research and Review 57.sup 1 (2000): 181-217.Bond, Chelsea. “When the Object Teaches: Indigenous Academics in Australian Universities”. Right Now 14 (2014). <http://rightnow.org.au/opinion-3/when-the-object-teaches-indigenous-academics-in-australian-universities/>.Bradley, Denise, Peter Noonan, Helen Nugent, and Bill Scales. Review of Australian Higher Education. Australian Government, 2008.Butler, Kathleen, and Anne Young. Indigenisation of Curricula – Intent, Initiatives and Implementation. Canberra: Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, 2009. 20 Apr. 2020 <http://www.teqsa.gov.au/news-publications/publications>.Campinha-Bacote, Josepha. “A Model and Instrument for Addressing Cultural Competence in Health Care”. Journal of Nursing Education 38.5 (1999): 203-207.Carlson, Bronwyn. The Politics of Identity – Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016.Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 2001.DiAngelo, Robin. “Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions”. Understanding and Dismantling Privilege 11.1 (2012). <http://www.wpcjournal.com/article/view/10100/Nothing%20to%20add%3A%20A%20Challenge%20to%20White%20Silence%20in%20Racial%20Discussions>.Frankenburg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.Fredericks, Bronwyn. “The Need to Extend beyond the Knowledge Gained in Cross-Cultural Awareness Training”. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 37.S (2008): 81-89.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Debbie Bargallie. “An Indigenous Cultural Competency Course: Talking Culture, Care and Power”. In Cultural Competence and the Higher Education Sector: Perspectives, Policies and Practice, eds. Jack Frawley, Gabrielle Russell, and Juanita Sherwood, Springer Publications, 295-308. <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-981-15-5362-2>.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Debbie Bargallie. “‘Which Way? Talking Culture, Talking Race’: Unpacking an Indigenous Cultural Competency Course”. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 9.1 (2016): 1-14.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Marlene Thompson. “Collaborative Voices: Ongoing Reflections on Cultural Competency and the Health Care of Australian Indigenous People”. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 13.3 (2010): 10-20.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Nereda White. “Using Bridges Made by Others as Scaffolding and Establishing Footings for Those That Follow: Indigenous Women in the Academy”. Australian Journal of Education 62.3 (2018): 243–255.Gorringe, Scott, Joe Ross, and Cressida Fforde. Will the Real Aborigine Please Stand Up? Strategies for Breaking the Stereotypes and Changing the Conversation. AIATSIS Research Discussion Paper No. 28. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), 2011.Hollinsworth, David. “Forget Cultural Competence: Ask for an Autobiography”. Social Work Education: The International Journal 32.8 (2013): 1048-1060.hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. London: Pluto Press, 2000.Kinnane, Stephen, Judith Wilks, Katie Wilson, Terri Hughes, and Sue Thomas. Can’t Be What You Can’t See: The Transition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students into Higher Education. Final report to the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. Canberra: Office of Learning and Teaching, 2014.Lentin, Alana. “Beyond Denial: ‘Not Racism’ as Racist Violence”. Continuum 32.1 (2018): 1-15.Leonardo, Zeus, and Ronald L. Porter. “Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory of ‘Safety’ in Race Dialogue”. Race Ethnicity and Education 13.2 (2010): 139-157.Lorde, Audrey. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.McIntosh, Peggy. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies. Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, 1988.McLaughlin, Juliana, and Sue Whatman. “The Potential of Critical Race Theory in Decolonizing University Curricula”. Asia Pacific Journal of Education 31.4 (2011): 365-377.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.Sargent, Sara E., Carol A. Sedlak, and Donna S. Martsolf. “Cultural Competence among Nursing Students and Faculty”. Nurse Education Today 25.3 (2005): 214-221.Sherwood, Juanita, and Tahnia Edwards. “Decolonisation: A Critical Step for Improving Aboriginal health”. Contemporary Nurse 22.2 (2016): 178-190.Spencer, Caroline, and Frances L. Archer. “Surveys of Cultural Competency in Health Professional Education: A Literature Review”. Journal of Emergency Primary Health Care 6.2 (2008): 17.Universities Australia. National Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency in Australian Universities. Universities Australia, 2011. <http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/lightbox/1312>.University of Sydney. National Centre for Cultural Competence, 2016. <http://sydney.edu.au/nccc/>.Westwood, Barbara, and Geoff Westwood. “Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Training: Policy v. Accountability – Failure in Reality”. Australian Health Review 34 (2010): 423-429.Young, Susan. “Not Because It’s a Bloody Black Issue! Problematics of Cross Cultural Training”. In Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation, ed. Belinda McKay, 204-219. Queensland Studies Centre, University of Queensland Press, 1999.

“What's the brief?” is an everyday question within the graphic design process. Moreover, the concept and importance of a design brief is overtly understood well beyond design practice itself—especially among stakeholders who work with designers and clients who commission design services. Indeed, a design brief is often an assumed and expected physical or metaphoric artefact for guiding the creative process. When a brief is lacking, incomplete or unclear, it can render an already ambiguous graphic design process and discipline even more fraught with misinterpretation. Nevertheless, even in wider design discourse, there appears to be little research on design briefs and the briefing process (Jones and Askland; Paton and Dorst). It seems astonishing that, even in Peter Phillips’s 2014 edition of Creating the Perfect Design Brief, he feels compelled to comment that “there are still no books available about design briefs” and that the topic is only “vaguely” covered within design education (21). While Phillips’s assertion is debatable if one draws purely from online vernacular sources or professional guides, it is supported by the lack of scholarly attention paid to the design brief. Graphic design briefs are often mentioned within design books, journals, and online sources. However, this article argues that the format, function and use of such briefs are largely assumed and rarely identified and studied. Even within the broader field of design research, the tendency appears to be to default to “the design brief” as an assumed shorthand, supporting Phillips’s argument about the nebulous nature of the topic. As this article contextualises, this is further problematised by insufficient attention cast on graphic design itself as a specific discipline. This article emerges from a wider, multi-stage creative practice study into graphic design practice, that used experimental performative design research methods to investigate graphic designers’ professional relationships with stakeholders (Meron, Strangely). The article engages with specific outcomes from that study that relate to the design brief. The article also explores existing literature and research and argues for academics, the design industry, and educationalists, to focus closer attention on the design brief. It concludes by suggesting that experimental and collaborative design methods offers potential for future research into the design brief. Contextualising the Design Brief It is critical to differentiate the graphic design brief from the operational briefs of architectural design (Blyth and Worthington; Khan) or those used in technical practices such as software development or IT systems design, which have extensive industry-formalised briefing practices and models such as the waterfall system (Petersen et al.) or more modern processes such as Agile (Martin). Software development and other technical design briefs are necessarily more formulaically structured than graphic design briefs. Their requirements are generally empirically and mechanistically located, and often mission-critical. In contrast, the conceptual nature of creative briefs in graphic design creates the potential for them to be arbitrarily interpreted. Even in wider design discourse, there appears to be little consistency about the form that a brief takes. Some sources indicate that a brief only requires one page (Elebute; Nov and Jones) or even a single line of text (Jones and Askland). At other times briefs are described as complex, high-level documents embedded within processes which designers respond to with the aim of producing end products to satisfy clients’ requirements (Ambrose; Patterson and Saville). Ashby and Johnson (40) refer to the design brief as a “solution neutral” statement, the aim being to avoid preconceptions or the narrowing of the creative possibilities of a project. Others describe a consultative (Walsh), collaborative and stakeholder-inclusive process (Phillips). The Scholarly Brief Within scholarly design research, briefs inevitably manifest as an assumed artefact or process within each project; but the reason for their use or antecedents for chosen formats are rarely addressed. For example, in “Creativity in the Design Process” (Dorst and Cross) some elements of the design brief are described. The authors also describe at what stage of the investigation the brief is introduced and present a partial example of the brief. However, there is no explanation of the form of the brief or the reasons behind it. They simply describe it as being typical for the design medium, adding that its use was considered a critical part of addressing the design problem. In a separate study within advertising (Johar et al.), researchers even admit that the omission of crucial elements from the brief—normally present in professional practice—had a detrimental effect on their results. Such examples indicate the importance of briefs for the design process, yet further illustrating the omission of direct engagement with the brief within the research design, methodology, and methods. One exception comes from a study amongst business students (Sadowska and Laffy) that used the design brief as a pedagogical tool and indicates that interaction with, and changes to, elements of a design brief impact the overall learning process of participants, with the brief functioning as a trigger for that process. Such acknowledgement of the agency of a design brief affirms its importance for professional designers (Koslow et al.; Phillips). This use of a brief as a research device informed my use of it as a reflective and motivational conduit when studying graphic designers’ perceptions of stakeholders, and this will be discussed shortly. The Professional Brief Professionally, the brief is a key method of communication between designers and stakeholders, serving numerous functions including: outlining creative requirements, audience, and project scope; confirming project requirements; and assigning and documenting roles, procedures, methods, and approval processes. The format of design briefs varies from complex multi-page procedural documents (Patterson and Saville; Ambrose) produced by marketing departments and sent to graphic design agencies, to simple statements (Jones and Askland; Elebute) from small to medium-sized businesses. These can be described as the initial proposition of the design brief, with the following interactions comprising the ongoing briefing process. However, research points to many concerns about the lack of adequate briefing information (Koslow, Sasser and Riordan). It has been noted (Murray) that, despite its centrality to graphic design, the briefing process rarely lives up to designers’ expectations or requirements, with the approach itself often haphazard. This reinforces the necessarily adaptive, flexible, and compromise-requiring nature of professional graphic design practice, referred to by design researchers (Cross; Paton and Dorst). However, rather than lauding these adaptive and flexible designer abilities as design attributes, such traits are often perceived by professional practitioners as unequal (Benson and Dresdow), having evolved by the imposition by stakeholders, rather than being embraced by graphic designers as positive designer skill-sets. The Indeterminate Brief With insufficient attention cast on graphic design as a specific scholarly discipline (Walker; Jacobs; Heller, Education), there is even less research on the briefing process within graphic design practice (Cumming). Literature from professional practice on the creation and function of graphic design briefs is often formulaic (Phillips) and fractured. It spans professional design bodies, to templates from mass-market printers (Kwik Kopy), to marketing-driven and brand-development approaches, in-house style guides, and instructional YouTube videos (David). A particularly clear summary comes from Britain’s Design Council. This example describes the importance of a good design brief, its requirements, and carries a broad checklist that includes the company background, project aims, and target audience. It even includes stylistic tips such as “don’t be afraid to use emotive language in a brief if you think it will generate a shared passion about the project” (Design Council). From a subjective perspective, these sources appear to contain sensible professional advice. However, with little scholarly research on the topic, how can we know that, for example, using emotive language best informs the design process? Why might this be helpful and desirable (or otherwise) for designers? These varied approaches highlight the indeterminate treatment of the design brief. Nevertheless, the very existence of such diverse methods communicates a pattern of acknowledgement of the criticality of the brief, as well as the desire, by professional bodies, commentators, and suppliers, to ensure that both designers and stakeholders engage effectively with the briefing process. Thus, with such a pedagogic gap in graphic design discourse, scholarly research into the design brief has the potential to inform vernacular and formal educational resources. Researching the Design Brief The research study from which this article emerges (Meron, Strangely) yielded outcomes from face-to-face interviews with eleven (deidentified) graphic designers about their perceptions of design practice, with particular regard to their professional relationships with other creative stakeholders. The study also surveyed online discussions from graphic design forums and blog posts. This first stage of research uncovered feelings of lacking organisational gravitas, creative ownership, professional confidence, and design legitimacy among the designers in relation to stakeholders. A significant causal factor pointed to practitioners’ perceptions of lacking direct access to and involvement with key sources of creative inspiration and information; one specific area being the design brief. It was a discovery that was reproduced thematically during the second stage of the research. This stage repurposed performative design research methods to intervene in graphic designers’ resistance to research (Roberts, et al), with the goal of bypassing practitioners’ tendency to portray their everyday practices using formulaic professionalised answers (Dorland, View). In aiming to understand graphic designers’ underlying motivations, this method replaced the graphic designer participants with trained actors, who re-performed narratives from the online discussions and designer interviews during a series of performance workshops. Performative methodologies were used as design thinking methods to defamiliarise the graphic design process, thereby enabling previously unacknowledged aspects of the design process to be unveiled, identified and analysed. Such defamiliarisation repurposes methods used in creative practice, including design thinking (Bell, Blythe, and Sengers), with performative elements drawing on ethnography (Eisner) and experimental design (Seago and Dunne). Binding these two stages of research study together was a Performative Design Brief—a physical document combining narratives from the online discussions and the designer interviews. For the second stage, this brief was given to a professional theatre director to use as material for a “script” to motivate the actors. In addition to identifying unequal access to the creative process as a potential point of friction, this study yielded outcomes suggesting that designers were especially frustrated when the design brief was unclear, insufficiently detailed, or even missing completely. The performative methodology enabled a refractive approach, using performative metaphor and theatre to defamiliarise graphic design practice, portraying the process through a third-party theatrical prism. This intervened in graphic designers’ habitual communication patterns (Dorland, The View). Thus, combining traditional design research methods with experimental interdisciplinary ones, enabled outcomes that might not otherwise have emerged. It is an example of engaging with the fluid, hybrid (Heller, Teaching), and often elusive practices (van der Waarde) of graphic design. Format, Function, and Use A study (Paton and Dorst) among professional graphic designers attempts to dissect practitioners’ perceptions of different aspects of briefing as a process of ‘framing’. Building on the broader theories of design researchers such as Nigel Cross, Bryan Lawson, and Donald Schön, Paton and Dorst suggest that most of the designers preferred a collaborative briefing process where both they and client stakeholders were directly involved, without intermediaries. This concurs with the desire, from many graphic designers that I interviewed, for unobstructed engagement with the brief. Moreover, narratives from the online discussions that I investigated suggest that the lack of clear frameworks for graphic design briefs is a hotly debated topic, as are perceptions of stakeholder belligerence or misunderstanding. For example, in a discussion from Graphic Design Forums designer experiences range from only ever receiving informal verbal instructions—“basically, we’ve been handed design work and they tell us ‘We need this by EOD’” (VFernandes)—to feeling obliged to pressure stakeholders to provide a brief—“put the burden on them to flesh out the details of a real brief and provide comprehensive material input” (HotButton) —to resignation to an apparent futility of gaining adequate design briefs from stakeholders because— “they will most likely never change” (KitchWitch). Such negative assumptions support Koslow et al.’s assertion that the absence of a comprehensive brief is the most “terrifying” thing for practitioners (9). Thus, practitioners’ frustrations with stakeholders can become unproductive when there is an inadequate design brief, or if the creative requirements of a brief are otherwise removed from the direct orbit of graphic designers. This further informs a narrative of graphic designers perceiving some stakeholders as gatekeepers of the design brief. For example, one interviewed designer believed that stakeholders ‘don’t really understand the process’ (Patricia). Another interviewee suggested that disorganised briefs could be avoided by involving designers early in the process, ensuring that practitioners had direct access to the client as a creative source, rather than having to circumnavigate stakeholders (Marcus). Such perceptions appeared to reinforce beliefs among these practitioners that they lack design capital within the creative process. These perceptions of gatekeeping of the design brief support suggestions of designers responding negatively when stakeholders approach the design process from a different perspective (Wall and Callister), if stakeholders assume a managerial position (Jacobs) and, in particular, if stakeholders are inexperienced in working with designers (Banks et al.; Holzmann and Golan). With such little clarity in the design briefing process, future research may consider comparisons with industries with more formalised briefing processes, established professional statuses, or more linear histories. Indeed, the uneven historical development of graphic design (Frascara; Julier and Narotzky) may influence the inconsistency of its briefing process. Inconsistency as Research Opportunity The inconsistent state of the graphic design brief is reflective of the broader profession that it resides within. Graphic design as a profession remains fluid and inconsistent (Dorland, Tell Me; Jacobs), with even its own practitioners unable to agree on its parameters or even what to call the practice (Meron, Terminology). Pedagogically, graphic design is still emerging as an independent discipline (Cabianca; Davis), struggling to gain capital outside of existing and broader creative practices (Poynor; Triggs). The inherent interdisciplinarity (Harland) and intangibility of graphic design also impact the difficulty of engaging with the briefing process. Indeed, graphic design’s practices have been described as “somewhere between science and superstition (or fact and anecdote)” (Heller, Teaching par. 3). With such obstacles rendering the discipline fractured (Ambrose et al.), it is understandable that stakeholders might find engaging productively with graphic design briefs challenging. This can become problematic, with inadequate stakeholder affinity or understanding of design issues potentially leading to creative discord (Banks et al.; Holzmann and Golan). Identifying potentially problematic and haphazard aspects of the design brief and process also presents opportunities to add value to research into broader relationships between graphic designers and stakeholders. It suggests a practical area of study with which scholarly research on collaborative design approaches might intersect with professional graphic design practice. Indeed, recent research suggests that collaborative approaches offer both process and educational advantages, particularly in the area of persona development, having the ability to discover the “real” brief (Taffe 394). Thus, framing the brief as a collaborative, educative, and negotiative process may allow creative professionals to elucidate and manage the disparate parts of a design process, such as timeframes, stakeholders, and task responsibilities, as well as the cost implications of stakeholder actions such as unscheduled amendments. It can encourage the formalisation of incomplete vernacular briefs, as well as allow for the influence of diverse briefing methods, such as the one-page creative brief of advertising agencies, or more formal project management practices while allowing for some of the fluidity of more agile approaches: acknowledging that changes may be required while keeping all parties informed and involved. In turn, collaborative approaches may contribute towards enabling the value of contributions from both graphic designers and stakeholders and it seems beneficial to look towards design research methodologies that promote collaborative pathways. Mark Steen, for example, argues for co-design as a form of design thinking for enabling stakeholders to combine knowledge with negotiation to implement change (27). Collaborative design methods have also been advocated for use between designers and users, with stakeholders on shared projects, and with external collaborators (Binder and Brandt). Others have argued that co-design methods facilitate stakeholder collaboration “across and within institutional structures” while challenging existing power relations, albeit leaving structural changes largely unaffected (Farr 637). The challenge for collaborative design research is to seek opportunities and methodologies to conduct design brief research within a graphic design process that often appears amorphous, while also manifesting complex designer–stakeholder dynamics. Doubly so, when the research focus—the graphic design brief—often appears as nebulous an entity as the practice it emerges from. Conclusion The research discussed in this article suggests that graphic designers distrust a creative process that itself symbolises an inconsistent, reactive, and often accidental historical development of their profession and pedagogy. Reflecting this, the graphic design brief emerges almost as a metaphor for this process. The lack of overt discussion about the format, scope, and process of the brief feeds into the wider framework of graphic design’s struggle to become an independent scholarly discipline. This, in turn, potentially undermines the professional authority of graphic design practice that some of its practitioners believe is deficient. Ultimately, the brief and its processes must become research-informed parts of graphic design pedagogy. Embracing the brief as a pedagogical, generative, and inseparable part of the design process can inform the discourse within education, adding scholarly value to practice and potentially resulting in increased agency for practitioners. The chameleon-like nature of graphic design’s constant adaptation to ever-changing industry requirements makes research into the role and influences of its briefing process challenging. Thus, it also follows that the graphic design brief is unlikely to quickly become as formalised a document or process as those from other disciplines. But these are challenges that scholars and professionals must surely embrace if pedagogy is to gain the research evidence to influence practice. As this article argues, the often obfuscated practices and inherent interdisciplinarity of graphic design benefit from experimental research methods, while graphic designers appear responsive to inclusive approaches. Thus, performative methods appear effective as tools of discovery and collaborative methodologies offer hope for organisational intervention. References Ambrose, Gavin. Design Thinking for Visual Communication. Fairchild, 2015. Ambrose, Gavin, Paul Harris, and Nigel Ball. The Fundamentals of Graphic Design. Bloomsbury, 2020. Ashby, M.F., and Kara Johnson. Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design. Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2010. Banks, Mark, et al. "Where the Art Is: Defining and Managing Creativity in New Media SME’s." Creativity and Innovation Management 11.4 (2002): 255-64. Bell, Genevieve, Mark Blythe, and Phoebe Sengers. "Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 12.2 (2005): 149-73. Benson, Joy, and Sally Dresdow. "Design Thinking: A Fresh Approach for Transformative Assessment Practice." Journal of Management Education 38.3 (2014): 436-61. Binder, Thomas, and Eva Brandt. "The Design:Lab as Platform in Participatory Design Research." CoDesign 4.2 (2008). Blyth, Alastair, and John Worthington. Managing the Brief for Better Design. Routledge, 2010. Cabianca, David. "A Case for the Sublime Uselessness of Graphic Design." Design and Culture 8.1 (2016): 103-22. Cross, Nigel. Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work. Berg, 2011. Cumming, Deborah. "An Investigation into the Communication Exchange between Small Business Client and Graphic Designer." Robert Gordon U, 2007. David, Gareth. "The Graphic Design Brief." 5 June 2021 <https://youtu.be/EMG6qJp_sPY 2017>. Davis, Meredith. "Tenure and Design Research: A Disappointingly Familiar Discussion." Design and Culture 8.1 (2016): 123-31. De Michelis, G., C. Simone and K. Schmidt, eds. An Ethnographic Study of Graphic Designers. Third European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. 1993. U of Surrey, UK. Design Council. "How to Commission a Designer: Step 4: Brief Your Designer." Design Council. 3 June 2021 <https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/how-commissiondesigner-step-4-brief-your-designer>. Dorland, AnneMarie. Tell Me Why You Did That: Learning “Ethnography” from the Design Studio. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, 2016. ———. "The View from the Studio: Design Ethnography and Organizational Cultures."Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2017. Vol. 1. 2017. 232-46. Dorst, Kees, and Nigel Cross. "Creativity in the Design Process: Co-Evolution of Problem–Solution." Design Studies 22 (2001): 425–37. Eisner, Elliot. Concerns and Aspirations for Qualitative Research in the New Millennium. Issues in Art and Design Teaching. RoutledgeFalmer, 2003. Elebute, Ayo. "Influence of Layout and Design on Strategy and Tactic for Communicating Advertising Messages." Global Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences 4.6 (2016): 34-47. Farr, Michelle. "Power Dynamics and Collaborative Mechanisms in Co-Production and Co-Design Processes." Critical Social Policy 38.4 (2017): 623–644. DOI: 10.1177/0261018317747444. Frascara, Jorge. "Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science?" Design Issues 5.1 (1988): 18-29. DOI: 10.2307/1511556. Harland, Robert G. "Seeking to Build Graphic Design Theory from Graphic Design Research." Routledge Companion to Design Research. Eds. Paul Rodgers and Joyce Yee. Routledge, 2015. 87-97. Heller, Steven. The Education of a Graphic Designer. Allworth P, 2015. ———. "Teaching Tools." Teaching Graphic Design History. Allworth, 2019. 312. Holzmann, Vered, and Joseph Golan. "Leadership to Creativity and Management of Innovation? The Case of the 'Innovation Club' in a Production Company." American Journal of Industrial and Business Management 6 (2016): 60-71. HotButton. "Kind of a Design Brief?" 2016. 28 July 2018 <https://web.archive.org/web/20160310013457/http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/forum/graphic-design/general/1619626-kind-of-a-designbrief?p=1619683#post1619683>. Jacobs, Jessica. "Managing the Creative Process within Graphic Design Firms: Literature Review." Dialectic 1.2 (2017): 155-78. Johar, Gita Venkataramani, Morris B. Holbrook, and Barbara B. Stern. "The Role of Myth in Creative Advertising Design: Theory, Process and Outcome." Journal of Advertising 30.2 (2001): 1-25. Jones, Wyn M., and Hedda Haugen Askland. "Design Briefs: Is There a Standard?" International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education. 2012. Khan, Ayub. Better by Design: An Introduction to Planning and Designing a New Library Building. Facet, 2009. KitchWitch. "Kind of a Design Brief?" 2016. 28 July 2018 <https://web.archive.org/web/20160310013457/http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/graphic-design/general/1619626-kind-of-a-design-brief?p=1619687#post1619687>. Kwik Kopy. "Design Brief." 2018. 5 June 2021 <https://www.kwikkopy.com.au/blog/graphic-designbrief-template>. Koslow, Scott, Sheila Sasser, and Edward Riordan. "What Is Creative to Whom and Why? Perceptions in Advertising Agencies." Journal of Advertising Research 43.1 (2003). “Marcus”. Interview by the author. 2013. Martin, Robert Cecil. Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices. Prentice Hall PTR, 2003. Meron, Yaron. "Strangely Familiar: Revisiting Graphic Designers’ Perceptions of Their Relationships with Stakeholders." RMIT University, 2019. ———. "Terminology and Design Capital: Examining the Pedagogic Status of Graphic Design through Its Practitioners’ Perceptions of Their Job Titles." International Journal of Art & Design Education 40.2 (2021): 374-88. “Patricia”. Interview by the author. 2013. Paton, Bec, and Kees Dorst. "Briefing and Reframing: A Situated Practice." Design Studies 32.6 (2011): 573-87. Patterson, Jacinta, and Joanne Saville. Viscomm: A Guide to Visual Communication Design VCE Units, 2012.1-4. Petersen, Kai, Claes Wohlin, and Dejan Baca. "The Waterfall Model in Large-Scale Development." . Proceedings of Product-Focused Software Process Improvement: 10th International Conference, Profes 2009, Oulu, Finland, June 15-17, 2009. Eds. Frank Bomarius et al. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. Springer, 2009. 386-400. Phillips, Peter L. Creating the Perfect Design Brief: How to Manage Design for Strategic Advantage. Allworth P, 2014. Poynor, Rick. "Does Graphic Design History Have a Future?" Print 65.4 (2011): 30-32. Roberts, Lucienne, Rebecca Wright, and Jessie Price. Graphic Designers Surveyed. Ed. Lucienne Roberts. London, UK: GraphicDesign&, 2015. Sadowska, Noemi, and Dominic Laffy. "The Design Brief: Inquiry into the Starting Point in a Learning Journey." Design Journal 20, Sup. 1 (2017): S1380-S89. Seago, Alex, and Anthony Dunne. "New Methodologies in Art and Design Research: The Object as Discourse." Design Issues 15.2 (1999): 11-17. Steen, Marc. "Co-Design as a Process of Joint Inquiry and Imagination." Design Issues 29.2 (2013): 16-28. DOI: 10.1162/DESI_a_00207. Taffe, Simone. "Who’s in Charge? End-Users Challenge Graphic Designers’ Intuition through Visual Verbal Co-Design." The Design Journal 20, Sup. 1 (2017): S390-S400. Triggs, Teal. "Graphic Design History: Past, Present, and Future." Design Issues 27.1 (2011): 3-6. Van der Waarde, Karel. "Graphic Design as Visual Arguments: Does This Make a Reliable Appraisal Possible?" Perspective on Design: Research, Education and Practice. Eds. Raposo, Daniel, João Neves, and José Silva. Springer Series in Design and Innovation. Springer, 2020. 89-101. VFernandes. "Kind of a Design Brief?" 2016. 28 July 2018 < https://web.archive.org/web/20160310013457/http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/graphic-design/general/1619626-kind-of-a-design-brief#post1619626>. Walker, Sue. "Research in Graphic Design." Design Journal 20.5 (2017): 549-59. Wall, James A., Jr., and Ronda Roberts Callister. "Conflict and Its Management." Journal of Management 21.3 (1995). Walsh, Vivien. "Design, Innovation and the Boundaries of the Firm." Research Policy 25 (1996): 509-29.

At first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of works of art will be affected. It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall only have to summon them and there they will be…They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. (Paul Valéry, ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, 225-6) Paul Valéry made these remarks in 1934, as the first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey, as Muzak was born, as the Associated Press started its international wirephoto service, and as a company called Imperial & International Communications renamed itself Cable & Wireless. Regular TV broadcasting would begin in England two years later, and in the U.S. in 1939, the same year John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry completed the prototype of the first digital computer. (Caslon Analytics) Valéry’s prognostications may of course be read alongside the thinking of Walter Benjamin, who quotes this passage in his famous essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Both stress that it is not simply the forms taken by art works that are changing, but their very conditions of possibility, or put another way (Benjamin’s), that they are henceforth designed with their reproducibility in mind. It is therefore neither uniqueness, nor specificity, but the potential for ‘ubiquity’, that yields the value of the work made for the new media. Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.(226) Two things have always struck me about Valéry’s analysis. The first is his characterization – for want of a better word, metaphysical – of the new cultural produce. It is not simply a movement from the clunky physicality of the artisanal object to that of the commodity; rather, it is a commutation, a transmogrification, a liquidation of the cultural object, whose value and form henceforth arise according to its new fluidity. The cultural ‘fluid’ – what is given (data) to our ‘sense organs’ – behaves more like energy, or money, than the older art object. These properties suggest a whole new political economy of the culture industries. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality So began what we might call our Broadband Dreaming. Secondly, Valéry cannot but invoke the public utility company, a dominant corporate form in his day, but which to us is an endangered species, having almost liquidated itself over the course of the last few decades’ ecstatic neoliberalism. According to the Shorter OED, the “utility” provides something “able to satisfy human needs or wants”; it is a service (such as electricity or water) considered essential to the community; and it describes the provider of such a service or supply, usually ‘a nationalized or private monopoly subject to public regulation’. And this is precisely why I return to Valéry in opening a volume on ‘fibre’. For it is the privatization of communications infrastructure, hastening the closure of this zone of ‘public’ interest and community ‘needs’ – and this is as much about the downgrading of expectations as of actual services – that underlies the current political economy of networks and networked culture, and which prompts many of the articles collected here. What’s more, Valéry is especially alert to the peculiar purity of demand that the utility assumes, and our impatience for art’s sensory data “when not only our mind desires it, but our soul and whole being craves and as it were anticipates it”. Perhaps this well-nigh existential impatience is a necessary condition of networking – will we ever be satisfied with the bandwidth we have? As Gerard Goggin writes in the feature article: As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer, we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. That which we have ‘on tap’ has a way of engendering in us a reliance and an appetite somewhat out of keeping with actual need. Where conventional economic analysis might therefore struggle to explain our current obsession with fibre, histories of addiction, of affect and of symbolic exchange might succeed. The Fibreculture Flavour When we started the Fibreculture list in early 2001, national communications policy was a central concern, as was the question of how to make the best of it through critique and alternative networking practices, against the many challenges presented by the global and local zeitgeist of privatization, and by the post-dotcom deflation of the telecoms sector. Ravenous former monopolies, in rebound mode, were punished for their over-extensions into markets they knew little about, as the blue skies clouded over. Against this backdrop, it seemed most urgent to support, build upon, and learn from the experiences of a panoply of alternative media networks – of virtual communities getting real, and real communities going virtual – in order to learn the lessons of the dotcom debacle. Buzzwords were: D.I.Y. and tactical media, openness, sustainability, and collaborative and distributed models. But this collaboration between Fibreculture and M/C is not just content-sharing by two networks with overlapping interests, although this sort of temporary network chiasm demonstrates an untapped flexibility that ICTs retain in spite of the calcification of their institutions and their economic devaluation post-dotcom. Rather, at the heart of this experiment was an alternative peer-review process, a much-needed intervention into the orthodoxy (too long unrenovated) of blind peer-review. It took the form of a supplementary round of ‘collaborative text filtering’. Traditionally, peer-review is closed (‘blind’), centralized, and tends to be somewhat arbitrary; our alternative is distributed, open and more heuristic. From the list’s subscribers, small cells of four or five readers were formed; submissions were posted to the list, assigned to a cell, and readers were asked to post their critical responses within two weeks. Some of the ensuing dialogue was fascinating, all of it engaged and generous. The Fibreculture flavour thus consists of a wider discussion and debate inflecting the author’s final submission. ‘Review’ here was oriented towards an opening, rather than a closure, of the text, giving rise to a sharing of resources, references and informed opinions. These exchanges remain accessible via the list archives (look for subject lines ‘MCFIBRE’ and ‘Re: MCFIBRE’) at: <http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-June/subject.html> <http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-May/subject.html> What’s lost is anonymity and the discursive or disciplinary specialization of reviewers – both are key components of the older model, both with their downside. The question must be asked: If interdisciplinarity means anything beyond the proliferation of competing discourses, what are its implications for the practices and economies of academic publishing, and for the ‘knowledge economy’ generally? Of course, the spread of topics does mirror Fibreculture’s interests. Half of the authors assembled here are regular contributors to the list. They include its co-founder, Geert Lovink, who manages to report and speculate (at once!) on the much-paraded relationship between art and science; and Gerard Goggin, whose informative feature article takes up many of the concerns raised above, with respect to broadband infrastructure (and policy) in particular. Emy Tseng and Kyle Eischen take the notion of infrastructure more technically in considering how it might inform a progressive techno-geography. Fibreculture explores the politics of networks and ICTs, but also their cultures. The experiential (and ‘affective’) dimension of networked culture was also a prevalent theme of responses to the Call For Papers, including artist and architect Petra Gemeinboeck’s theoretical explanation of her installation Maya – Veil of Illusion. Fibre is where the economic meets the social, where the public meets the private, and intrudes upon it. Grayson Cooke responds in kind (and with humour) to the intrusive excesses of Spam. For Adrian Mackenzie, both social and technical practices “are integrated in our politics. When politics integrates human affairs and technical things, collective affects concerning infrastructure arise… Infrastructures are integral to how cultural forms of life render and inhabit their worlds.” But some aspects of sociality migrate to the networks more easily than others, as Jon Marshall discovers in his analysis of gendered and gendering behaviour online. For all their complexity, the interweavings of affect in the networks are anything but random. As we find in Andrew Murphie’s anthropological musing (after José Gil) on the place of ritual in the technosphere: Even at its apparently most disorganized … (in ritual ecstasy for example), ritual magic is in reality extremely organised (although an organisation of forces and translations rather than one of stable states). As Gil writes, even the 'gestures, words, or cries of the possessed are coded'. Indeed, the codes involved are precisely those of possession, but of a possession by networks rather than of them… Also of a theoretical bent is Andrew Goffey’s fascinating synopsis of the relationship – potentially very revealing – between immunology and theories of networked communication and organization. A welcome reminder of the necessity, and the speculative pleasures, of pressing on with cross-disciplinary investigation, even when it seems ‘interdisciplinarity’ has devolved from a type of work to a mere ‘framework’ for funding agendas and institutional window-dressing. As with all Fibreculture projects, no all-inclusive vision of anything is offered here. What we present instead is another installment of networked multiplicity, the unpredictable mixture of codes, idioms and critical thought on which list cultures seem to thrive. With thanks to the team at M/C, to the contributors and reviewers (especially Mel Gregg, Ned Rossiter and Esther Milne), and to all who contribute to the Fibreculture community. http://www.fibreculture.org Works Cited Paul Valéry, ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, in Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Caslon Analytics, ‘Media and Communications Timeline’ 1926-50 <http://www.caslon.com.au/timeline5.htm> accessed 18/08/03 Links http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-June/subject.html http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-May/subject.html http://www.caslon.com.au/timeline5.htm http://www.fibreculture.org/ http://www.fibreculture.org/index.html http://www.fibreculture.org/mcfibre.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Teh, David. "Fibre " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/01-editorial.html >. APA Style Teh, D. (2003, Aug 26). Fibre . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/01-editorial.html >

Contemporary culinary discourse in Australia has been dominated by the notion that migration and the increased mobility of Australians is responsible for filling a culinary void, as though, because we have had no peasantry we have no affinity with either the land or its produce. This argument serves to alienate Australians of British descent and its validity is open to questioning. It's an argument in urgent need of debate because cuisine stands out as the signifier of a 'multicultural' nation. Despite all the political posturing, food has 'long been the acceptable face of multiculturalism' (Gunew 13). We argue that the rhetoric of multiculturalism serves to widen the chasm between Australians of British descent and other migrants by encouraging the 'us' and 'them' mentality. We have examined the common links in the food stories of three women from disparate backgrounds. The sample is small in quantitative terms but we felt that if the culinary histories of just three women ran counter to the dominant discourse, then they would provide a new point of departure. In doing this we hope to question the precept driving culinary discourse which gives more weight to what men have said and done, than what women have cooked and how; and propagates mythologies about the eating habits of 'ethnic' migrants. Multiculturalism The terminology surrounding policies that seek to manage difference and diversity is culturally loaded and tends to perpetuate binaries. "Multiculturalism, circulates in Australia as a series of discursive formations serving a variety of institutional interests" (Gunew 256). In Australia multicultural policy seeks to "manage our cultural diversity so that the social cohesion of our nation is preserved" (Advisory Council on Multicultural Affairs 4). The result is to allow diversity that is sanctioned and is to some extent homogenised, while difference is not understood and is contained (see Newman). Multicultural? Who does it include and exclude? Gunew points out that official formulations of multiculturalism exclude people of 'Anglo-Celtic' origin, as though they had no 'ethnicity'. Multiculturalism, while addressing some of the social problems of immigration, is propelled at government level by our need for national cultural policy (see Stratton and Ang). To have a national cultural policy you need, it would seem, a film industry, a music industry, and a cuisine. In his history of Australian cuisine, Symons has only briefly alluded to women's role in the development of Australia's 'industrial cuisine'. One Continuous Picnic presents an essentially masculinist history, a pessimistic derogatory view giving little value to domestic traditions passed from mother to daughter. Women are mentioned only as authors of cookbooks produced throughout the 19th century and as the housewives whose role in the 1950s changed due to the introduction of labour-saving devices. Scant reference is made to the pre-eminent icon of Australian rural culinary history, the Country Women's Association1 and their recipe books. These books have gone through numerous editions from the 1920s, but Symons refers to them dismissively as a 'plain text' arising from the 'store-shelf of processed ingredients' (Symons 201). What of the 'vegie' patch, the afternoon tea? These traditions are mentioned, but only in passing. The products of arduous and loving baking are belittled as 'pretty things'. Is this because they are too difficult to document or because they are women's business? Female writers Barbara Santich and Marion Halligan have both written on the importance of these traditions in the lives of Australian women. Symons's discourse concentrates on 'industrial cuisine', but who is to say that its imperatives were not transgressed. The available data derives from recipe books, sales figures and advertising, but we don't actually know how much food came from other sources. Did your grandmother keep chickens? Did your grandfather fish? Terra Australis Culinae Nullius2 Michael Symons's precept is: This is the only continent which has not supported an agrarian society ... . Our land missed that fertile period when agriculture and cooking were created. There has never been the creative interplay between society and the soil. Almost no food has ever been grown by the person who eats it, almost no food has been preserved in the home and indeed, very little preparation is now done by a family cook. This is the uncultivated continent. Our history is without peasants. (10, our emphasis) This notion of terra Australis culinae nullius is problematic on two levels. The use of the word indigenous implies both Aboriginal and British settler culinary tradition. This statement consequently denies both traditional Aboriginal knowledge and the British traditions. The importance of Aboriginal foodways, their modern exploitation and their impact on the future of Australian cuisine needs recognition, but the complexity of the issue places it beyond the bounds of this paper. Symons's view of peasantry is a romanticised one, and says less about food and more about nostalgia for a more permanent, less changing environment. Advertising of 'ethnic' food routinely exploits this nostalgia by appropriating the image of the cheerful peasant. These advertisements perpetuate the mythologies that link pastoral images with 'family values'. These myths, or what Barthes describes as 'cultural truths', hold that migrant families all have harmonious relationships, are benevolently patriarchal and they all sit down to eat together. 'Ethnic' families are at one with the land and use recipes made from fresher, more natural produce, that are handed down through the female line and have had the benefit of generations of culinary wisdom. (See Gallegos & Mansfield.) So are the culinary traditions of Australians of British descent so different from those of migrant families? Joan, born near her home in Cunderdin in the Western Australian wheatbelt, grew up on a farm in reasonably prosperous circumstances with her six siblings. After marrying, she remained in the Cunderdin area to continue farming. Giovanna was born in 1915 on a farm four kilometres outside Vasto, in the Italian region of Abruzzi. One of seven children, her father died when she was young and at the age of twenty, she came to Australia to marry a Vastese man 12 years her senior. Maria was born in Madeira in 1946, in a coastal village near the capital Funchal. Like Giovanna she is the fifth of seven children and arrived in Australia at the age of twenty to marry. We used the information elicited from these three women to scrutinise some of the mythology surrounding ethnic families. Myth 1: 'Ethnic' families all eat together. All three women said their families had eaten together in the past and it was Joan who commented that what was missing in Australia today was people sitting down together to share a meal. Joan's farming community all came in for an extended midday meal from necessity, as the horses needed to be rested. Both women described radio, television, increasing work hours and different shifts as responsible for the demise of the family meal. Commensality is one of the common boundary markers for all groups 'indicating a kind of equality, peership, and the promise of further kinship links stemming from the intimate acts of dining together' (Nash 11). It is not only migrant families who eat together, and the demise of the family meal is more widely felt. Myth 2: Recipes in 'ethnic' families are passed down from generation to generation. Handing recipes down from generation to generation is not limited to just 'ethnic' families. All three women describe learning to cook from their mothers. Giovanna and Maria had hands-on experiences at very young ages, cooking for the family out of necessity. Joan did not have to cook for her family but her mother still taught her basic cookery as well as the finer points. The fluidity of the mother-daughter identity is expressed and documented by the handing on of recipes. Joan's community thought the recipes important enough to document in a written form, and so the West Australian version of the CWA cookbook became a reality. Joan, when asked about why the CWA developed a cookbook, replied that they wanted to record the recipes that were all well tried by women who spent the bulk of their days in the kitchen, cooking. Being taught to cook, teaching your children to cook and passing on recipes crosses borders, and does not serve to create or maintain boundaries. Myth 3: 'Ethnic' food is never prepared from processed products but always from homegrown produce. During their childhoods the range of food items purchased by the families was remarkably similar for all three women. All described buying tinned fish, rice and sugar, while the range of items produced from what was grown reflected common practices for the use and preservation of fresh produce. The major difference was the items that were in abundance, so while Joan describes pickling meat in addition to preserving fruits, Maria talks about preserving fish and Giovanna vegetables. The traditions developed around what was available. Joan and her family grew the food that they ate, preserved the food in their own home, and the family cook did all the preparation. To suggest they did not have a creative interplay with the soil is suggesting that they were unskilled in making a harsh landscape profitable. Joan's family could afford to buy more food items than the other families. Given the choice both Giovanna's and Maria's families would have only been too eager to make their lives easier. For example, on special occasions when the choice was available Giovanna's family chose store-bought pasta. The perception of the freshness and tastiness of peasant cuisine and affinity with the land obscures the issue, which for much of the world is still quantity, not quality. It would seem that these women's stories have points of reference. All three women describe the sense of community food engendered. They all remember sharing and swapping recipes. This sense of community was expressed by the sharing of food -- regardless of how little there was or what it was. The legacy lives on, while no longer feeling obliged to provide an elaborate afternoon tea as she did in her married life, visitors to Joan's home arrive to the smell of freshly baked biscuits shared over a cup of tea or coffee. Giovanna is only too eager to share her Vastese cakes with a cup of espresso coffee, and as new acquaintances we are obliged to taste each of the five different varieties of cakes and take some home. Maria, on the other hand, offered instant coffee and store-bought biscuits; having worked outside the home all her life and being thirty years younger than the other women, is this perhaps the face of modernity? The widespread anticipation of the divisions between these women has more to do with power relationships and the politics of east, west, north, south than with the realities of everyday life. The development of a style of eating will depend on your knowledge both as an individual and as a collective, the ingredients that are available at any one time, the conditions under which food has to be grown, and your own history. For the newly-arrived Southern Europeans meat was consumed in higher quantities because its availability was restricted in their countries of origin, to eat meat regularly was to increase your status in society. Interest in 'ethnic' food and its hybridisation is a global phenomenon and the creolisation of eating has been described both in America (see Garbaccia) and in Britain (James 81). The current obsession with the 'ethnic' has more to do with nostalgia than tolerance. The interviews which were conducted highlight the similarities between three women from different backgrounds despite differences in age and socioeconomic status. Our cuisine is in the process of hybridisation, but let us not forget who is manipulating this process and the agendas under which it is encouraged. To lay claim that one tradition is wonderful, while the other either does not exist or has nothing to offer, perpetuates divisive binaries. By focussing on what these women have in common rather than their differences we begin to critically interrogate the "culinary binary". It is our intention to stimulate debate that we hope will eventually lead to the encouragement of difference rather than the futile pursuit of authenticity. Footnotes 1. The Country Women's Association is an organisation that began in Australia in the 1920s. It is still operational and has as one of its primary aims the improvement of the welfare and conditions of women and children, especially those living in the country. 2. The term terra australis nullius is used to describe Australia at the point of colonisation. The continent was regarded as "empty" because the native people had neither improved nor settled on the land. We have extended this concept to incorporate cuisine. This notion of emptiness has influenced readings of Australian history which overlook the indigenous population and their relationship with the land. References Advisory Council on Multicultural Affairs. Towards A National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. Canberra, 1988. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993. Belasco, Warren. "Ethnic Fast Foods: The Corporate Melting Pot". Food and Foodways 2.1 (1987): 1-30. Gallegos, Danielle, and Alan Mansfield. "Eclectic Gastronomes or Conservative Eaters: What Does Advertising Say?" Nutrition Unplugged, Proceedings of the 16th Dietitians Association of Australia National Conference. Hobart: Dietitians Association of Australia, 1997. Gallegos, Danielle, and Alan Mansfield. "Screen Cuisine: The Pastes, Powders and Potions of the Mediterranean Diet". Celebrate Food, Proceedings of the 17th Dietitians Association of Australia National Conference. Sydney: Dietitians Association of Australia, 1998. Garbaccia, D.R. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Boston: Harvard UP, 1998. Gunew, Sneja. "Denaturalising Cultural Nationalisms; Multicultural Readings of 'Australia'." Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 245-66. Gunew, Sneja. Introduction. Feminism and the Politics of Difference. Eds. S. Gunew and A. Yeatman. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993. xiii-xxv. Halligan, Marion. Eat My Words. Melbourne: Angus & Robertson, 1990. Harvey, D. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. James, Alison. "How British Is British Food". Food, Health and Identity. Ed. P. Caplan. London: Routledge, 1997. 71-86. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996. Nash, Manning. The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Newman, Felicity. Didn't Your Mother Teach You Not to Talk with Your Mouth Full? Food, Families and Friction. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia, 1997. Santich, Barbara. Looking for Flavour. Adelaide: Wakefield, 1996. Stratton, Jon, and Ien Ang. "Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in Australia and the USA". Continuum 8.2 (1994): 124-58. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic. Adelaide: Duck, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Danielle Gallegos, Felicity Newman. "What about the Women? Food, Migration and Mythology." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/women.php>. Chicago style: Danielle Gallegos, Felicity Newman, "What about the Women? Food, Migration and Mythology," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/women.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Danielle Gallegos, Felicity Newman. (1999) What about the women? Food, migration and mythology. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/women.php> ([your date of access]).

Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. Dir./Filmmaker John Little. Netflix DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000. Daidjo, Yuzan. Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Tuttle Martial Arts. Boston: Tuttle, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,1987. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Netflix DVD. Artisan, 2000. Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan. New Haven: Yale UP,1998. Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Jansen, Marius, ed. Warrior Rule in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays. Trans. Donald Richie. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Lanzagorta, Marco. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” Senses of Cinema. Sept-Oct 2002. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/ghost_dog.htm>. Mol, Serge. Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Eubanks, Kevin P. "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>. APA Style Eubanks, K. (May 2007) "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>.