Journal articles: 'Victoria's life was finally working for her' – Grafiati (2024)

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The aim of this essay is to illuminate the lived experiences of Victoria—an undocumented immigrant woman of Mexican origin working and living in the United States. Drawing on an in-depth interview conducted with Victoria following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, we identify a set of discursive and material conditions that inform her lived reality. By examining three mutually constituting stages of Victoria’s life, we invite readers to consider how the imbricated nexus between global manifestations of colonization, migration, and the political rise of right-wing extremism is embodied and negotiated locally by one particular woman. To aid in theoretically informing the excerpts provided by Victoria, we draw on Judith Butler’s recent works in which she develops, individually and collaboratively, ideas of dispossession and precariousness. We find that dispossession and precariousness foreground the currents of vulnerability that are located palpably in Victoria’s narrative. Finally, by engaging with a genre of feminine writing that collapses the traditional boundaries between theory and practice, we revisit the question of praxis in relation to the researchers’ responsibility toward the participants of their study.

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Making decisions that will change your life significantly can be very challenging and you may postpone these decisions on a regular basis. When you finally take the plunge to do something new it will change your life indefinitely. Sarah Thorpe, an early years practitioner, gives an insight into working overseas and how it has opened her eyes to different ways of teaching and learning.

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The Wesker Trilogy is critically acclaimed as one of the most ambitious project by a young playwright under the age of thirty years. The trilogy in its broader aspect reflects the situation of the working class community after the Second World War was over. Roots is the central play of the famous trilogy which deals with the personal aspect of the humanitarian society. The story revolves around the protagonist of the play and gives an account of a fortnight in Beatie’s life. All her dreams shattering within a fortnight and her journey towards the path of self discovery become the central theme of the play. Beatie Bryant turns out to be the spoke person of the working class people and the play mainly focuses on the problems of working class in the 20th century. Beatie finally succeeds in librating herself from the fixed ideologies of society and finds a voice and thought of her own. She establishes her identity and her power of expression by asking questions and not by involving in some revolutionary acts.

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This research is aimed to revel the personality determinant and Veronika`s ego-state. The theory that applied in this research is personality determinant by Elizabeth Hurlock and transactional analysis proposed by Eric Berne. The method used in this research is qualitative descriptive method. The condition that Veronika experiences is that her mother in determining her future pressures Veronika`s life. Everything that she wants to do, it must be controlled by her mother. Finally, she feels tired living with that condition therefore she prefers to end up her life through suicide. Unlikely, she is failure in doing it. It is found out aspiration and achievement, education, social, emotion, family, sex, physical, and intellectual factor determinant her personality. However, her personality is dominant by family factor. Her view in relationship toward a life and death are she feels happy living when she was to child. However, she feels empty when she is adult women and has everything. She gets bored with her routine activity such as go for working in the morning and gets back in the afternoon. She has not any purpose of life anymore. Since living the mental hospital, her life rise back. She understands the meaning of life through motivation from her friends and love from young man. There are three aspects of her ego-state within her such as parents, adult, and child aspects. However, the adult ego state determinates from them all.

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This three-part collection presents the physicality of borders as conceived by Paulo Nazareth (born Brazil, 1977). First, a 2006 series of pamphlets depict migration in ways that may not be realistic or factually realizable, but the point is the intention. In a second step, a photo series capture moments of the artist’s journey on the road of the Americas, traveling through 15 countries on foot and by bus from his native Brazil to the United States. Finally, the poignant 2022 testimony of a cleaning lady working for his gallerist Mendes Wood DM is presented here in the original Spanish, as Florencia Cruz Ramos recounts her journey as an immigrant and the impact of Nazareth’s work on her life.

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This organizational life history documents how the founder of an elite gymnastics training organization led her organizational members to resist what she deemed to be unethical institutional influences prior to working toward changing those institutional practices. The study contributes the idea that institutional resistance leadership at the team and organizational levels can precede disruptive institutional entrepreneurship activities at the institutional level. The diachronic analysis describes the micro, local, historical, intra-organizational work that serves as a proving ground for generating resistance before proceeding to institutional level work; in doing so, the article explores how leadership activities can be ‘scaled up’ to affect institutions through the intermediary of an organization. Identity violations triggered a founder’s sensemaking and moved her to lead others to resist institutional forces on her own organization’s training practices. The founder used the rhetorical strategy of narrative to create sensebreaking to help members make sense of the dominant institutional influence, articulate an alternative philosophy, translate the alternative into practices, and acquire material resources for undertaking resistance at the local organizational level. Finally, in attempting to scale up to institutional entrepreneurship, the institutional resistance leadership then struggled with defining success for the organization in the view of dominant institutional actors.

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Mary Ward was born in 1585 near Ripon, eldest child of a recusant family. She spent her whole life until the age of 21 in the intimate circle of Yorkshire Catholics, with her parents, her Wright grandparents at Ploughland in Holderness, Mrs. Arthington, née Ingleby, at Harewell Hall in Nidderdale, and finally with the Babthorpes of Babthorpe and Osgodby. Convinced of her religious vocation, but of course unable to pursue it openly in England, she spent some time as a Poor Clare in Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands, first in a Flemish community, then in the English house that she helped to found. She was happy there, but was shown by God that he was calling her to ‘some other thing’. Exactly what it was to be was not yet clear, so she returned to England, spent some time in London working for the Catholic cause, and discovering that there was much for women to do—then returned to Saint-Omer with a small group of friends, other young women in their 20s, to start a school, chiefly for English Catholic girls, and through prayer and penance to find out more clearly what God was asking. Not surprisingly, given her early religious formation in English Catholic households, served by Jesuit missionaries, and her desire to work for her own country, the guidance that came was ‘Take the same of the Society’. She spent the rest of her life trying to establish a congregation for women which would live by the Constitutions of St. Ignatius, be governed by a woman general superior, under the Pope, not under diocesan bishops or a male religious order, and would be unenclosed, free to be sent ‘among the Turks or any other infidels, even to those who live in the region called the Indies, or among any heretics whatsoever, or schismatics, or any of the faithful’. There were always members working in the underground Church in England, and in Mary Ward's own lifetime there were ten schools, in Flanders and Northern France, Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary. But her long struggle for approbation met with failure—Rome after the Council of Trent, which had insisted on enclosure for all religious women, was not yet ready for Jesuitesses. In 1631 Urban VIII banned her Institute by a Bull of Suppression, imprisoning Mary Ward herself for a time in the Poor Clare convent on the Anger in Munich. She spent the rest of her life doing all she could to continue her work, but when she died in Heworth, outside York, in 1645 and was buried in Osbaldwick churchyard, only a handful of followers remained together, some with her in England, 23 in Rome, a few in Munich, all officially laywomen. It is owing to these women that Mary Ward's Institute has survived to this day.

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Research ships are much more numerous on the high seas in the 1990s than they were in the 1950s. At that time the United Kingdom was fortunate in that it had a purpose-built research vessel, RRS 'Discovery II' (see inside back cover), the successor to Scott's 'Discovery' (which was itself granted the title Royal Research Ship in 1923, see inside front cover). 'Discovery II's prime objectives had originally been oceanographic research in the Antarctic relevant to the whaling industry, to which end she had completed six two-year Antarctic commissions. In the 1950s she was being operated by the National Institute of Oceanography and was working extensively in the North Atlantic, covering the gamut of marine physics, chemistry, biology and geology, including participation in the research programme of the International Geophysical Year. However, by 1959 she was 30 years old, and both scientific space and stability had become limiting. Increasingly stringent Ministry of Trade requirements were also making successive refits less and less cost-effective. In April of that year the first brief outline for a replacement vessel was prepared, and six months later discussions between naval architects and the National Oceanographic Council (represented by Dr H.F.P. Herdman) produced an outline draft specification for the new ship. Further discussions with the Admiralty finally resulted, in June 1961, in an order being placed for a new vessel, at an estimated cost of £800K (Deacon, 1967).The new ship, the RRS 'Discovery', was launched in July 1962 and commissioned on 17 December, 10 m shorter than her originally conceived length but at a contained final cost of £802K.

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This interview with Black and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo author Rebecca Roanhorse explores the innovations she has brought to horror and science-fiction genres by speaking from the colonial difference and centring Indigenous histories, cosmologies, and spirituality in her works. The influence of Grace Dillon’s concept of Indigenous Futurisms on Roanhorse’s oeuvre is explored, as is the importance of Indigenous representation in white-dominated literary fields and how such representation can resist colonial repression while empowering Indigenous people in real life. Finally, Roanhorse speaks to the ways in which corporations such as Lucasfilm and Marvel are increasingly acknowledging a historic lack of diversity – or a historic offensive stereotyping of marginalised groups – and actively working to undo this harm by producing series entirely created by Indigenous writers that expand opportunities and give them the license to create stories from their unique cultural perspective.

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In the graphic narrative Dumb: Living Without a Voice (2018), Canadian cartoonist Georgia Webber explores her acquired physical disability after a severe vocal injury leaves her voiceless. As a talkative, social young woman working as a café server, Georgia’s life is interrupted when she is forced to adapt herself to a different way of navigating the world. Previous scholarly work has analyzed Dumb to articulate a connection between comics theory and disability rhetoric (Dolmage and Jacobs 2016) and explored its fruitful linkage between voice/voicelessness and identity (Venkatesan and Dastidar 2020). Building on the path opened by these scholars, the aim of this paper is to critically examine the representation of disability and its engagement with the concept of crip time in Dumb by drawing on the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies, crip theory, and comics theory. The first section of this paper will build on Alison Kafer’s formulation of the strange temporalities of disability (2013) to investigate the ways in which Webber constructs non-conventional layouts where she incorporates different formal elements to present Georgia’s lived experience of disability as a disruption of conventional temporalities. Special attention will be paid to the endless, frustrating routine of paperwork to apply for disability welfare that the protagonist faces when her condition renders her unable to work. In the second section, I will draw on the work of Ellen Samuels (2017) to examine how Webber negotiates her shifting identity by graphically splitting her embodied self on the page, composing a parallel timeline where she visualizes her pre-disabled and disabled selves. The power of the pictorial is also extended to Webber’s clever usage of color: while her cartoonish drawings appear in black and white, she employs red to draw Georgia’s inner voice and her pain. Finally, my last section will employ the conception of crip time developed by Petra Kuppers (2014) to explore Georgia’s reconnection with herself through her breathing exercises and her orientation towards artistic creativity. Overall, I will argue that Dumb does not present a narrative of recovery, as Georgia does not heal from her injury but engages instead with her disabled existence by turning inwards and depicting her voice (lessness).

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We believe that the consciousness-based/holistic medical toolbox has a serious additional offer to cancer patients and, as a consequence, designed a treatment for the patient with metastasized cancer. From a holistic perspective, cancer can be understood as a simple disturbance of the cells, arising from the tissue holding on to a trauma with strong emotional content. This is called “a blockage”, where the function of the cells is allocated from their original function in the tissue to a function of holding emotions. We hope to be able not only to improve the quality of life, but also to improve survival and in some cases even induce spontaneous remission of the metastasized cancer. This paper describes how work with a patient with metastasized cancer can be done in the holistic clinical practice in 14 days on an individual basis, helping the patient to recover her human character, purpose of life, coherence, and will to live, thus improving quality of life and possibly also survival time. The holistic therapeutic work includes (1) teaching existential theory, (2) working with life perspective and philosophy of life, (3) helping the patient to acknowledge the state of the disease and the feelings connected to it, and finally (4) getting the patient into the holistic state of healing: (a) feeling old repressed emotions, (b) understanding why she got sick from a holistic point of view, and finally (c) letting go of the negative beliefs and decisions that made her sick according to the holistic theory of nongenetic diseases. The theory of the human character, the quality of life theories, the holistic theory of cancer, the holistic process theory of healing, the theory of (Antonovsky) coherence, and the life mission theory are the most important theories for the patient to find hope and mobilize the will to fight the cancer and survive. The patient went through the following phases: (1) finding the purpose of life and hidden resources; (2) confronting denial; (3) taking responsibility for being very ill; (4) severe existential crises with no wish to live while still fighting; (5) integration of many repressed feelings and negative decisions thus rehabilitating character; (6) confronting lack of intimacy and trust in others and this way rehabilitating the ability to love; (7) rehabilitating the will to live, breaking through and falling in love with life; (8) assuming responsibility for the social relations; and sometimes (9) quality of life is improved radically with indications of spontaneous remission of the liver tumors.

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John Kendrew was born in Oxford, where he spent his childhood years. His father, Wilfred Kendrew, was Dean of the St Catherine's Society and was a geographer and reader in climatology at Oxford University. His mother, Evelyn Sandberg, came from a Hereford parsonage. John's parents separated when he was four years old, his mother moving to Italy and finally to Florence, where she became an art historian working with Bernard Berenson in the Uffizi. She was an authority on Italian primitives and published under the nom de guerre Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà. John remained with his father in Oxford and attended the Dragon School. He re–established contact with his mother a few times during his early years and her influence on him remained strong throughout his life. Although he had the attention and affection of his paternal grandmother and two doting maiden aunts, his childhood was rather lonely. One of his aunts noticed that the child was much in need of spectacles. John's pebble glasses were to shield him from enquiring eyes until late in life when a cataract operation rendered them less necessary. His aunts introduced him to photography, which remained a lifelong interest.

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This study aims to determine the symptoms of trauma experienced by Elizabeth Gilbert and how Gilbert's efforts to reconcile her trauma. The data source used in this study is the novel Eat Pray Love. While the method used in this research is descriptive analysis method. The theory used to examine the symptoms of trauma and Elizabeth Gilbert's reconciliation efforts is the trauma theory by Cathy Caruth and the concept of acting out and working through from LaCapra. The data analysis technique was carried out by reading the novel Eat Pray Love, classifying the data into tables based on predetermined variables, analyzing the data, and finally writing conclusions. The results of this study are the symptoms that appear in response to the traumatic events experienced by Gilbert such as symptoms of fear, anxiety, depression, and the desire to hurt oneself to the desire to commit suicide. In an effort to reconcile his trauma, Gilbert travels to three countries, avoids things that are potentially traumatic, and testifies by writing novels based on his life experiences.

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Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) has been incredibly influential generally and within economics, and it remains important despite some historical and conceptual flaws. Hardin focused on the stress population growth inevitably placed on environmental resources. Unconstrained consumption of a shared resource—a pasture, a highway, a server—by individuals acting in rational pursuit of their self-interest can lead to congestion and, worse, rapid depreciation, depletion, and even destruction of the resources. Our societies face similar problems, with respect to not only environmental resources but also infrastructures, knowledge, and many other shared resources. In this article, we examine how the tragedy of the commons has fared within the economics literature and its relevance for economic and public policies today. We revisit the original piece to explain Hardin’s purpose and conceptual approach. We expose two conceptual mistakes he made: conflating resource with governance and conflating open access with commons. This critical discussion leads us to the work of Elinor Ostrom, the recent Nobel Prize in Economics laureate, who spent her life working on commons. Finally, we discuss a few modern examples of commons governance of shared resources.

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A youth cannot marry his cousin because her father refuses for economic reasons. This story shows how the Saudi Arabian society connects marriage with wealth, even when it comes to relatives who are obligated culturally to take care of one another. A father is ready to sacrifice his daughter for a rich person, hoping that marriage bargain will improve his economic status. The customs of the society validate that a father can do to his daughter what he sees as good. Also, the norms of the society require a younger relative to obey an older one, even working for him; a person cannot fight back or challenge an elder. Accordingly, the relation between relatives is a relation of traditional and cultural power recognized and imposed by the society. In this story, the protagonist is colonized physically and mentally: in addition to having been exploited for fifteen years, he believes that his life is secured with his uncle. And hence, “he almost lost his personal independence,” as the story states. He can lose anything as long as his future is granted, for he believes that he is the only heir of his uncle. But after his uncle’s refusal of his proposal, he becomes aware of being marginalized and colonized. He has to struggle and search for his identity after being considered as “a nobody in the world of the living.” Like the protagonist who kills his father in the previous story, the youth of this story “deludes himself that he is brave and that he has to prove it.” Yet as an oppressed and marginalized person, the main character is neither supposed nor expected to practice oppression. But he thinks of violating his uncle’s daughter’s honor—for no fault except that she is his uncle’s daughter. In a culture that valorizes masculine values, the wretched girl becomes the victim of both her father, who wants to sell her as a commodity for the one who pays more, and of her cousin, who wants to exploit her in order to achieve his goals. Finally, in my translation, some well-known words are kept with their original pronunciation and written in italics to keep the reader aware of the Arabic text.3

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This introspective, first-person account describes those thanatologically-oriented theories or conceptions which were useful to the son/thanatologist in helping his father toward an appropriate death. Those theories that were particularly useful were a variation of stress theory developed by the author, symbolic interaction theory, psychological and social ambivalence theory, the concept of awareness of finitude, and the regressive intervention concept. The concept of “appropriate death” provided a path and goal that were quite utilitarian. Discussion centered around the need to understand individual differences allowing the dying individual to choose that which is appropriate for him or her throughout the dying process. Second, although it is fashionable to suggest the need for research which would allow greater specificity of prediction and deeper understanding, it is suggested that one learns and grows in dealing with the unpredicted. Evaluative data indicated that a large death education class taught by the instructor found that the day-by-day account of the dying process was valuable in terms of “forever remembering the death education course and the lessons learned in the autobiographical account” and that “the experience made the professor more human in the eyes of the students.” Finally, differences in working with the dying parent as compared to other clients were briefly discussed in terms of the quality and quantity of the human bond.

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This study dismantles Jane Austen’s view in Pride and Prejudice novel triggered by the social systems in British society. The society influenced by the phenomena of the industrial revolution in England in the late eighteenth century revealed the social system. This study aims to find out how Jane Austen views the revolution of the industry in British society. By having the focus on the sociology of literature, this study applies Lucien Goldman’s genetic structuralism. By the dialectical method, the study found that in Austen’s view the landed gentry system and inheritance system was adopted to measure the social class among the societies. Jane Austen thought the inheritance system as the fallacious practice in the society as the economic condition motivated British parents to apply matchmaking for their children to get a better life. Jane Austen views that the industrial revolution plays an important role in forming social occupation at that time. The working-class condition leads them to work in the town, while the upper-class society tends to open some businesses by doing trade at the town. The rest group of middle class tends to work and dedicate themselves to the rich people. Finally, Jane Austen puts her view toward the society in Pride and Prejudice.Keywords: author, class, genetic structuralism, the industrial revolution, view

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Abstract This is a review article of Janet Gyatso's 2015 award-winning book, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet. The art-historical aspects of the book—mainly confined to the first chapter, “Reading Paintings, Painting the Medical, Medicalizing the State” and based on a perceptive art-historical reading of a set of medical paintings and its copies—had yet to be reviewed by an academically-trained art historian. This review underscores the fine art-historical insights deserving the attention of art historians working in parallel contexts of the often tense relationship between religious and empirical epistemologies. At the same time, the evaluation of certain readings of the visual record lead to suggested revisions in the support they provide to Gyatso's primary argument. In addition, other precedents of depictions “from life” in Tibetan art history are offered to help contextualize claims of originality or uniqueness. Finally, an analysis is presented of less formal, freehand painting versus more formalized, iconometric execution, calibrated with vernacular subject matter versus iconographically predetermined themes. Both of the painting modes and subject types are combined in the painting set analyzed by Gyatso supporting her assessment of the innovation of the artists selected by the patron, Desi Sangyé Gyatso (1653–1705).

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution and use of the school desk in unified Italy as a multifunctional and highly efficient tool, which was required not only to efficiently support in-class activities, to facilitate the classroom management and finally to maintain a correct body posture in order to preserve pupils’ health, but also to accomplish the additional task of working as real “gymnastic equipment”, i.e. suitable for performing various gymnastic exercises inside the classroom. Design/methodology/approach The assumption upon which this paper rests is that school desks have always been signifiers charged with multiple meanings related to the evolution of curriculum, pedagogic ideas and daily school practices, which have often been forgotten, abandoned or, for some reasons, underrepresented in the official history of education as well as in the collective memory of school. In order to rebuild this forgotten history, and retrace the possible theoretical-pedagogical basis underlying such practice, the authors have systematically reviewed the Italian manuals on gymnastics between desks from the 1870s to the 1970s, retraced sources documenting this practice in the daily school life (government rules, school programmes, school hygiene prescriptions, iconographic sources, teachers and school managers’ testimonies) and finally, compared with other foreign practices (such as “calisthenics”). Findings The convergence between many differentiated sources has demonstrated the longevity of this school practice, which was not only the fruit of educational theories of gymnastic teachers but was also determined by the backwardness and logistic inadequacies of many Italian schools. The paper reveals how this gymnastic practice, after establishing itself in the post-Unification Italian schools, continued almost uninterrupted until the Second World War and even until the 1970s, evidencing how gymnastic teachers, hygienists, educationalists and lawmakers continued, over almost a century, to scientifically legitimise (from the top downwards) an educational practice that was actually driven from the bottom upwards, i.e. determined by an endemic lack of adequate spaces and tools for physical education in Italian schools. Originality/value For the very first time, the special source of Italian manuals and booklets on gymnastics between desks has been located, analysed and systematically reviewed for the period 1870s-1970s, and then cross-checked against differentiated sources. This study actually represents the first step of a research which must be still further developed. Undoubtedly, the “new” source represented by the manuals of “gymnastics between school desks” offered a first original perspective from which to explore the use of this furniture in the school of the past, thereby enabling historians of education to shed the first light on a school practice that has been overlooked or forgotten, and still hidden within the “black box of schooling”.

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Summary Subjective career success reflects an individual’s internal apprehension and evaluation of his or her career, across any dimensions that are perceived relevant by the individual. It has beneficial consequences on several individual and organizational outcomes, such as job performance, employee commitment, occupational retention as well as organizational retention. Given the pervasive result that women are subjected to gender discrimination in the workplace, we first wanted to check whether the level of perceived discrimination they report having faced is related to their subjective career success. We also wanted to check whether individual priorities, as evidenced in the concept of career anchor, have an influence on the relationship between perceived discrimination and career success. Using a sample of 300 women employees working in a large French company, we therefore investigated the relationship between perceived gender discrimination, subjective career success and career anchors. We found that perceived gender discrimination was negatively related to subjective career success overall. However, the relationship between the two variables was moderated by career anchors. Some anchors (i.e. managerial, technical and lifestyle) enhanced the impact of perceived gender discrimination, while other anchors (i.e. security and autonomy) lessened it. Our results show how individual expectations, reflected in the notion of career anchor, have an influence on how the work environment is interpreted. In addition, they provide a potential explanation for the apparently contradictory findings of the literature on gender and career success. Finally, our results suggest that organizations should pay special attention not only to the work experiences of women who aspire to move up the hierarchy, but also to the women who aspire to achieve a high level of competency at their job, or seek balance between their work life and their home life.

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AbstrakSudah sepatutnya seorang ibu mengurusi berbagai hal yang berhubungan dengan urusan rumah tangga. Hal ini merupakan salah satu dari sekian banyak tugas serta peran seorang ibu. Dewasa ini peran ibu bertambah intensitasnya sehingga peran dan tugas ibu menjadi semakin kompleks. Hal ini tidak terlepas dari banyaknya ibu yang sekarang ikut terjun ke dalam dunia kerja. Ibu bekerja identik dengan asumsi bahwa keluarga mengalami kekurangan. Belum lagi banyak problematika yang timbul akibat ibu bekerja. namun tidak sedikit juga ibu bekerja sebagai bentuk pengaplikasian atas ilmunya. Selalu adanya keterlibatan dan keterhubungan setiap aspek kehidupan dalam fenomena ibu bekerja. Terkait hal tersebut terdapat berbagai faktor yang mendorong mengapa akhirnya ibu bekerja, mulai dari faktor internal sampai eksternal. Faktor ini menciptakan berbagai dilema dan akhirnya menentukan apa dampak yang akan tercipta ketika ibu bekerja. Artikel ini bertujuan untuk menentukan faktor apa saja yang mendorong ibu bekerja. Hal tersebut menjadi sebuah dasar terhadap dinamika apa saja yang tercipta akibat ibu bekerja dan apa pengaruhnya terhadap kehidupan ibu maupun keluarga. AbstractIt is a mothers job to do many things that are connected to the household. This is one of the many things a mother does. In this century the intensity in a mothers role and the duties of a mother makes her role more complex. This doesn’t change the fact that lots of mothers are also working. Mothers that work are identical with the assumption that a family has many flaws. There are also lots of problematics that show up when a mother works. But there are lots of mothers that work as an application for their knowledge. There is always an involvement and connections on every aspect in the phenomenal life of a working mother. On that note there are also lots of factors that make mothers work, starting from internal to external factors. These factors create lots of dilemmas and finally decided what side effects will be created when mothers work. This article is to decide on what factors that push mothers to work. Those things became the basr to whatever dinamic that will be created from a working mother and what is the side effects to the mother and the family.

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This article focuses on the problematic consequences of shifting boundaries of converged radio practices for individual privacies. Holding that privacy is constructed through the interrelated information practices of both individuals and their mediated surroundings, it addresses radio as a previously intimate and privacy friendly medium. The case of the <em>Royal Prank </em>call by the Australian 2DayFM radio station demonstrates how contemporary converged radio practices affect the privacies of unintended participants in their shows. In December 2012, Jacintha Saldanha, nurse of London’s Royal King Edward VII Hospital committed suicide after two Australian radio presenters had made a prank phone call pretending to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles concerned about the state of duch*ess Kate’s health, who was expecting her first child. The case identifies three conditions, each with implications on privacy. First, digitization renders radio content archivable and repeatable. There is a second life of radio programs keeping available information about any people involved. Secondly, the division of radio related labour leads to a lack of journalistic responsibility for respecting privacy standards. Broadcasters feel no need to be sensitive regarding the consequences of disseminated material, as commercial and legal staff decide on that. Finally, legal frameworks continue to apply legacy radio privacy measures and do not correspond to these new working conditions, as the reactions of the Australian supervisory authority show. In consequence, the case of the <em>Royal Prank </em>call demonstrates the impossibility to fight individual privacy when one is unintentionally involved in radio shows.

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The recovery of the human character and purpose of life with consciousness-based medicine seems to be able to induce spontaneous remissions in several diseases. On two different occasions, we observed breast tumors reduced to less than half their original diameters (clinically judged) during a holistic session, when working with the patients in accordance with the holistic process theory of healing, the life mission theory, and the theory of human character. One tumor was histologically diagnosed as malign breast cancer prior to the session, while the other was under examination. As both patients had the affected regions of the breast surgically removed immediately after the session, we are unable to determine if they were actually healed by the holistic treatment. We find it extremely interesting that the size of a tumor can be reduced dramatically within a few hours of holistic treatment, when the patient is highly motivated for personal development. The reduction of tumor size is in accordance with the holistic view that many types of cancer are caused by emotional and existential disturbances. From a holistic perspective, cancer can be understood as a simple disturbance of the cells, arising from the tissue holding on to a trauma with strong emotional content. This is called “a blockage”, where the function of the cells is changed from their original function in the tissue to a function of holding emotions. The reduction of the tumor in the two cases happened when old painful emotions were identified in the tissues, in and around the tumor, and processed into understanding; when the patients finally did let go of negative beliefs and attitudes that had kept the feeling(s) repressed to that part of the body, the tumor first softened and then disappeared, presumably by apoptosis. We believe that the consciousness-based/holistic medical toolbox has a serious additional offer to cancer patients, and we will therefore strongly encourage the scientific society to explore these new possibilities. Our holistic medical research meets both ethical dilemmas and practical difficulties, as it obviously is important for the research in induced spontaneous remissions that surgery and chemotherapy is not used before it is absolutely necessary. On the other hand, is it important for the patient's survival that they receive any well-documented treatment as soon as possible. An additional aspect for the patient who is able to cure her own cancer is that she is much less likely to get cancer again and much better prepared to deal with other diseases and challenges in life. Knowing that one can fight even cancer gives a strong belief in life and the need to improve quality of life. The high incidence of secondary cancers and the physical and emotional wounds from the biomedical treatment seem to justify a focus on prevention and additional holistic treatment modules. To support the patient in learning the mastery of coherence of body and life, using the crisis of cancer to recover the human character and the purpose of life, seems turning a personal potential disaster into the greatest gift of all. When it comes down to it, life is not just about surviving; what is more important is to live fully, to learn from the great challenges of life, and to obtain the optimal quality of life while being here.

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The article is devoted to the actualization of memory studies in Ukrainian literary criticism. In particular, it is about expanding the working tools of this humanitarian field by introducing new terminological definitions («memory box», memory map, «wounds of time»). These terms were transferred from the research of Aleida Assmann and used in the analysis and reconstruction of the architecture of memory based on the material of a particular work. The object of analysis is the novel of the modern British writer Joanne Harris “Five Quarters of the Orange” (2001), which is the final one in the so-called French cycle (novels “Chocolat”, “Blackberry Wine” and “Five Quarters of the Orange” that are united by the topos of the French province of Brittany). The purpose of the article is to reveal the conditional architecture of memory of Joanne Harris’s novel «Five Quarters of the Orange». This is a reconstruction of a conditional memory map, which is primarily associated with the tragic events of the Second World War. The outlined «wound of time» is directly connected with the relationship between the Dartigen family and the German soldier Thomas Leibniz. Individual memories of past events are encrypted in an old cooking album, which in its turn is identical to a “memory box” – the portable repository of memories or the ark. The article implements several tasks that made it possible to achieve the main goal. It is primarily about discovering and exploring the mechanisms of memory that are inherent in both narrative structures of the text: both Mirabelle’s notes on the margins of her cooking album and the memories of the main character Framboise are analyzed in terms of correlation of individual memories and collective flashback of the past. The influence of trauma and traumatic experience of the Dartigen family in general on the formation of memory architecture in the novel is also outlined. Illness of mother, early loss of father, which the children are going through, seen murder (Franboise was the witness); expulsion from home and forced expulsion of painful memories for the sake of continued existence are all conditional points on the memory map that are recreated by Fraumboise in her story, which simulates oral storytelling. Finally, several symbols are researched that also correspond to certain points on the memory map. They are aimed at actualization of reader’s attention and focus on the significance of certain events in the life of the family and Les Laveuses (cooking album of Mirabelle; orange encrypted in the title of the novel; Observatory, Standing Stones, Loire River, where the Hunt for the Old Mother was and who finally took away Thomas Leibniz). The conditional architecture of memory in Joanne Harris’s novel “Five Quarters of the Orange”, in fact, results in deciphering the cooking album (“memory box”) and presents the author’s message of forgiveness and understanding, as well as affirms the anti-war message that is extremely relevant today.

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Background:Abatacept (ABA) is a biological drug approved for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients that, by working on CTLA4, can inhibit T-cell activation. Randomized controlled trials have demonstrated both the efficacy and a good safety profile, characterized by a lower infectious risk in comparison with other biological DMARDs, in RA patients. In a real-life setting, the drug retention rate could be considered as a surrogate of drug effectiveness. Data from the literature reported a retention rate of ABA ranging from 55 to 76% at 12 months and from 54 to 64% at 24 months (1-3).Objectives:In the present longitudinal analysis, we evaluated the retention rate of ABA in a large monocentric RA cohort.Methods:We enrolled consecutive RA patients starting treatment with intravenous (IV) or subcutaneous (SC) ABA according to the standard of care. All the patients fulfilled the 2010 ACR/EULAR classification criteria for RA. For each patient, we collected demographic parameters, serological status, previous and concomitant treatments, and disease activity by DAS28 with C reactive protein (DAS28-CRP). All the patients were assessed at baseline, and after 4 and 12 months (T4 and T12, respectively). The reasons for withdrawal of treatment were registered and classified as primary or secondary inefficacy or adverse events (AEs). Kaplan-Meier statistical analysis has been done to evaluate the survival of the treatment in patients with at least 12 months follow-up.Results:We evaluated 161 patients [M/F 21/140; median age 67 years (IQR 21.7), median disease duration 180 months (IQR 161)]. RF was positive in 70.3% of patients, ACPA in 66.4%. ABA was the first biological DMARD in 66 patients (41%). At baseline, the median DAS28-CRP was 4.3 (IQR 1.6) and ABA was administered in association with MTX in 96 patients (59.6%). One hundred-eleven patients (68.9%) started SC ABA [M/F 16/95; median age 64.5 years (IQR 21.5), median disease duration 156 months (IQR 132)], the remaining 50 IV ABA [M/F 5/45, median age 71 years (IQR 60.2), median disease duration 187 months (IQR 157)]. Median age and disease duration were significantly higher in patients receiving IV in comparison with SC ABA (p=0.008 and p=0.03, respectively). We found a significant reduction of DAS28-CRP values during the follow-up in comparison with baseline [4 months: median 3.5 (IQR 1.9), p<0.0001; 12 months: median 3.2 (IQR 1.4), p<0.0001]. Seven patients were lost to follow-up, in the remaining 154 patients a median treatment duration of 33 months (IQR 49) was registered. Data on drug survival are reported in Figure 1A: at 12 months, 92% of patients persisted on treatment; this percentage decreased to 78.2% at 24 months and to 67.9% at 36 months. Furthermore, we did not find any differences in drug survival either with respect to SC vs IV administration (12 months: 93.7% versus 88.6%; 24 months 78.9% versus 72.6%; 36 months 63.7% versus 72.6%; Figure 1B) or according to the association with MTX. Concerning the withdrawal reasons, 46 patients (29.9%) stopped ABA due to inefficacy (primary in 28, secondary in 18), 11 patients (7.1%) due to AEs, and 7 for inadequate adherence (4.5%). Finally, 10 patients switched from IV to SC administration, due to patient’s preference.Conclusion:In our monocentric RA cohort, we have observed a high retention rate of ABA at both 12 and 24 months, confirming the good profile of this drug in terms of effectiveness and safety, irrespective of the route of administration and association with MTX.References:[1]Cagnotto, Arthritis Res Ther 2020; (2) Salmon, J Clin Med 2020; Westhovens, Rheumatol Int 2020.Acknowledgements:I would like to acknowledge Dr. F. Ceccarelli, for her patience.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

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В работе Катерины Кудрявцевой перспектива рассмотрения загадочного образа из Апокалипсиса иная — не богословская, а, скорее, религиоведческая. Но религиоведческая точка зрения не может не включать в себя богословскую, иначе она рискует исказить свой предмет — религию, обойдя вниманием её вероучительную сторону. К. Г. Кудрявцевой удалось прийти к богословскому рассмотрению образа религиоведческим путём, а именно путём расшифровки его семантики. В этом смысле её исследование подобно работе с красками, восстанавливающими цвета фрески до первоначальной яркости (пусть виртуально, чтобы не вмешаться с новой кистью в исторически сохранившиеся слои), в то время как схема рисунка и его сюжет остаются теми же самыми. К. Г. Кудрявцева берёт за основу нарратив видения св. апостола Иоанна, который она разделяет на четыре аспекта и даёт им довольно поэтические названия: «Застигнутая жизнью и смертью»; «Свечение»; «Противостояние как погоня»; «Город». По этим четырём ключевым темам распределена на параграфы каждая из пяти глав работы, которые охватывают мировой фольклор, корпус канонических книг Ветхого Завета, письменность эпохи Второго Храма, литературный контекст Откровения св. Иоанна Богослова (то есть тоже произведения периода Второго Храма, но наиболее близкие по развитию своей образности к Апокалипсису) и, наконец, сам текст Откровения. In Katerina Kudryavtseva's work, the perspective of the enigmatic image from the Apocalypse is different - not theological but, rather, religious studies. But a theological perspective could not avoid incorporating a theological perspective, otherwise it would risk distorting its subject, religion, by neglecting its doctrinal side. K.G. Kudryavtseva was able to reach a theological consideration of the image in a theological way, namely by deciphering its semantics. In this sense, her research is like working with paints, restoring the colours of a fresco to their original brightness (albeit virtually, so as not to intervene with a new brush in the historically preserved layers), while the scheme of the drawing and its subject remain the same. K.G. Kudryavtseva takes as a basis the narrative of St. John's vision, which she divides into four aspects and gives them rather poetic titles: "Caught in Life and Death"; "Illumination"; "Confrontation as Chase"; "City". Each of the five chapters is divided into paragraphs according to these four key themes, covering world folklore, the corpus of canonical books of the Old Testament, the writing of the Second Temple period, the literary context of the Revelation of Saint John the Evangelist (that is, also works from the Second Temple period, but closest in their development of imagery to the Apocalypse) and, finally, the text of Revelation itself.

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AbstractThe little known window design and corresponding glass cartoon kept in the Municipal Archives of Leiden are the remains of a now lost window with the representation of Pallas Athena and her owl, given by the Board of Governors of Leiden University to the Pieterskerk. They have been first published by Pelinck in I943 with the correct destination, donor's name and even the date, I629 (note 2). He was able to do so by linking the drawings with a description from c. I630 by the Utrecht antiquarian Arnoldus Buchelius and the published resolution of the Cu-rators taken on I4 May I629 (notes 6, 9). The Curators offered a gift of glass to the former churchmaster Heinrick Egbertsz. van der Hal, whereby no artist's name or subject matter are mentioned, only the obligatory inclusion of the city arms. The practical arrangement for the commission was left to the Burgomasters of Leyden, who were all members of the Board of Governors. The small-scale drawing, severely damaged, concentrates on the architectural and heraldic design (fig. i). An aedicule supported by Corinthian columns and crowned by a pediment offers room below to the city arms of Leiden and the university flag, with a still life of books and globes in front, covering the floor. Two more coats of arms are depicted on either side of the pediment: on the left the arms of Holland held by the Dutch lion, and on the right those of Prince William of Orange, founding father of the university, held by Fame. The drawing provided with scale indications and an unfinished, alternative design on the reverse is apparantly not a vidimus, but a working document to facilitate the elaboration of the cartoon. The latter consists of two long segments for the first two lights and two shorter ones, with the missing information added either on the reverse of the same strip or of the corresponding second (for the third) and first (for the fourth) lights (figs. 2-9). The working method is so far similar to that of the Gouda cartoons, of which the latest pieces date from the early I7th century. With the repetition of parts of the architecture in mirror image the Leiden cartoon is now considered, contrary to Pelinck, complete. It represents minor improvements in composition and ornament with respect to the small drawing, but most important, it depicts the figures in the second and third lights, still missing in the small design. Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom and protector of science and the arts is standing on a pedestal in the aedicule, paging in a book placed on the cathedra on her leftside. Her attributes, the owl and the shield with Medusa head, are nearby. Below her feet four children are engaged in writing and reading. They are identified now as personifications of the four then faculties of the young university: on the left theology, distinguished by a piece of paper inscribed with Hebrew-like characters bound to the figure's head, and medicine, depicted as a naked child, only the head covered by a drapery. The two helmeted boys on the right represent law and philosophy. The donation can not be linked to any special occasion, in I629 the university existed just 54 years. The old attribution by Pelinck on presumed stylistic ground of design and cartoon to the Utrecht painter and glass-painter Jan Gerritsz. van Bronchorst (c. I603-I66I) was already rejected in the past in the artist's biography on the same ground (note 25). A new candidate is proposed now in the person of the Leiden artist Pieter Kouwenhorn (I599/I600-I654), who originated from Haarlem and was inscribed in I6I9 as master glass-painter in the rolls of the Leiden Guild of St. Luke. Although he has already been studied in the past in some detail, more information is given now on his life and the small œuvre of his drawings (notes 29-30, 56). The Burgomasters of Leiden, responsible for commissioning the artist, were familiar with him, as Kouwenhorn has just finished in I628 a documented window in the Aldermen's Chamber of the City Hall (fig. II). Although the figural scenes of this cartoon are smaller and they are therefore executed in the favourite technique of the artist in pen, grey and brown ink and wash instead of black and white chalk, they also present certain parallels in support of the attribution. More stylistic arguments are provided by Kouwenhorn's signed drawing with a related subject matter, Minerva and Mercury from I635 in the Album Amicorum of the Leiden scholar Petrus Scriverius (fig. I5). The new attribution is finally substantiated by documents. The artist's correct Christian name, mis-spelled surname and his qualification as a glass-painter occur in the church administration, when he was paid on 25th of March I630 the sum of f 6 s I4, without precising his services; on 30th December of the same year payment of f I0 s I6 is recorded again to him as Pieter Pieters. (notes 5I, 52). The first item most probably concerns the customary gratuity given by the churchwardens after installment of the window in the Pieterskerk, with payment perhaps for additional work in December. Completion of the glass within a year, announced by the Curators of the university on I4th May I629 is reasonable, and full payment was due from the latter. The question remains, if Kouwenhorn was only the glass-painter or also the author of the window's design and the draftsman of the cartoon with figures of exceptional quality, which are executed more carefully than the protagonists of the smaller cartoon for the Aldermen's Chamber. His oeuvre of independent drawings made in a variety of techniques (figs. I0, I2, I4, I6, I7), the reference made to him shortly after his death as an excellent draftsman, and his involvement in giving drawing lessons leave no doubt as to his capacities in this field (notes 36-38). Together with Bronchorst, Kouwenhorn follows in the footsteps of such famous I6th-century glass-painters as the Crabeths from Gouda and Willem Tybout from Haarlem, who all worked from own design. As to Kouwenhorn, unfortunately none of his windows is preserved. The exact location of the university glass in the Pieterskerk is unknown, just like the date when it fell into decay and was removed.

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Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad continues to seek thought-provoking manuscripts, insightful essays, well-researched papers, and concise book reviews that may provide the profession of study abroad an intellectual charge, document some of the best thinking and innovative programming in the field, create an additional forum for dialogue among colleagues in international education, and ultimately enrich our perspectives and bring greater meaning to our work. In this issue, Frontiers focuses on one of the most compelling themes of interest among international educators: learning outside the home society and culture. Through the researched articles, we hope to engage you in further thinking and discussion about the ways we learn in other societies and cultures; the nature of such learning and the features that make it distinctive from learning in one's home culture; the methods, techniques, and best practices of such learning; and the integration of learning abroad into the broader context of the "internationalization" of the home campus. Brian J. Whalen's lead article in this edition of the journal develops our theme by providing an overview of learning outside the home culture, with particular emphasis on the role that memory plays in this enterprise. Whalen examines the psychological literature and uses case studies to focus on the ways in which students learn about their new society and culture, and about themselves. Hamilton Beck, on the other hand, presents an intriguing study from the life of W. E. B. Du Bois. In examining his Autobiography and Du Bois's three-year stay in Berlin from 1892 to 1894 as a graduate student at the Friedrich Wilhelms-Universitat zu Berlin, Beck uncovers an excellent example of "learning outside one's home society and culture" through the series of social, political, and ideological encounters Du Bois experiences, reflects on, and then remembers. The article ends with several "lessons" learned from late- nineteenth-century Germany that remained with Du Bois for the rest of his life, as shown in his Autobiography and his collection of essays in The Souls of Black Folk. A team of field study and study abroad specialists from Earlham College looks at our theme through the use of ethnography and the techniques of field study for students living and working in Mexico, Austria, and Germany. The article demonstrates through the observations of the students how effective the use of field research methods can be in learning about Mexican social relations and cultural traditions by working in a tortilla factory, or about Austrian social habits and traditions by patronizing a night club and its "intimate society." We are reminded of other methods of strengthening learning outside the home society and culture by the case study of the Canadian students from Ontario who attended a teacher training program at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. Barbara Jo Lantz's review of a recent publication describing the usefulness of an “analytical notebook" in learning outside the home society and culture underscores the importance of journal writing as an integral part of study abroad. While journals have been used before in study abroad learning, Kenneth Wagner and Tony Magistrale's Writing Across Culture points the international educator in new directions and contexts in which journal writing enhances learning. Finally, in our Update section, Wayne Myles examines the uses of technology-including the Internet, homepages, and electronic bulletin boards-as ways of advertising to, networking with, and processing study abroad students and their learning on and off our campuses. Barbara Burn examines the internationalization efforts of our European colleagues through her review of Hans de Wit's edited work Strategies for Internationalisation of Higher Education, while Aaro Ollikainen follows up an earlier article by Hans de Wit (Frontiers, no. 1), with a detailed look at Finland's efforts at internationalization. Joseph R. Stimpfl's thorough annotated bibliography reminds us that there is a legacy of several decades of critical thinking about study abroad and international education to which we are indebted and on which we can build. With this issue, the editorial board is pleased to begin publishing two issues annually of Frontiers. We are interested in interdisciplinary approaches to study abroad as well as critical essays, book reviews, and annotated bibliographies. In building on the work of previous research, and creating a forum for a debate and discussion, we hope that we may begin to define both theoretically and practically the contours of the frontiers of study abroad. Michael Monahan, Macalester College Thomas Ricks, Villanova University

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Background and Objective: Suicide attempts are 10-20X more common than completed suicide and an important risk factor for death by suicide, yet most people who attempt suicide do not die by suicide. The process of recovering after a suicide attempt has not been well studied. The Reasons to go on Living (RTGOL) Project, a narrative web-based study, focuses on experiences of people who have attempted suicide and made the decision to go on living, a process not well studied. Narrative research is ideally suited to understanding personal experiences critical to recovery following a suicide attempt, including the transition to a state of hopefulness. Voices from people with lived experience can help us plan and conceptualize this work. This paper reports on a secondary research question of the larger study: what stories do participants tell of the positive role/impact of the mental health system. Material and Methods: A website created for The RTGOL Project (www.thereasons.ca) enabled participants to anonymously submit a story about their suicide attempt and recovery, a process which enabled participation from a large and diverse group of participants. The only direction given was “if you have made a suicide attempt or seriously considered suicide and now want to go on living, we want to hear from you.” The unstructured narrative format allowed participants to describe their experiences in their own words, to include and emphasize what they considered important. Over 5 years, data analysis occurred in several phases over the course of the study, resulting in the identification of data that were inputted into an Excel file. This analysis used stories where participants described positive involvement with the mental health system (50 stories). Results: Several participants reflected on experiences many years previous, providing the privilege of learning how their life unfolded, what made a difference. Over a five-year period, 50 of 226 stories identified positive experiences with mental health care with sufficient details to allow analysis, and are the focus of this paper. There were a range of suicidal behaviours in these 50 stories, from suicidal ideation only to medically severe suicide attempts. Most described one or more suicide attempts. Three themes identified included: 1) trust and relationship with a health care professional, 2) the role of friends and family and friends, and 3) a wide range of services. Conclusion: Stories open a window into the experiences of the period after a suicide attempt. This study allowed for an understanding of how mental health professionals might help individuals who have attempted suicide write a different story, a life-affirming story. The stories that participants shared offer some understanding of “how” to provide support at a most-needed critical juncture for people as they interact with health care providers, including immediately after a suicide attempt. Results of this study reinforce that just one caring professional can make a tremendous difference to a person who has survived a suicide attempt. Key Words: web-based; suicide; suicide attempt; mental health system; narrative research Word Count: 478 Introduction My Third (or fourth) Suicide AttemptI laid in the back of the ambulance, the snow of too many doses of ativan dissolving on my tongue.They hadn't even cared enough about meto put someone in the back with me,and so, frustrated,I'd swallowed all the pills I had with me— not enough to do what I wanted it to right then,but more than enough to knock me out for a good 14 hours.I remember very little after that;benzodiazepines like ativan commonly cause pre- and post-amnesia, says Google helpfullyI wake up in a locked rooma woman manically drawing on the windows with crayonsthe colors of light through the glassdiffused into rainbows of joy scattered about the roomas if she were coloring on us all,all of the tattered remnants of humanity in a psych wardmade into a brittle mosaic, a quilt of many hues, a Technicolor dreamcoatand I thoughtI am so glad to be able to see this. (Story 187)The nurse opening that door will have a lasting impact on how this story unfolds and on this person’s life. Each year, almost one million people die from suicide, approximately one death every 40 seconds. Suicide attempts are much more frequent, with up to an estimated 20 attempts for every death by suicide.1 Suicide-related behaviours range from suicidal ideation and self-injury to death by suicide. We are unable to directly study those who die by suicide, but effective intervention after a suicide attempt could reduce the risk of subsequent death by suicide. Near-fatal suicide attempts have been used to explore the boundary with completed suicides. Findings indicated that violent suicide attempters and serious attempters (seriousness of the medical consequences to define near-fatal attempts) were more likely to make repeated, and higher lethality suicide attempts.2 In a case-control study, the medically severe suicide attempts group (78 participants), epidemiologically very similar to those who complete suicide, had significantly higher communication difficulties; the risk for death by suicide multiplied if accompanied by feelings of isolation and alienation.3 Most research in suicidology has been quantitative, focusing almost exclusively on identifying factors that may be predictive of suicidal behaviours, and on explanation rather than understanding.4 Qualitative research, focusing on the lived experiences of individuals who have attempted suicide, may provide a better understanding of how to respond in empathic and helpful ways to prevent future attempts and death by suicide.4,5 Fitzpatrick6 advocates for narrative research as a valuable qualitative method in suicide research, enabling people to construct and make sense of the experiences and their world, and imbue it with meaning. A review of qualitative studies examining the experiences of recovering from or living with suicidal ideation identified 5 interconnected themes: suffering, struggle, connection, turning points, and coping.7 Several additional qualitative studies about attempted suicide have been reported in the literature. Participants have included patients hospitalized for attempting suicide8, and/or suicidal ideation,9 out-patients following a suicide attempt and their caregivers,10 veterans with serious mental illness and at least one hospitalization for a suicide attempt or imminent suicide plan.11 Relationships were a consistent theme in these studies. Interpersonal relationships and an empathic environment were perceived as therapeutic and protective, enabling the expression of thoughts and self-understanding.8 Given the connection to relationship issues, the authors suggested it may be helpful to provide support for the relatives of patients who have attempted suicide. A sheltered, friendly environment and support systems, which included caring by family and friends, and treatment by mental health professionals, helped the suicidal healing process.10 Receiving empathic care led to positive changes and an increased level of insight; just one caring professional could make a tremendous difference.11 Kraft and colleagues9 concluded with the importance of hearing directly from those who are suicidal in order to help them, that only when we understand, “why suicide”, can we help with an alternative, “why life?” In a grounded theory study about help-seeking for self-injury, Long and colleagues12 identified that self-injury was not the problem for their participants, but a panacea, even if temporary, to painful life experiences. Participant narratives reflected a complex journey for those who self-injured: their wish when help-seeking was identified by the theme “to be treated like a person”. There has also been a focus on the role and potential impact of psychiatric/mental health nursing. Through interviews with experienced in-patient nurses, Carlen and Bengtsson13 identified the need to see suicidal patients as subjective human beings with unique experiences. This mirrors research with patients, which concluded that the interaction with personnel who are devoted, hope-mediating and committed may be crucial to a patient’s desire to continue living.14 Interviews with individuals who received mental health care for a suicidal crisis following a serious attempt led to the development of a theory for psychiatric nurses with the central variable, reconnecting the person with humanity across 3 phases: reflecting an image of humanity, guiding the individual back to humanity, and learning to live.15 Other research has identified important roles for nurses working with patients who have attempted suicide by enabling the expression of thoughts and developing self-understanding8, helping to see things differently and reconnecting with others,10 assisting the person in finding meaning from their experience to turn their lives around, and maintain/and develop positive connections with others.16 However, one literature review identified that negative attitudes toward self-harm were common among nurses, with more positive attitudes among mental health nurses than general nurses. The authors concluded that education, both reflective and interactive, could have a positive impact.17 This paper is one part of a larger web-based narrative study, the Reasons to go on Living Project (RTGOL), that seeks to understand the transition from making a suicide attempt to choosing life. When invited to tell their stories anonymously online, what information would people share about their suicide attempts? This paper reports on a secondary research question of the larger study: what stories do participants tell of the positive role/impact of the mental health system. The focus on the positive impact reflects an appreciative inquiry approach which can promote better practice.18 Methods Design and Sample A website created for The RTGOL Project (www.thereasons.ca) enabled participants to anonymously submit a story about their suicide attempt and recovery. Participants were required to read and agree with a consent form before being able to submit their story through a text box or by uploading a file. No demographic information was requested. Text submissions were embedded into an email and sent to an account created for the Project without collecting information about the IP address or other identifying information. The content of the website was reviewed by legal counsel before posting, and the study was approved by the local Research Ethics Board. Stories were collected for 5 years (July 2008-June 2013). The RTGOL Project enabled participation by a large, diverse audience, at their own convenience of time and location, providing they had computer access. The unstructured narrative format allowed participants to describe their experiences in their own words, to include and emphasize what they considered important. Of the 226 submissions to the website, 112 described involvement at some level with the mental health system, and 50 provided sufficient detail about positive experiences with mental health care to permit analysis. There were a range of suicidal behaviours in these 50 stories: 8 described suicidal ideation only; 9 met the criteria of medically severe suicide attempts3; 33 described one or more suicide attempts. For most participants, the last attempt had been some years in the past, even decades, prior to writing. Results Stories of positive experiences with mental health care described the idea of a door opening, a turning point, or helping the person to see their situation differently. Themes identified were: (1) relationship and trust with a Health Care Professional (HCP), (2) the role of family and friends (limited to in-hospital experiences), and (3) the opportunity to access a range of services. The many reflective submissions of experiences told many years after the suicide attempt(s) speaks to the lasting impact of the experience for that individual. Trust and Relationship with a Health Care Professional A trusting relationship with a health professional helped participants to see things in a different way, a more hopeful way and over time. “In that time of crisis, she never talked down to me, kept her promises, didn't panic, didn't give up, and she kept believing in me. I guess I essentially borrowed the hope that she had for me until I found hope for myself.” (Story# 35) My doctor has worked extensively with me. I now realize that this is what will keep me alive. To be able to feel in my heart that my doctor does care about me and truly wants to see me get better.” (Story 34). The writer in Story 150 was a nurse, an honours graduate. The 20 years following graduation included depression, hospitalizations and many suicide attempts. “One day after supper I took an entire bottle of prescription pills, then rode away on my bike. They found me late that night unconscious in a downtown park. My heart threatened to stop in the ICU.” Then later, “I finally found a person who was able to connect with me and help me climb out of the pit I was in. I asked her if anyone as sick as me could get better, and she said, “Yes”, she had seen it happen. Those were the words I had been waiting to hear! I quickly became very motivated to get better. I felt heard and like I had just found a big sister, a guide to help me figure out how to live in the world. This person was a nurse who worked as a trauma therapist.” At the time when the story was submitted, the writer was applying to a graduate program. Role of Family and Friends Several participants described being affected by their family’s response to their suicide attempt. Realizing the impact on their family and friends was, for some, a turning point. The writer in Story 20 told of experiences more than 30 years prior to the writing. She described her family of origin as “truly dysfunctional,” and she suffered from episodes of depression and hospitalization during her teen years. Following the birth of her second child, and many family difficulties, “It was at this point that I became suicidal.” She made a decision to kill herself by jumping off the balcony (6 stories). “At the very last second as I hung onto the railing of the balcony. I did not want to die but it was too late. I landed on the parking lot pavement.” She wrote that the pain was indescribable, due to many broken bones. “The physical pain can be unbearable. Then you get to see the pain and horror in the eyes of someone you love and who loves you. Many people suggested to my husband that he should leave me in the hospital, go on with life and forget about me. During the process of recovery in the hospital, my husband was with me every day…With the help of psychiatrists and a later hospitalization, I was actually diagnosed as bipolar…Since 1983, I have been taking lithium and have never had a recurrence of suicidal thoughts or for that matter any kind of depression.” The writer in Story 62 suffered childhood sexual abuse. When she came forward with it, she felt she was not heard. Self-harm on a regular basis was followed by “numerous overdoses trying to end my life.” Overdoses led to psychiatric hospitalizations that were unhelpful because she was unable to trust staff. “My way of thinking was that ending my life was the only answer. There had been numerous attempts, too many to count. My thoughts were that if I wasn’t alive I wouldn’t have to deal with my problems.” In her final attempt, she plunged over the side of a mountain, dropping 80 feet, resulting in several serious injuries. “I was so angry that I was still alive.” However, “During my hospitalization I began to realize that my family and friends were there by my side continuously, I began to realize that I wasn't only hurting myself. I was hurting all the important people in my life. It was then that I told myself I am going to do whatever it takes.” A turning point is not to say that the difficulties did not continue. The writer of Story 171 tells of a suicide attempt 7 years previous, and the ongoing anguish. She had been depressed for years and had thoughts of suicide on a daily basis. After a serious overdose, she woke up the next day in a hospital bed, her husband and 2 daughters at her bed. “Honestly, I was disappointed to wake up. But, then I saw how scared and hurt they were. Then I was sorry for what I had done to them. Since then I have thought of suicide but know that it is tragic for the family and is a hurt that can never be undone. Today I live with the thought that I am here for a reason and when it is God's time to take me then I will go. I do believe living is harder than dying. I do believe I was born for a purpose and when that is accomplished I will be released. …Until then I try to remind myself of how I am blessed and try to appreciate the wonders of the world and the people in it.” Range of Services The important role of mental health and recovery services was frequently mentioned, including dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT)/cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), recovery group, group therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous, accurate diagnosis, and medications. The writer in Story 30 was 83 years old when she submitted her story, reflecting on a life with both good and bad times. She first attempted suicide at age 10 or 12. A serious post-partum depression followed the birth of her second child, and over the years, she experienced periods of suicidal intent: “Consequently, a few years passed and I got to feeling suicidal again. I had pills in one pocket and a clipping for “The Recovery Group” in the other pocket. As I rode on the bus trying to make up my mind, I decided to go to the Recovery Group first. I could always take the pills later. I found the Recovery Group and yoga helpful; going to meetings sometimes twice a day until I got thinking more clearly and learned how to deal with my problems.” Several participants described the value of CBT or DBT in learning to challenge perceptions. “I have tools now to differentiate myself from the illness. I learned I'm not a bad person but bad things did happen to me and I survived.”(Story 3) “The fact is that we have thoughts that are helpful and thoughts that are destructive….. I knew it was up to me if I was to get better once and for all.” (Story 32): “In the hospital I was introduced to DBT. I saw a nurse (Tanya) every day and attended a group session twice a week, learning the techniques. I worked with the people who wanted to work with me this time. Tanya said the same thing my counselor did “there is no study that can prove whether or not suicide solves problems” and I felt as though I understood it then. If I am dead, then all the people that I kept pushing away and refusing their help would be devastated. If I killed myself with my own hand, my family would be so upset. DBT taught me how to ‘ride my emotional wave’. ……….. DBT has changed my life…….. My life is getting back in order now, thanks to DBT, and I have lots of reasons to go on living.”(Story 19) The writer of Story 67 described the importance of group therapy. “Group therapy was the most helpful for me. It gave me something besides myself to focus on. Empathy is such a powerful emotion and a pathway to love. And it was a huge relief to hear others felt the same and had developed tools of their own that I could try for myself! I think I needed to learn to communicate and recognize when I was piling everything up to build my despair. I don’t think I have found the best ways yet, but I am lifetimes away from that teenage girl.” (Story 67) The author of story 212 reflected on suicidal ideation beginning over 20 years earlier, at age 13. Her first attempt was at 28. “I thought everyone would be better off without me, especially my children, I felt like the worst mum ever, I felt like a burden to my family and I felt like I was a failure at life in general.” She had more suicide attempts, experienced the death of her father by suicide, and then finally found her doctor. “Now I’m on meds for a mood disorder and depression, my family watch me closely, and I see my doctor regularly. For the first time in 20 years, I love being a mum, a sister, a daughter, a friend, a cousin etc.” Discussion The 50 stories that describe positive experiences in the health care system constitute a larger group than most other similar studies, and most participants had made one or more suicide attempts. Several writers reflected back many years, telling stories of long ago, as with the 83-year old participant (Story 30) whose story provided the privilege of learning how the author’s life unfolded. In clinical practice, we often do not know – how did the story turn out? The stories that describe receiving health care speak to the impact of the experience, and the importance of the issues identified in the mental health system. We identified 3 themes, but it was often the combination that participants described in their stories that was powerful, as demonstrated in Story 20, the young new mother who had fallen from a balcony 30 years earlier. Voices from people with lived experience can help us plan and conceptualize our clinical work. Results are consistent with, and add to, the previous work on the importance of therapeutic relationships.8,10,11,14–16 It is from the stories in this study that we come to understand the powerful experience of seeing a family members’ reaction following a participant’s suicide attempt, and how that can be a potent turning point as identified by Lakeman and Fitzgerald.7 Ghio and colleagues8 and Lakeman16 identified the important role for staff/nurses in supporting families due to the connection to relationship issues. This research also calls for support for families to recognize the important role they have in helping the person understand how much they mean to them, and to promote the potential impact of a turning point. The importance of the range of services reflect Lakeman and Fitzgerald’s7 theme of coping, associating positive change by increasing the repertoire of coping strategies. These findings have implications for practice, research and education. Working with individuals who are suicidal can help them develop and tell a different story, help them move from a death-oriented to life-oriented position,15 from “why suicide” to “why life.”9 Hospitalization provides a person with the opportunity to reflect, to take time away from “the real world” to consider oneself, the suicide attempt, connections with family and friends and life goals, and to recover physically and emotionally. Hospitalization is also an opening to involve the family in the recovery process. The intensity of the immediate period following a suicide attempt provides a unique opportunity for nurses to support and coach families, to help both patients and family begin to see things differently and begin to create that different story. In this way, family and friends can be both a support to the person who has attempted suicide, and receive help in their own struggles with this experience. It is also important to recognize that this short period of opportunity is not specific to the nurses in psychiatric units, as the nurses caring for a person after a medically severe suicide attempt will frequently be the nurses in the ICU or Emergency departments. Education, both reflective and interactive, could have a positive impact.17 Helping staff develop the attitudes, skills and approach necessary to be helpful to a person post-suicide attempt is beginning to be reported in the literature.21 Further implications relate to nursing curriculum. Given the extent of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and deaths by suicide, this merits an important focus. This could include specific scenarios, readings by people affected by suicide, both patients themselves and their families or survivors, and discussions with individuals who have made an attempt(s) and made a decision to go on living. All of this is, of course, not specific to nursing. All members of the interprofessional health care team can support the transition to recovery of a person after a suicide attempt using the strategies suggested in this paper, in addition to other evidence-based interventions and treatments. Findings from this study need to be considered in light of some specific limitations. First, the focus was on those who have made a decision to go on living, and we have only the information the participants included in their stories. No follow-up questions were possible. The nature of the research design meant that participants required access to a computer with Internet and the ability to communicate in English. This study does not provide a comprehensive view of in-patient care. However, it offers important inputs to enhance other aspects of care, such as assessing safety as a critical foundation to care. We consider these limitations were more than balanced by the richness of the many stories that a totally anonymous process allowed. Conclusion Stories open a window into the experiences of a person during the period after a suicide attempt. The RTGOL Project allowed for an understanding of how we might help suicidal individuals change the script, write a different story. The stories that participants shared give us some understanding of “how” to provide support at a most-needed critical juncture for people as they interact with health care providers immediately after a suicide attempt. While we cannot know the experiences of those who did not survive a suicide attempt, results of this study reinforce that just one caring professional can make a crucial difference to a person who has survived a suicide attempt. We end with where we began. Who will open the door? References 1. World Health Organization. Suicide prevention and special programmes. http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/index.html Geneva: Author; 2013.2. Giner L, Jaussent I, Olie E, et al. Violent and serious suicide attempters: One step closer to suicide? J Clin Psychiatry 2014:73(3):3191–197.3. Levi-Belz Y, Gvion Y, Horesh N, et al. Mental pain, communication difficulties, and medically serious suicide attempts: A case-control study. Arch Suicide Res 2014:18:74–87.4. Hjelmeland H and Knizek BL. Why we need qualitative research in suicidology? Suicide Life Threat Behav 2010:40(1):74–80.5. Gunnell D. A population health perspective on suicide research and prevention: What we know, what we need to know, and policy priorities. Crisis 2015:36(3):155–60.6. Fitzpatrick S. Looking beyond the qualitative and quantitative divide: Narrative, ethics and representation in suicidology. Suicidol Online 2011:2:29–37.7. Lakeman R and FitzGerald M. How people live with or get over being suicidal: A review of qualitative studies. J Adv Nurs 2008:64(2):114–26.8. Ghio L, Zanelli E, Gotelli S, et al. Involving patients who attempt suicide in suicide prevention: A focus group study. J Psychiatr Ment Health Nurs 2011:18:510–18.9. Kraft TL, Jobes DA, Lineberry TW., Conrad, A., & Kung, S. Brief report: Why suicide? Perceptions of suicidal inpatients and reflections of clinical researchers. Arch Suicide Res 2010:14(4):375-382.10. Sun F, Long A, Tsao L, et al. The healing process following a suicide attempt: Context and intervening conditions. Arch Psychiatr Nurs 2014:28:66–61.11. Montross Thomas L, Palinkas L, et al. Yearning to be heard: What veterans teach us about suicide risk and effective interventions. Crisis 2014:35(3):161–67.12. Long M, Manktelow R, and Tracey A. The healing journey: Help seeking for self-injury among a community population. Qual Health Res 2015:25(7):932–44.13. Carlen P and Bengtsson A. Suicidal patients as experienced by psychiatric nurses in inpatient care. Int J Ment Health Nurs 2007:16:257–65.14. Samuelsson M, Wiklander M, Asberg M, et al. Psychiatric care as seen by the attempted suicide patient. J Adv Nurs 2000:32(3):635–43.15. Cutcliffe JR, Stevenson C, Jackson S, et al. A modified grounded theory study of how psychiatric nurses work with suicidal people. Int J Nurs Studies 2006:43(7):791–802.16. Lakeman, R. What can qualitative research tell us about helping a person who is suicidal? Nurs Times 2010:106(33):23–26.17. Karman P, Kool N, Poslawsky I, et al. Nurses’ attitudes toward self-harm: a literature review. J Psychiatr Ment Health Nurs 2015:22:65–75.18. Carter B. ‘One expertise among many’ – working appreciatively to make miracles instead of finding problems: Using appreciative inquiry as a way of reframing research. J Res Nurs 2006:11(1): 48–63.19. Lieblich A, Tuval-Mashiach R, Zilber T. Narrative research: Reading, analysis, and interpretation. Sage Publications; 1998.20. Braun V and Clarke V. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol 2006:3(2):77–101.21. Kishi Y, Otsuka K, Akiyama K, et al. Effects of a training workshop on suicide prevention among emergency room nurses. Crisis 2014:35(5):357–61.

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Abstract:

Since September 11, American Muslim identities, political views, sensi- bilities, and even private lives have been studied by academics, pollsters, government agencies, and think tank researchers. This renewed interest on the nexus of religious and national identity has produced a vast volume of publications, cross-cutting each social science discipline and thematic re- search area. Some are even available online, such as #islamophobiaisracism syllabus, #BlackIslamSyllabus and ISPU’s Muslim American Experience Bibliography page. What is often lost in this conversation, however, are the nuances that influence everyday lives of American Muslims and their practice of Islam. Situated within religious studies and Islamic studies scholarship and speak- ing to a broad disciplinary array, the edited volume The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction is a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Islam and American Muslims. The book’s editor, prolific and prominent scholar and historian of Is- lam in America, Edward Curtis IV, explains the goals of the book in this sentence: “This book is driven by the desire to provide clear answers to es- sential, and basic, questions about how observant Muslim Americans prac- tice Islam…” (2). Importantly, the book delivers on its promise to provide a lived religion perspective (3). While the twelve chapters in The Practice of Islam in America examine distinct practices and themes, the chapters synergize in giving voice to a lived religion perspective on American Muslims’ practices. This approach helps the reader to achieve a healthy distance from the significant but often overly dominant political context that influences discourse on American Muslim life. The book opens with an introductory chapter by Curtis, explaining the rationale and background to the project. The chapter is a good prelude to this rich volume, reflecting Curtis’ years of experience working on Muslim American history and experience. For the non-specialist audience, the in- troductory chapter also provides a broad historical overview of American Muslim history, starting from the slave trade and stretching into contem- porary Islamophobia while covering debates within the diverse American Muslim community. The volume is organized across four thematic parts. Each part includes three chapters, producing a rich, twelve-chapter account. Part I examines prayer and pilgrimage and includes chapters on ṣalāt, dhikr, and ḥajj. Part II explores holidays; individual chapters cover Ramadan and Eid celebra- tions, Ashura, and Milad/Mawlid celebrations. Part III takes the reader into the realm of life cycle rituals with chapters on birth, wedding, and funeral/ death rituals. The concluding Part IV touches on Islamic ethics and reli- gious culture. It examines philanthropy, food practices and engagements with the Qur’an with reference to everyday practices of American Muslims. Curtis explains in his introduction that the volume is intentional in de- veloping a lived religion focus. Moreover, almost all authors give examples for how these practices vary in different branches of Islam (Sunni, Twelver and Isma‘ili/Bohra Shi‘i communities) as well as for multiple ethno-racial demographic groups that make up the deeply pluralistic Muslim American fabric. Contributors should be applauded for producing chapters that are ethnographically rich, thematically diverse, and attentive to multiple sites and dynamics. Chapter 1 moves through multiple vignettes that involve ṣalāt, the Muslim ritual prayer. Rose Aslan’s vivid descriptions of the lives of Ameri- can Muslims and her ability to walk the reader along not only the basics of the prayer but also the nuances among individuals with diverse ethno-racial and socioeconomic backgrounds and the post-September 11 securitization of ṣalāt is refreshing. Rosemary R. Corbett’s chapter on dhikr—“medita- tive and sometimes joyous religious litanies,” to use the definition offered by Curtis in the introductory chapter (6)—is a comparative study of three related groups, each springing from the Turkish Halveti Cerrahi order. The historical account around the creation of these groups is helpful especially because one of these figures, Tosun Bayrak of the Spring Valley Halveti Cerrahi order, recently passed away. In the next chapter, Hussein Rashid skillfully walks the reader through the meaning, rites, and politico-eco- nomic realities surrounding ḥajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudia Arabia. His chapter helps to familiarize the readers with complexities of ḥajj. Part II of the book begins with Jackleen Salem’s nuanced and vivid account of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, and Eid al-Adha. In testament to the volume’s attention to inclusivity, Michael Muhammad Knight’s chapter on Ashura is a vivid and informative account of this most popular Shi‘i commemoration. This chapter is less ethnographically driven than other chapters preceding it, perhaps to the advantage of the common reader who learns a great deal about early Muslim history and the background to the Sunni-Shi‘i split. The same is true also for Marcia Hermansen’s chapter on Milad/Mawlid celebrations recognizing Prophet Muhammad’s birth. The chapter strikes a balance between academic information on the subject and a thick description of these ceremonies. She provides a superb account of major debates and disagreements within the Muslim community sur- rounding these celebrations for the benefit of the uninitiated reader. In the first chapter of Part III, Maria Curtis explores birth rituals ranging from baby-showers to naming a child to postpartum complexities faced by moms within the American Muslim community. Her chapter is noteworthy in producing a much-needed addition to these underexplored topics. Juliane Hammer’s chapter on weddings is an exploration of not only ceremonial aspects of marriage but also legal approaches to marriage in America through a rich ethnographic account of three distinct weddings. She gives due attention to textual and Qur’anic interpretations on love and mercy by American Muslims. Her chapter is among those that provide the common reader with a nuanced view of the scholarship on the theme that is under exploration. The same is true for Amir Hussain’s chapter on Muslim funerals. Speaking from within a few funeral processions in southern Cali- fornia, as well as a brief description of the funeral ceremony of Muhammad Ali, Hussain explores the rites of death and burial in the American Muslim landscape.The first chapter of Part IV, by Danielle Witman Abraham, examines philanthropy and social giving in the American Muslim community. The chapter explains the norms in Sunii and Shi‘i communities, including concerns about domestic vs. international giving. Chapter 11, by Magfirat Dahlan, delves into American Muslims’ food consumption choices. She explores the fluid categories of permissible and impermissible food as well as ethical vs. non-ethical food as perceived by her respondents. The final chapter of the book is by Mona Ali and focuses on the Qur’an and how American Muslims engage with Islam’s holy book. Her approach provides a concise and effective summary of the Qur’an’s role in life cycles, identity formation and internal conversations among American Muslims. While the individual chapters’ focus on specific contexts and ethno- graphic accounts is very helpful, some chapters leave the reader with a sense of incompleteness due to the brief attempt to cram information on the broader context in the last two pages of each chapter. For example, in Chapter 1, Rose Aslan invokes the American Muslim debate around cre- ating gender equity in mosques and the third space wave but cannot do justice to the multifaceted conversations and developments around this issue. Chapter 4 by Jackleen Salem also suffers from trying to deliver too much. Salem’s concluding section, “Eid as an American Holiday,” fails to mention the heated debates that defined the “White House Iftar” dinners during President Obama’s presidency. These kinds of omissions create a kind of wedge between the complexities that arise in the everyday practice of Islam and the volume’s broader reflections. Chapter 9, by Amir Hussain, details Muhammad Ali’s funeral but does not fully engage with the debates and choices that marked the funeral. One wonders too if inclusion of other dhikr practices adapted by American Muslim followers of the Tijaniyya or the Ba‘Alawi sufi networks could have been helpful to give voice to dhikr practice in Chapter 2, out- side the Halveti Jerrahi context. Another theme that is neglected lies in the chapter on philanthropy, which does not mention what are often heated debates within American Muslim communities on the jurisprudence (fiqh) of giving to non-Muslims as well as whether certain service organizations (such as those serving students or social justice needs) are zakāt-eligible.There are practices that are left out as well. Du‘a Kumayl, practiced by Shi‘i Muslims on Thursday evenings similar to mawlid ceremonies, is not mentioned in the text. It would have been enriching to include this practice of reading a prayer that is traced to Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and one of the four great caliphs, Imam Ali. Finally, the choice to not cite online resources with their full web ad- dresses seems like an odd choice for a volume this rich in content. The lack of a full pathway in many instances makes it difficult for researchers to access information. These slight omissions notwithstanding, The Practice of Islam in Amer- ica: An Introduction is a great resource for instructors to use in introducto- ry courses in religious studies and American Muslim studies programs, as well as a good supplementary text for anyone teaching Islam in interfaith contexts. It delivers on its promise to provide rich narratives on what Is- lam looks like as a lived religion in America. It is highly relevant for those teaching not only on Islam but also on religion generally. The editor as well as the authors deserve recognition for producing a nuanced and insightful volume. Ahmet Selim TekeliogluAli Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic StudiesGeorge Mason University

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Since September 11, American Muslim identities, political views, sensi- bilities, and even private lives have been studied by academics, pollsters, government agencies, and think tank researchers. This renewed interest on the nexus of religious and national identity has produced a vast volume of publications, cross-cutting each social science discipline and thematic re- search area. Some are even available online, such as #islamophobiaisracism syllabus, #BlackIslamSyllabus and ISPU’s Muslim American Experience Bibliography page. What is often lost in this conversation, however, are the nuances that influence everyday lives of American Muslims and their practice of Islam. Situated within religious studies and Islamic studies scholarship and speak- ing to a broad disciplinary array, the edited volume The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction is a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Islam and American Muslims. The book’s editor, prolific and prominent scholar and historian of Is- lam in America, Edward Curtis IV, explains the goals of the book in this sentence: “This book is driven by the desire to provide clear answers to es- sential, and basic, questions about how observant Muslim Americans prac- tice Islam…” (2). Importantly, the book delivers on its promise to provide a lived religion perspective (3). While the twelve chapters in The Practice of Islam in America examine distinct practices and themes, the chapters synergize in giving voice to a lived religion perspective on American Muslims’ practices. This approach helps the reader to achieve a healthy distance from the significant but often overly dominant political context that influences discourse on American Muslim life. The book opens with an introductory chapter by Curtis, explaining the rationale and background to the project. The chapter is a good prelude to this rich volume, reflecting Curtis’ years of experience working on Muslim American history and experience. For the non-specialist audience, the in- troductory chapter also provides a broad historical overview of American Muslim history, starting from the slave trade and stretching into contem- porary Islamophobia while covering debates within the diverse American Muslim community. The volume is organized across four thematic parts. Each part includes three chapters, producing a rich, twelve-chapter account. Part I examines prayer and pilgrimage and includes chapters on ṣalāt, dhikr, and ḥajj. Part II explores holidays; individual chapters cover Ramadan and Eid celebra- tions, Ashura, and Milad/Mawlid celebrations. Part III takes the reader into the realm of life cycle rituals with chapters on birth, wedding, and funeral/ death rituals. The concluding Part IV touches on Islamic ethics and reli- gious culture. It examines philanthropy, food practices and engagements with the Qur’an with reference to everyday practices of American Muslims. Curtis explains in his introduction that the volume is intentional in de- veloping a lived religion focus. Moreover, almost all authors give examples for how these practices vary in different branches of Islam (Sunni, Twelver and Isma‘ili/Bohra Shi‘i communities) as well as for multiple ethno-racial demographic groups that make up the deeply pluralistic Muslim American fabric. Contributors should be applauded for producing chapters that are ethnographically rich, thematically diverse, and attentive to multiple sites and dynamics. Chapter 1 moves through multiple vignettes that involve ṣalāt, the Muslim ritual prayer. Rose Aslan’s vivid descriptions of the lives of Ameri- can Muslims and her ability to walk the reader along not only the basics of the prayer but also the nuances among individuals with diverse ethno-racial and socioeconomic backgrounds and the post-September 11 securitization of ṣalāt is refreshing. Rosemary R. Corbett’s chapter on dhikr—“medita- tive and sometimes joyous religious litanies,” to use the definition offered by Curtis in the introductory chapter (6)—is a comparative study of three related groups, each springing from the Turkish Halveti Cerrahi order. The historical account around the creation of these groups is helpful especially because one of these figures, Tosun Bayrak of the Spring Valley Halveti Cerrahi order, recently passed away. In the next chapter, Hussein Rashid skillfully walks the reader through the meaning, rites, and politico-eco- nomic realities surrounding ḥajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudia Arabia. His chapter helps to familiarize the readers with complexities of ḥajj. Part II of the book begins with Jackleen Salem’s nuanced and vivid account of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, and Eid al-Adha. In testament to the volume’s attention to inclusivity, Michael Muhammad Knight’s chapter on Ashura is a vivid and informative account of this most popular Shi‘i commemoration. This chapter is less ethnographically driven than other chapters preceding it, perhaps to the advantage of the common reader who learns a great deal about early Muslim history and the background to the Sunni-Shi‘i split. The same is true also for Marcia Hermansen’s chapter on Milad/Mawlid celebrations recognizing Prophet Muhammad’s birth. The chapter strikes a balance between academic information on the subject and a thick description of these ceremonies. She provides a superb account of major debates and disagreements within the Muslim community sur- rounding these celebrations for the benefit of the uninitiated reader. In the first chapter of Part III, Maria Curtis explores birth rituals ranging from baby-showers to naming a child to postpartum complexities faced by moms within the American Muslim community. Her chapter is noteworthy in producing a much-needed addition to these underexplored topics. Juliane Hammer’s chapter on weddings is an exploration of not only ceremonial aspects of marriage but also legal approaches to marriage in America through a rich ethnographic account of three distinct weddings. She gives due attention to textual and Qur’anic interpretations on love and mercy by American Muslims. Her chapter is among those that provide the common reader with a nuanced view of the scholarship on the theme that is under exploration. The same is true for Amir Hussain’s chapter on Muslim funerals. Speaking from within a few funeral processions in southern Cali- fornia, as well as a brief description of the funeral ceremony of Muhammad Ali, Hussain explores the rites of death and burial in the American Muslim landscape.The first chapter of Part IV, by Danielle Witman Abraham, examines philanthropy and social giving in the American Muslim community. The chapter explains the norms in Sunii and Shi‘i communities, including concerns about domestic vs. international giving. Chapter 11, by Magfirat Dahlan, delves into American Muslims’ food consumption choices. She explores the fluid categories of permissible and impermissible food as well as ethical vs. non-ethical food as perceived by her respondents. The final chapter of the book is by Mona Ali and focuses on the Qur’an and how American Muslims engage with Islam’s holy book. Her approach provides a concise and effective summary of the Qur’an’s role in life cycles, identity formation and internal conversations among American Muslims. While the individual chapters’ focus on specific contexts and ethno- graphic accounts is very helpful, some chapters leave the reader with a sense of incompleteness due to the brief attempt to cram information on the broader context in the last two pages of each chapter. For example, in Chapter 1, Rose Aslan invokes the American Muslim debate around cre- ating gender equity in mosques and the third space wave but cannot do justice to the multifaceted conversations and developments around this issue. Chapter 4 by Jackleen Salem also suffers from trying to deliver too much. Salem’s concluding section, “Eid as an American Holiday,” fails to mention the heated debates that defined the “White House Iftar” dinners during President Obama’s presidency. These kinds of omissions create a kind of wedge between the complexities that arise in the everyday practice of Islam and the volume’s broader reflections. Chapter 9, by Amir Hussain, details Muhammad Ali’s funeral but does not fully engage with the debates and choices that marked the funeral. One wonders too if inclusion of other dhikr practices adapted by American Muslim followers of the Tijaniyya or the Ba‘Alawi sufi networks could have been helpful to give voice to dhikr practice in Chapter 2, out- side the Halveti Jerrahi context. Another theme that is neglected lies in the chapter on philanthropy, which does not mention what are often heated debates within American Muslim communities on the jurisprudence (fiqh) of giving to non-Muslims as well as whether certain service organizations (such as those serving students or social justice needs) are zakāt-eligible.There are practices that are left out as well. Du‘a Kumayl, practiced by Shi‘i Muslims on Thursday evenings similar to mawlid ceremonies, is not mentioned in the text. It would have been enriching to include this practice of reading a prayer that is traced to Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and one of the four great caliphs, Imam Ali. Finally, the choice to not cite online resources with their full web ad- dresses seems like an odd choice for a volume this rich in content. The lack of a full pathway in many instances makes it difficult for researchers to access information. These slight omissions notwithstanding, The Practice of Islam in Amer- ica: An Introduction is a great resource for instructors to use in introducto- ry courses in religious studies and American Muslim studies programs, as well as a good supplementary text for anyone teaching Islam in interfaith contexts. It delivers on its promise to provide rich narratives on what Is- lam looks like as a lived religion in America. It is highly relevant for those teaching not only on Islam but also on religion generally. The editor as well as the authors deserve recognition for producing a nuanced and insightful volume. Ahmet Selim TekeliogluAli Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic StudiesGeorge Mason University

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Field-based research programs offer students a singular opportunity to understand that today there are no simple scientific, economic or socio-political answers to the complex questions facing governments, communities, and local organizations. Through their research, students can gain a first-hand appreciation that decision making in the real world is a mix of all these disciplines, and that they have a vital role to play in participating in this process. According to the most recent Open Doors report (2006), issued by the Institute of International Education, about 206,000 US students studied abroad in 2004/5. While about 55% studied in Europe, an increasing number studied in other host countries around the world. Social science and physical science students comprised about 30% of all US study abroad students in this period. While study abroad programs encompassing a field research component are still in the minority, an increasing number of home institutions and field-based providers are supporting and conducting these types of programs. As the student papers in this Special Issue of Frontiers demonstrate, there is high quality work being produced by undergraduates in settings as diverse as France, Thailand, Kenya, South Africa and Mali. For these students this opportunity was likely a new experience, involving living and studying in international settings; dealing with language and culture differences; matriculating in programs operated by host country universities, independent program providers, or their home institution’s international program; and learning how to conduct research that meets professional standards. Much has been written and discussed regarding pre-departure orientation of US students studying abroad, along with studies and evaluations of the study abroad experience. Less discussion and research has focused on the experiences of the on-site faculty and staff who host students and incorporate field-based research into their courses and programs. These courses and programs involving student research include the following types: • International university-based research, in which the student conducts research on a topic as part of a course or term paper; • Independent field-based research, in which the student identifies a topic, organizes the project, and conducts the field work, analysis, write-up, etc. for an overall grade; • Collective field-based research, in which students, working under the guidance of a professor (either US or international), conduct a research project as part of a US-based course, or complementary to the professor’s research focus; • Client-focused, directed, field-based research in which the research conducted is in response to, or in collaboration with, a specific client ranging from an NGO, to a corporation, to an indigenous community, or a governmental agency. The purpose of this article is to describe some of the issues and challenges that on-site faculty and staff encounter in preparing and supporting US undergraduate students to conduct formal research projects in international settings in order to maximize their success and the quality of their research. The perspectives described below have been gathered through informal surveys with a range of international program faculty and staff; discussions with program managers and faculty; and through our own experience at The School for Field Studies (SFS), with its formal directed research model. The survey sought responses in the following areas, among others: preparing students to conduct successfully their field-based research in a different socio-cultural environment; the skill building needs of students; patterns of personal, cultural, and/or technical challenges that must be addressed to complete the process successfully; and, misconceptions that students have about field-based research. Student Preparation Students work either individually or in groups to conduct their research, depending on the program. In either case on-site faculty and staff focus immediately on training students on issues ranging from personal safety and risk management, to cultural understanding, language training, and appropriate behavior. In programs involving group work, faculty and staff have learned that good teamwork dynamics cannot be taken for granted. They work actively with students in helping them understand the ebb and flow of groups, the mutual respect which must be extended, and the active participation that each member must contribute. As one on-site director indicates, “Students make their experience what it is through their behavior. We talk a lot about respecting each other as individuals and working together to make the project a great experience.” Cultural and sensitivity training are a major part of these field-based programs. It is critical that students learn and appreciate the social and cultural context in which they will conduct their research. As another on-site director states, “It is most important that the students understand the context in which the research is happening. They need to know the values and basic cultural aspects around the project they will be working on. It is not simply doing ‘good science.’ It requires understanding the context so the science research reaches its goal.” On-site faculty and staff also stress the importance of not only understanding cultural dynamics, but also acting appropriately and sensitively relative to community norms and expectations. Language training is also a component of many of these programs. As a faculty member comments, “Students usually need help negotiating a different culture and a new language. We try to help the students understand that they need to identify appropriate solutions for the culture they are in, and that can be very difficult at times.” Skill Building Training students on the technical aspects of conducting field-based research is the largest challenge facing most on-site faculty and staff, who are often struck by the following: • A high percentage of students come to these programs with a lack of knowledge of statistics and methods. They’ve either had very little training in statistics, or they find that real world conditions complicate their data. According to one faculty member, “Statistics are a big struggle for most students. Some have done a class, but when they come to work with real data it is seldom as black and white as a text book example and that leads to interpretation issues and lack of confidence in their data. They learn that ecology (for example) is often not clear, but that is OK.” • Both physical and social science students need basic training in scientific methodology in order to undertake their projects. Even among science majors there is a significant lack of knowledge of how to design, manage and conduct a research project. As a program director states, “Many students begin by thinking that field research is comprised only of data collection. We intensively train students to understand that good research is a process that begins with conceptualization of issues, moves into review of relevant literature, structures a research hypothesis, determines indicators and measurements, creates the research design, collects data, undertakes analysis and inference. This is followed by write-up in standard scientific format for peer review and input. This leads to refining earlier hypotheses, raising new questions and initiating further research to address new questions.” Consistently, on-site faculty have indicated that helping students understand and appreciate this cycle is a major teaching challenge, but one that is critical to their education and the success of their various field research projects. • The uncertainty and ambiguity that are often present in field research creates challenges for many students who are used to seeking ‘the answer in the book.’ On-site faculty help students understand that science is a process in which field-based research is often non-linear and prone to interruption by natural and political events. It is a strong lesson for students when research subjects, be they animal or human, don’t cooperate by failing to appear on time, or at all, and when they do appear they may have their own agendas. Finally, when working with human communities, student researchers need to understand that their research results and recommendations are not likely to result in immediate action. Program faculty help them to understand that the real world includes politics, conflicting attitudes, regulatory issues, funding issues, and other community priorities. • Both physical and social science students demonstrate a consistent lack of skill in technical and evidence-based writing. For many this type of writing is completely new and is a definite learning experience. As a faculty member states, “Some students find the report writing process very challenging. We want them to do well, but we don’t want to effectively write their paper for them.” Challenges The preceding points address some of the technical work that on-site faculty conduct with students. Faculty also witness and experience the ‘emotional’ side of field-based research being conducted by their students. This includes what one faculty member calls “a research-oriented motivation” — the need for students to develop a strong, energized commitment to overcome all the challenges necessary to get the project done. As another professor indicates, “At the front end the students don’t realize how much effort they will have to expend because they usually have no experience with this sort of work before they do their project.” Related to this is the need for students to learn that flexibility in the research process does not justify a sloppy or casual approach. It does mean a recognition that human, political, and meteorological factors may intervene, requiring the ability to adapt to changed conditions. The goal is to get the research done. The exact mechanics for doing so will emerge as the project goes on. “Frustration tolerance” is critical in conducting this type of work. Students have the opportunity to learn that certain projects need to incorporate a substantial window of time while a lengthy ethics approval and permit review system is conducted by various governmental agencies. Students learn that bureaucracies move at their own pace, and for reasons that may not be obvious. Finally, personal challenges to students may include being uncomfortable in the field (wet, hot, covered in scrub itch) or feeling over-tired. As a faculty member states, “Many have difficulty adjusting to the early mornings my projects usually involve.” These issues represent a range of challenges that field-based research faculty and staff encounter in working with undergraduate students in designing and conducting their research projects around the world. In my own experience with SFS field-based staff, and in discussions with a wide variety of others who work and teach on-site, I am consistently impressed by the dedication, energy and commitment of these men and women to train, support and mentor students to succeed. As an on-site director summarizes, essentially speaking for all, “Fortunately, most of the students attending our program are very enthusiastic learners, take their limitations positively, and hence put tremendous effort into acquiring the required skills to conduct quality research.” Summary/Conclusions Those international program faculty and staff who have had years of experience in dealing with and teaching US undergraduates are surprised that the US educational system has not better prepared students on subjects including statistics, scientific report formatting and composition, and research methodologies. They find that they need to address these topics on an intensive basis in order for a substantial number of students to then conduct their research work successfully. Having said this, on-site faculty and staff are generally impressed by the energy and commitment that most students put into learning the technical requirements of a research project and carrying it out to the best of their abilities. Having students conduct real field-based research, and grading these efforts, is a very concrete method of determining the seriousness with which a student has participated in their study abroad program. Encouraging field-based research is good for students and good for study abroad because it has the potential of producing measurable products based on very tangible efforts. In a number of instances students have utilized their field research as the basis for developing their senior thesis or honors project back on their home campus. Successful field research has also formed the basis of Fulbright or Watson proposals, in addition to other fellowships and graduate study projects. An increasing number of students are also utilizing their field research, often in collaboration with their on-site program faculty, to create professional conference presentations and posters. Some of these field-based research models also produce benefits for incountry clients, including NGOs, corporations and community stakeholders. In addition to providing the data, analyses, technical information, and recommendations that these groups might not otherwise be able to afford, it is a concrete mechanism for the student and her/his study abroad program faculty and staff to ‘give back’ to local stakeholders and clients. It changes the dynamic from the student solely asking questions, interviewing respondents, observing communities, to more of a mutually beneficial relationship. This is very important to students who are sensitive to this dynamic. It is also important to their program faculty and staff, and in most cases, genuinely appreciated by the local stakeholders. In essence, community identified and responsive research is an excellent mechanism for giving to a community — not just taking from it. An increasing interest in conducting field-based research on the part of US universities and their students may have the effect of expanding the international destinations to which US students travel. A student’s sociological, anthropological, or environmental interest and their desire to conduct field research in that academic discipline, for example, may help stretch the parameters of the student’s comfort level to study in more exotic (non-traditional) locales. Skill building in preparing for and conducting field-based research is an invaluable experience for the student’s future academic and professional career. It is a fairly common experience for these students to indicate that with all the classroom learning they have done, their study abroad experience wherein they got their hands dirty, their comfort level stretched, their assumptions tested, and their work ethic challenged, provided them with an invaluable and life changing experience. Conducting field-based research in an international setting provides real world experience, as the student papers in this edition of Frontiers attest. It also brings what may have only been academic subjects, like statistics, and research design and methodology, to life in a real-conditions context. On a related note, conducting real field-based work includes the requirement to endure field conditions, remote locations, bad weather, personal discomforts, technological and mechanical breakdowns, and sometimes dangerous situations. Field research is hard work if it is done rigorously. In addition, field work often includes non-cooperating subjects that defy prediction, and may confound a neat research hypothesis. For a student considering a profession which requires a serious commitment to social or physical science field work this study abroad experience is invaluable. It clarifies for the student what is really involved, and it is helpful to the student in assessing their future career focus, as they ask the critical question — would I really want to do this as a fulltime career? US education needs to bridge better the gap between the physical and social sciences. Students are done a disservice with the silo-type education that has been so prevalent in US education. In the real world there are no strictly scientific, economic, or sociological solutions to complex, vexing problems facing the global community. Going forward there needs to be interdisciplinary approaches to these issues by decision makers at all levels. We need to train our students to comprehend that while they may not be an ecologist, or an economist, or a sociologist, they need to understand and appreciate that all these perspectives are important and must be considered in effective decision-making processes. In conclusion, education abroad programs involving serious field-based research are not a distraction or diversion from the prescribed course of study at US home institutions; rather, they are, if done well, capable of providing real, tangible skills and experience that students lack, in spite of their years of schooling. This is the reward that is most meaningful to the international program faculty and staff who teach, mentor and support US students in conducting their field-based research activities. As an Australian on-site program director stated, “there are relatively few students who are adequately skilled in these (field research) areas when they come to our program. Most need a lot of instruction and assistance to complete their research projects, but that of course is part of what we’re all about — helping students acquire or improve these critical skills.” This is the real service that these programs and on-site faculty and staff offer to US undergraduates. Paul Houlihan, President The School for Field Studies

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The great social and cultural changes in the Victorian period had a great impact on gender roles. In both public and private sphere, the divisions in gender roles started to disappear with the emergence of a type of woman willing to be active in every area of life. Along with more frequent appearance and growing numbers of women in the work force through the late nineteenth century Elaine Showalter’s notion of “sexual anarchy” and its different forms were invigorated. How the social status of women started to change along with industrialization by the end of the nineteenth-century was also reflected upon Victorian literature. For instance, in Mrs Warren’s Profession the protagonist Vivie represents the new woman type who is ambitious to get education and to participate in work life as a self-sufficient woman in Victorian drama. When compared with the traditional woman type, she is more free-minded, independent and career-oriented. In D. H. Lawrence’ The Rainbow, Ursula, is another significant prototype for the ‘new woman’, who struggles for more freedom and independence. She is well-educated and it is very difficult for her to come to terms with her pregnancy as she cannot accept the fact that one part of hers belongs to a man. She is unconventional and rebellious. She counters domesticity. In The Story of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner the protagonist Lyndall’s life story on an ostrich farm depicts the limited choices and living conditions of a woman constrained by the rigid conventions of Boer lifestyle. Her main goal in life is to pursue after her own choices. In The Type-Writer Girl by Grant Allen, Juliet Appleton stands out with some infamous characteristics of her identity as a New Woman, such as smoking cigarettes, attending college, travelling on her bicycle, and wearing rational clothing. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that working women had an unstable position at the end of the nineteenth century, based on all these trappings of the New Woman, and the intersection of gender with the discourses of class, evolution and technology through a feminist perspective. Social pressure and prejudices restrict the opportunities of the new woman to go beyond her capacity and reach real freedom and happiness. Therefore, the society mostly puts barriers in front of her ideals and her dreams. Through a feminist lens, this study reveals the fact that the new woman expects to live in a more democratic society where she is honoured with equal rights and opportunities with men. She rejects being completely dependent upon men finally, instead she adopts the idea of self-help to gain the respect she deserves as a self-sufficient woman.

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There have been a number of Australian memoirs written by adoptees over the last twenty years—Robert Dessaix’s A Mother’s Disgrace, Suzanne Chick’s Searching for Charmian, Tom Frame’s Binding Ties:An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia, for example—as well as international adoptee narratives by Betty Jean Lifton, Florence Fisher, and A. M. Homes amongst others. These works form a component of the small but growing field of adoption life writing that includes works by “all members of the adoption triad” (Hipchen and Deans 163): adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoptees. As the broad genre of memoir becomes more theorised and mapped, many sub-genres are emerging (Brien). My own adoptee story (which I am currently composing) could be a further sub-categorisation of the adoptee memoir, that of “late discovery adoptees” (Perl and Markham), those who are either told, or find out, about their adoption in adulthood. When this is part of a life story, secrets and silences are prominent, and digging into these requires using whatever resources can be found. These include cookbooks, recipes written by hand, and the scraps of paper shoved between pages. There are two cookbooks from my adoptive mother’s belongings that I have kept. One of them is titled Miss Tuxford’s Modern Cookery for the Middle Classes: Hints on Modern Gas Stove Cooking, and this was published around 1937 in England. It’s difficult to date this book exactly, as there is no date in my copy, but one of the advertisem*nts (for Bird’s Custard, I think; the page is partly obscured by an Orange Nut Loaf recipe from a Willow baking pan that has been glued onto the page) is headed with a date range of 1837 to 1937. It has that smell of long ago that lingers strongly even now, out of the protective custody of my mother’s storage. Or should I say, out of the range of my adoptive father’s garbage dump zeal. He loved throwing things away, but these were often things that I saw as valuable, or at least of sentimental value, worth keeping for the memories they evoked. Maybe my father didn’t want to remember. My mother was brimming with memories, I discovered after her death, but she did not reveal them during her life. At least, not to me, making objects like these cookbooks precious in my reconstruction of the lives I know so little about, as well as in the grieving process (Gibson).Miss Tuxford (“Diplomée Board of Education, Gold Medallist, etc”) produced numerous editions of her book. My mother’s is now fragile, loose at the spine and browned with age. There are occasional stains showing that the bread and cakes section got the most use, with the pages for main meals of meat and vegetables relatively clean. The author divided her recipes into the main chapters of Soups (lentil, kidney, sheep’s head broth), Sauces (white, espagnol, mushroom), Fish (“It is important that all fish is fresh when cooked” (23)), Meats (roasted, boiled, stuffed; roast rabbit, boiled turkey, scotch collop), Vegetables (creamed beetroot, economical salad dressing, potatoes baked in their skins), Puddings and Sweets (suet pastry, Yorkshire pudding, chocolate tarts, ginger cream), Bread and Cakes (household bread, raspberry sandwich cake, sultana scones, peanut fancies), Icings and Fillings, Invalid Cookery (beef tea, nourishing lemonade, Virol pudding), Jams, Sweetmeats and Pickles (red currant jelly, piccalilli) and Miscellaneous Dishes including Meatless Recipes (cheese omelette, mock white fish, mock duck, mock goose, vegetarian mincemeat). At the back, Miss Tuxford includes sections on gas cooking hints, “specimen household dinners” (206), and household hints. There is then a “Table of Foods in Season” (208–10) taking the reader through the months and the various meats and vegetables available at those times. There is a useful index and finally an advertisem*nt for an oven cleaner on the last page (which is glued to the back cover). There are food and cookery advertisem*nts throughout the book, but my favourite is the one inside the front cover, for Hartley’s jam, featuring two photographs of a little boy. The first shows him looking serious, and slightly anxious, the second wide-eyed and smiling, eager for his jam. The text tells mothers that “there’s nothing like plenty of bread and Hartley’s for a growing boy” (inside front cover). I love the simple appeal to making your little boy happy that is contained within this tiny narrative. Did my mother and father eat this jam when they were small? By 1937, my mother was twenty-one, not yet married, living with her mother in Weston-super-Mare. She was learning secretarial skills—I have her certificate of proficiency in Pitman’s shorthand—and I think she and my father had met by then. Perhaps she thought about when she would be giving her own children Hartley’s jam, or something else prepared from Miss Tuxford’s recipes, like the Christmas puddings, shortbread, or chocolate cake. She would not have imagined that no children would arrive, that twenty-five years of marriage would pass before she held her own baby, and this would be one who was born to another woman. In the one other cookbook I have kept, there are several recipes cut out from newspapers, and a few typed or handwritten recipes hidden within the pages. This is The Main Cookery Book, in its August 1944 reprint, which was written and compiled by Marguerite K. Gompertz and the “Staff of the Main Research Kitchen”. My mother wrote her name and the date she obtained the cookbook (31 January 1945) on the first blank page. She had been married just over five years, and my father may, or may not, have still been in the Royal Air Force. I have only a sketchy knowledge of my adoptive parents. My mother was born in Newent, Gloucestershire, and my father in Bromley, Kent; they were both born during the first world war. My father served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force in the second world war in the 1940s, received head and psychological injuries and was invalided out before the war ended. He spent some time in rehabilitation, there being letters from him to my mother detailing his stay in one hospital in the 1950s. Their life seemed to become less and less secure as the years passed, more chaotic, restless, and unsettled. By the time I came into their lives, they were both nearly fifty, and moving from place to place. Perhaps this is one reason why I have no memory of my mother cooking. I cannot picture her consulting these cookbooks, or anything more modern, or even cutting out the recipes from newspapers and magazines, because I do not remember seeing her do it. She did not talk to me about cooking, we didn’t cook together, and I do not remember her teaching me anything about food or its preparation. This is a gap in my memory that is puzzling. There is evidence—the books and additional paper recipes and stains on the pages—that my mother was involved in the world of the kitchen. This suggests she handled meats, vegetables, and flours, kneaded, chopped, mashed, baked, and boiled all manners of foods. But I cannot remember her doing any of it. I think the cooking must have been a part of her life before me, when she lived in England, her home country, which she loved, and when she still had hope that children would come. It must have then been apparent that her husband was going to need support and care after the war, and I can imagine she came to realise that any dreams she had would need rearranging.What I do remember is that our meals were prepared by my father, and contained no spices, onions, or garlic because he suffered frequently from indigestion and said these ingredients made it worse. He was a big-chested man with small hips who worried he was too heavy and so put himself on diets every other week. For my father, dieting meant not eating anything, which tended to lead to binges on chocolate or cheese or whatever he could grab easily from the fridge.Meals at night followed a pattern. On Sundays we ate roast chicken with vegetables as a treat, then finished it over the next days as a cold accompaniment with salad. Other meals would feature fish fingers, mince, ham, or a cold luncheon meat with either salad or boiled vegetables. Sometimes we would have a tin of peaches in juice or ice cream, or both. No cookbooks were consulted to prepare these meals.What was my mother doing while my father cooked? She must have been in the kitchen too, probably contributing, but I don’t see her there. By the time we came back to Australia permanently in 1974, my father’s working life had come to an end, and he took over the household cookery for something to do, as well as sewing his own clothes, and repairing his own car. He once hoisted the engine out of a Morris Minor with the help of a young mechanic, a rope, and the branch of a poinciana tree. I have three rugs that he wove before I was born, and he made furniture as well. My mother also sewed, and made my school uniforms and other clothes as well as her own skirts and blouses, jackets and pants. Unfortunately, she was fond of crimplene, which came in bright primary colours and smelled of petrol, but didn’t require ironing and dried quickly on the washing line. It didn’t exactly hang on your body, but rather took it over, imposing itself with its shapelessness. The handwritten recipe for salad cream shown on the pink paper is not in my mother’s hand but my father’s. Her correction can be seen to the word “gelatine” at the bottom; she has replaced it with “c’flour” which I assume means cornflour. This recipe actually makes me a liar, because it shows my father writing about using pepper, paprika, and tumeric to make a food item, when I have already said he used no spices. When I knew him, and ate his food, he didn’t. But he had another life for forty-seven years before my birth, and these recipes with their stains and scribbles help me to begin making a picture of both his life, and my mother’s. So much of them is a complete mystery to me, but these scraps of belongings help me inch along in my thinking about them, who they were, and what they meant to me (Turkle).The Main Cookery Book has a similar structure to Miss Tuxford’s, with some variations, like the chapter titled Réchauffés, which deals with dishes using already cooked foodstuffs that only then require reheating, and a chapter on home-made wines. There are also notes at the end of the book on topics such as gas ovens and methods of cooking (boiling, steaming, simmering, and so on). What really interests me about this book are the clippings inserted by my mother, although the printed pages themselves seem relatively clean and uncooked upon. There is a recipe for pickles and chutneys torn from a newspaper, and when I look on the other side I find a context: a note about Charlie Chaplin and the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee starting its investigations into the influence of Communists on Hollywood. I wonder if my parents talked about these events, or if they went to see Charlie Chaplin’s films. My mother’s diaries from the 1940s include her references to movies—Shirley Temple in Kiss and Tell, Bing Crosby in Road to Utopia—as well as day to day activities and visits to, and from, family and friends, her sinus infections and colds, getting “shock[ed] from paraffin lamp”, food rationing. If my father kept diaries during his earlier years, nothing of them survives. I remember his determined shredding of documents after my mother’s death, and his fear of discovery, that his life’s secrets would be revealed. He did not tell me I had been adopted until I was twenty-three, and rarely spoke of it afterwards. My mother never mentioned it. I look at the recipe for lemon curd. Did my mother ever make this? Did she use margarine instead of butter? We used margarine on sandwiches, as butter was too hard to spread. Once again, I turn over this clipping to read the news, and find no date but an announcement of an exhibition of work by Marc Chagall at the Tate Gallery, the funeral of Sir Geoffrey Fison (who I discover from The Peerage website died in 1948, unmarried, a Baronet and decorated soldier), and a memorial service for Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian poet and prose writer, during which the Poet Laureate of the time, John Masefield, gave the address. And there was also a note about the latest wills, including that of a reverend who left an estate valued at over £50 000. My maternal adoptive grandmother, who lived in Weston-super-Mare across the road from the beach, and with whom we stayed for several months in 1974, left most of her worldly belongings to my mother and nothing to her son. He seems to have been cut out from her life after she separated from her husband, and her children’s father, sometime in the 1920s. Apparently, my uncle followed his father out to Australia, and his mother never forgave him, refusing to have anything more to do with her son for the rest of her life, not even to see her grandchildren. When I knew her in that brief period in 1974, she was already approaching eighty and showing signs of dementia. But I do remember dancing the Charleston with her in the kitchen, and her helping me bathe my ragdoll Pollyanna in a tub in the garden. The only food I remember at her stone house was afternoon tea with lots of different, exotic cakes, particularly one called Neopolitan, with swirls of red and brown through the moist sponge. My grandmother had a long narrow garden filled with flowers and a greenhouse with tomatoes; she loved that garden, and spent a lot of time nurturing it.My father and his mother-in-law were not each other’s favourite person, and this coloured my mother’s relationship with her, too. We were poor for many years, and the only reason we were able to go to England was because of the generosity of my grandmother, who paid for our airfares. I think my father searched for work while we were there, but whether he was successful or not I do not know. We returned to Australia and I went into grade four at the end of 1974, an outsider of sorts, and bemused by the syllabus, because I had moved around so much. I went to eight different primary schools and two high schools, eventually obtaining a scholarship to a private girls’ school for the last four years. My father was intent on me becoming a doctor, and so my life was largely study, which is another reason why I took little notice of what went on in the kitchen and what appeared on the dining table. I would come home from school and my parents would start meal preparation almost straight away, so we sat down to dinner at about four o’clock during the week, and I started the night’s study at five. I usually worked through until about ten, and then read a novel for a little while before sleep. Every parcel of time was accounted for, and nothing was wasted. This schedule continued throughout those four years of high school, with my father berating me if I didn’t do well at an exam, but also being proud when I did. In grades eight, nine, and ten, I studied home economics, and remember being offered a zucchini to taste because I had never seen one before. I also remember making Greek biscuits of some sort for an exam, and the sieve giving out while I was sifting a large quantity of flour. We learned to cook simple meals of meats and vegetables, and to prepare a full breakfast. We also baked cakes but, when my sponges remained flat, I realised that my strengths might lay elsewhere. This probably also contributed to my lack of interest in cooking. Domestic pursuits were not encouraged at home, although my mother did teach me to sew and knit, resulting in skewed attempts at a shirt dress and a white blouse, and a wildly coloured knitted shoulder bag that I actually liked but which embarrassed my father. There were no such lessons in cakemaking or biscuit baking or any of the recipes from Miss Tuxford. By this time, my mother bought such treats from the supermarket.This other life, this previous life of my parents, a life far away in time and place, was completely unknown to me before my mother’s death. I saw little of them after the revelation of my adoption, not because of this knowledge I then had, but because of my father’s controlling behaviour. I discovered that the rest of my adoptive family, who I hardly knew apart from my maternal grandmother, had always known. It would have been difficult, after all, for my parents to keep such a secret from them. Because of this life of constant moving, my estrangement from my family, and our lack of friends and connections with other people, there was a gap in my experience. As a child, I only knew one grandmother, and only for a relatively brief period of time. I have no grandfatherly memories, and none either of aunts and uncles, only a few fleeting images of a cousin here and there. It was difficult to form friendships as a child when we were only in a place for a limited time. We were always moving on, and left everything behind, to start again in a new suburb, state, country. Continuity and stability were not our trademarks, for reasons that are only slowly making themselves known to me: my father’s mental health problems, his difficult personality, our lack of money, the need to keep my adoption secret.What was that need? From where did it spring? My father always seemed to be a secretive person, an intensely private man, one who had things to hide, and seemed to suffer many mistakes and mishaps and misfortune. At the end, after my mother’s death, we spent two years with each other as he became frailer and moved into a nursing home. It was a truce formed out of necessity, as there was no one else to care for him, so thoroughly had he alienated his family; he had no friends, certainly not in Australia, and only the doctor and helping professionals to talk to most days. My father’s brother John had died some years before, and the whereabouts of his other sibling Gordon were unknown. I discovered that he had died three years previously. Nieces had not heard from my father for decades. My mother’s niece revealed that my mother and she had never met. There is a letter from my mother’s father in the 1960s, probably just before he died, remarking that he would like a photograph of her as they hadn’t seen each other for forty years. None of this was talked about when my mother was alive. It was as if I was somehow separate from their stories, from their history, that it was not suitable for my ears, or that once I came into their lives they wanted to make a new life altogether. At that time, all of their past was stored away. Even my very origins, my tiny past life, were unspoken, and made into a secret. The trouble with secrets, however, is that they hang around, peek out of boxes, lurk in the corners of sentences, and threaten to be revealed by the questions of puzzled strangers, or mistakenly released by knowledgeable relatives. Adoptee memoirs like mine seek to go into those hidden storage boxes and the corners and pages of sources like these seemingly innocent old cookbooks, in the quest to bring these secrets to light. Like Miss Tuxford’s cookbook, with its stains and smudges, or the Main Cookery Book with its pages full of clippings, the revelation of such secrets threaten to tell stories that contradict the official version. ReferencesBrien, Donna Lee. “Pathways into an ‘Elaborate Ecosystem’: Ways of Categorising the Food Memoir”. TEXT (October 2011). 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct11/brien.htm›.Chick, Suzanne. Searching for Charmian. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Dessaix, Robert. A Mother’s Disgrace. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994.Fisher, Florence. The Search for Anna Fisher. New York: Arthur Fields, 1973.Frame, Tom. Binding Ties: An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, 1999.Gibson, Margaret. Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P, 2008. Gompertz, Marguerite K., and the Staff of the Main Research Kitchen. The Main Cookery Book. 52nd. ed. London: R. & A. Main, 1944. Hipchen, Emily, and Jill Deans. “Introduction. Adoption Life Writing: Origins and Other Ghosts”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 18.2 (2003): 163–70. Special Issue on Adoption.Homes, A. M. The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir. London: Granta, 2007.Kiss and Tell. Dir. By Richard Wallace. Columbia Pictures, 1945.Lifton, Betty Jean. Twice Born: Memoirs of An Adopted Daughter. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1977.Lundy, Darryl, comp. The Peerage: A Genealogical Survey of the Peerage of Britain as well as the Royal Families of Europe. 30 May 2013 ‹http://www.thepeerage.com/p40969.htm#i409684›Perl, Lynne and Shirin Markham. Why Wasn’t I Told? Making Sense of the Late Discovery of Adoption. Bondi: Post Adoption Resource Centre/Benevolent Society of NSW, 1999.Road to Utopia. Dir. By Hal Walker. Paramount, 1946.Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 2011. Tuxford, Miss H. H. Miss Tuxford’s Modern Cookery for the Middle Classes: Hints on Modern Gas Stove Cooking. London: John Heywood, c.1937.

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'Self-awareness' and the development of the autonomous subject (derived from Enlightenment and the Anglo-European philosophical traditions) has often been implicated in discussions of modernity. In East Asian societies where the Confucianist social order is seen as a deep-rooted social and cultural force, discussions of modernity and modernisation have often revolved around the tension between the spread of individualism and liberalism that come with modernisation and contact with the West. The preservation of traditional sociocultural values and familial and social structures that stress mutual obligations, social harmony and a certain form of "benign" paternalism have been key concerns. The popular television dramas in these societies seem to provide a public imaginary space where such tensions and conflicts are often played out in dramatic ways. They provide places were simulated or compromised solutions are proposed and explored. Popular TV romance dramas in particular can serve as a window to the ways in which the topic of the (non-) self-determining subject is explored. These dramas typically present a scenario in which strong mutual love and desire between two people come into conflict with the existing sociocultural values (e.g., familial, social constraints). In this paper, I analyse a recent popular South Korean TV romance drama: (1) Autumn in My Heart (also known as Endless Love I, Autumn for short below) and contrast it with (2) Friends, another recent popular TV romance drama jointly produced by television companies in Japan and South Korea. These cultural products are shown not only in their respective societies but also sold to television companies in other neighbouring countries; their VCD/DVDs are widely marketed and circulated in East Asian areas (e.g., Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China). 1 Autumn is about a brother (played by Song Seung-hun) and sister (played by Song Hye-kyo) who had grown up together and had developed a very close relationship in a happy middle class family until one day the family found out that the girl was actually not their own. There had been a mistake in the hospital and two baby girls were swapped. Hye-kyo was 14 when this mistake was discovered. She returned to her real mother's poor working class home (her father died from blood cancer before she was born), while the middle class family left Korea for the States with their son and newly recovered daughter as an attempt to forget about the whole incident. From then on, Hye-kyo was separated from her "brother" (Seung-hun) and started her longing for him. Ten years later, the middle class family returned to South Korea and the "brother" and "sister" met again and fell in love. Seung-hun wanted to break his prior engagement with his fiancée to marry Hye-kyo. However, family and friends still saw them as "brother" and "sister" (despite the fact that they are not related in blood) and imposed great familial and social pressure on them to end their "improper" relationship. Later, Hye-kyo discovered that she had blood cancer. She hid her illness from Seung-hun and wished him happiness with his fiancé. Seung-hun, not knowing about Hye-kyo's illness, and under a guilty conscience to make it up to his fiancée (who had attempted suicide for him), consented to leave Hye-kyo and go back to the States with his fiancé. At the last moment, he found out about Hye-kyo's illness and rushed to the hospital. Families and friends were finally moved by their love for each other and did not prevent them from spending their last days together. Hye-kyo died from her illness soon and Seung-hun, having lost all hope and interest in life, was hit by a truck. To the Western audience, such a storyline may seem implausible and perhaps impossible. For instance, how can family and friends find any legitimate reasons to prevent Seung-hun and Hye-kyo from loving each other when they are not blood relatives? Seung-hun's father mentioned once that their "improper relationship" would bring disgrace to the family. His mother did not support their union, either, as she could not bear to see the "brother-sister" relationship being transformed into a romantic, sexual relationship. She became ill, tormented by her own guilty feelings: she blamed herself for not taking Hye-kyo with her to the States ten years ago and she thought that their "love" for each other was a tragic distortion of their original brotherly and sisterly feelings due to their long separation. On the other hand, Seung-hun felt guilty for breaking his prior promise to his fiancé. Hye-kyo was also full of guilty feelings for she felt that they were hurting everybody who cared about them. Almost 90% of the time when the couple talked to each other, they were in tears and were deeply tormented by the conflict between their perceived obligations towards family and friends who loved them and their strong desire to stay together. At one point, they decided to part so that "no one would get hurt any more" (without admitting that they themselves were deeply hurt). Such self-negating actions were coupled with an unquestioning acceptance of the legitimacy of the familial and social demands on them. Is the current South Korean society very much against the development of an autonomous individual and the individual's self-determining actions? On this issue, Korean cultural studies scholar Lee Dong-hoo had the following comments: Many Korean dramas, especially daily soap operas, put values on relationships, such as family relationship and friendship. Even a success story, which emphasizes one's own will to succeed, doesn't neglect the aspect of human relationships. … The traditional Confucianist ethics or patriarchal ideology can be found in the dramas' emphasis on relationship or one's social role. And I think that keeping good relationships is one of the survival strategies in Korea. The Korean society has been maintained by the closely connected social nets. The dramas may (unconsciously) reflect this reality. Lee's remarks about the importance of Confucianism in the Korean society are evidenced in the long-term activities of the well-organised Confucianist society ("Confucian Forest"), which maintains special schools in major cities and counties, offering instruction in Confucianist ethics, rituals and practices (Wu 27). Another example of Confucianist relational ethics can be found in the recent rejection by the South Korean parliament of the nominated female prime minister; one of the reasons quoted is that her son has chosen to be an American citizen (Nan 26). Before moving on to a discussion of the ideological implications of the tragic ending in Autumn, let us first look at another recent popular TV romance drama, Friends, which was jointly produced by Japanese and South Korean television companies. Interestingly, Friends did not start with a scene in Korea or Japan but with the Victorian Harbor scene in Hong Kong, with spectacular cosmopolitan skyscrapers in the background, and a Western-style saxophonist playing Jazz music in a busy street corner. Tomoko, a tourist from Japan, was left on her own by her colleague who had travelled with her on holiday but was keen to see her boyfriend who worked in Hong Kong. Soon, Tomoko was robbed of her handbag in a busy street. In chasing the robber, she mistook Kim as the culprit. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, they became friends. Kim was a college student from South Korea and an active member of the Film society in his university. He was in Hong Kong trying to shoot his first and last movie on a shoestring budget (last because he had decided to give up film-making after this to conform to his father's wish for him to run the family business). Tomoko agreed to help Kim by acting in his movie, which was about a young woman running and searching for true love in the busy streets of a foreign place (Hong Kong). After the short stay in Hong Kong, they returned to Japan and Korea respectively and started their e-mail correspondence. Soon they fell in love. Tomoko felt that corresponding with Kim made her able to like herself again. Coming from a divorced, single-parent family and not doing very well in school, she had tried to commit suicide before. Her lowly, routine job as a sales assistant in a big department store in Tokyo also gave her little satisfaction and purpose in life. However, after starting her romance with Kim, Tomoko seemed to have regained confidence in herself and a purpose in life -- she started taking lessons in the Korean language, worked very hard and finally succeeded in becoming a tour guide for Korean trips so that she could move to South Korea. Likewise, Kim found that he could become himself again when he was with Tomoko. Tomoko encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming a movie director. However, aggravating family pressure later made Kim wonder whether he was right in defying his father's wishes (by pursuing a film career and loving a Japanese woman) and he blamed Tomoko for his strained relationship with his father. Tomoko, dejected and heart-broken, returned to Japan. Kim, having lost Tomoko, came to his senses and returned to his low-paid job as a film production assistant. Finally he succeeded in gaining a prize for his movie and his parents came to the award ceremony indicating a softening on the part of his father, who finally came to recognise the value of, and his passion for, film work. Kim later became re-united with Tomoko. The happy ending of Friends stands in sharp contrast with the tragic ending of Autumn. The simulated ending of Friends reflects "imaginary realism", one of the newly appropriated strategies based on marketing considerations found in the recent hugely successful blockbuster movies produced in South Korea; it "enables [one] to escape the restrictions of reality without losing a sense of the real" (Lee 12). In Autumn, Hye-kyo frequently said to Seung-hun that their actions would be punished and she later remarked that her illness was a punishment for hurting other people. This tragic ending thus seems to have the ideological, didactic effect of teaching about the punishment for violating the Confucianist social order. Friends, on the other hand, seems to use the hybrid, third space created by the cosmopolitan scene and Western symbols (the Western street musician playing jazz) in Hong Kong (a former British colony which claims itself to be "the Manhattan of Asia") to fabricate a modernised, Westernised and yet still Asian background for the love story to start in. Tomoko was instrumental in inducing Kim to follow his dream, to become the person he really wanted to be. Kim's subsequent success which helped win the acceptance of his father symbolises the possibility of the maturing of the self-determining subject in the new, globalised economic order (Kim's superior in Kim's military service once encouraged him to follow his passion and contribute to the film-making industry to bring glory to the nation) and the possible gradual transition from Confucianism to a certain form of nationalist liberalism in South Korea (e.g., following one's dream and contributing to national glory simultaneously), under the influence of seemingly more Wesernised neighbouring societies (e.g., Japan, Hong Kong). Autumn and Friends seem to represent two different possible stances towards the traditional order at this historical juncture when South Korea is experiencing enormous economic success and going through modernisation and a certain degree of Westernisation that come with its participation in the global economic order. Sociocultural tensions, conflicts and resolutions are simulated and explored in the relatively safe, imaginary space of popular TV dramas, which apart from playing their economic part in a highly successful national media industry, also play an important role in engaging the transnational public (e.g., audiences in East Asian societies which share a Confucianist tradition) with sociocultural issues in an imaginary space. As in the feminist retelling and re-staging of the traditional Chinese opera Butterfly Lovers in newly formed Communist China in the 1950s to explore the self-determining subject and autonomous actions of the female protagonist (Li), these Korean TV dramas seem to provide an important public space for the explorations of a society's cultural ethos and the contested issues of modernity, Westernisation and cosmopolitanisation. They reflect the articulation of different (contradictory) cultural, economic and historical forces and their potential constitutive impact on the future sociocultural landscape of East Asian societies awaits further research. Notes For instance, the media in Hong Kong and China readily talk of the coming of the "Korean Wave" and the names of Korean TV idols such as Song Hye-kyo, Song Seung-hun and Won Bin (who co-starred in Autumn) are familiar to many Chinese young people. The final episode of Autumn aired on Asia Television (ATV) in August 2002 had attracted as high as 70% of that night's television audience in Hong Kong, a rare phenomenon that ATV hurried to boast of. References Lee, Dong-Hoo. "Relationships in Korean Dramas". E-mail communication to the author, 6 August 2002. Lee, Sooyeon. Explaining the South Korean blockbuster movies: An industrial and textual analysis. Unpublished manuscript. Korean Women's Development Institute, South Korea, 2002. Li, Siu Leung. Cross-dressing in Chinese opera. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong Press, 2001. Nan, Li Ming. "Broken dream of female prime minister in a sad South Korea [in Chinese]." Yazhou Zhoukan—The International Chinese Newsweekly, 12-18 August 2002: 26. Wu, Le Shan. "Female prime minister in South Korea's new era [in Chinese]." Yazhou Zhoukan—The International Chinese Newsweekly, 22-28 July 2002: 26-27. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Lin, Angel M. Y.. "Modernity and the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html &gt. Chicago Style Lin, Angel M. Y., "Modernity and the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Lin, Angel M. Y.. (2002) Modernity and the Self. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html &gt ([your date of access]).

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This article presents an assessment of the administrative career of Kathleen Kenyon. It examines her involvement in the new Institute and wider British archaeological community as well as assessing her working life within the context of the increasing professionalisation of archaeological organisations between the wars, and the role played in this by female administrators. The behaviours and actions of Kenyon and those around her are also evaluated within the context of wider contemporary attitudes to and about women. Finally, Kenyon’s role in women’s archaeological practice and women’s contributions to archaeological culture between the wars is considered.

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Surgical specialties, and particularly neurosurgery, have historically had and continue to have poor representation of female trainees. This is especially true of South Asia, considering the added social and cultural expectations for women in this region. Yet it was in India, with its difficult history of gender relations, that Asia’s first fully qualified female neurosurgeon, Dr. T. S. Kanaka (1932–2018), took root, flourished, and thereafter played an integral role in helping develop stereotactic and functional neurosurgery in the country. While a few biographical accounts of her exist, highlighted here are the lessons from her illustrious life for neurosurgical trainees and educators worldwide, along with the instances that exemplify those lessons, drawn from several hitherto unutilized primary sources. These lessons are consistent with the factors identified in previous systematic reviews to be contributing to gender disparities in neurosurgery. Many of the virtues that ensured her success are attributes that continue to be critical for a neurosurgical career. Additionally, the circ*mstances that helped Kanaka succeed have been recounted as considerations for those working to promote diversity and inclusion. Finally, her life choices and sacrifices are described, which are underexplored but relevant concerns for women in neurosurgery.

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As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peaco*ck with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.

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

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Reul, L. Sarah. Allie All Along. Sterling Publishing Co, 2018. This engaging and colourful picture book depicts the unpleasant feelings of anger in an accurate and child friendly way. The font, letter sizes, and colours of the text match the bright and exciting illustrations, bringing life to the words as they are read. The illustrations are appropriate reflections of how we might feel (a spiky, screaming little red monster) when going through the stages of difficult emotions like anger. The tone of this story is bright and exciting, and the language and storyline are simple, yet effective at getting the message across to young readers. Reul provides insight into the life of Allie, a young girl who gets ignited with anger due to a frustration she faces. Allie’s rage and subsequent phases of coping are described and depicted in a relatable and humorous way that children would find appealing and entertaining. Allie’s older brother helps her work through her robust and difficult feelings by providing her with various outlets for her anger, thus allowing her to shed layers of anger one at a time. Each new depiction of the monster shows the rage declining, eventually turning into sadness. This teaches readers that often hiding beneath one extreme emotion is another emotion that can be reached through coping and support. The concept of facing and working through difficult emotions is a challenging process that many people learn over time—or never at all. Coping with difficult emotions is a large part of caring for mental health and preventing the expression of emotions in unhealthy or violent ways. This makes this topic tremendously important for young readers today. This story explores this concept in a way that young readers can relate to and begin to understand. By the end of the story Allie has shed layers of anger by coping in various healthy ways with the support of her older brother. She finally becomes herself again and asks her brother for a hug. This book offers a lesson on anger and how to cope when emotions become too overwhelming. Allie All Along would be a great addition to any elementary school classroom as well as school and public libraries. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Chantelle Blair Chantelle Blair is an undergraduate student in the University of Alberta’s Education program. She loves spending time with children of all ages and hopes to one day publish children’s books of her own.

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On the night of 31 August, 1888, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found murdered in Buck’s Row, her throat slashed and her body mutilated. She was followed by Annie Chapman on 8 September in the year of 29 Hanbury Street, Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on 30 September, and finally Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, on 9 November. These five women, all prostitutes, were victims of an unknown assailant commonly referred to by the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’, forming an official canon which excludes at least thirteen other cases around the same time. As the Ripper was never identified or caught, he has attained an almost supernatural status in London’s history and literature, immortalised alongside other iconic figures such as Sherlock Holmes. And his killing ground, the East End suburb of Whitechapel, has become notorious in its own right. In this article, I will discuss how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as 'Ripperature'. I will begin by speaking to the turn of Gothic literature towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space, before arguing that Whitechapel's development into a Gothic location may be attributed to the threat of the Ripper and the literature which emerged during and after his crimes. As a working class slum with high rates of crime and poverty, Whitechapel already enjoyed an evil reputation in the London press. However, it was the presence of Jack that would make the suburb infamous into contemporary times. The Gothic Space of the City In the nineteenth century, there was a shift in the representation of space in Gothic literature. From the depiction of the wilderness and ancient buildings such as castles as essentially Gothic, there was a turn towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space. David Punter attributes this turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The wild landscape is no longer considered as dangerous as the savage city of London, and evil no longer confined only to those of working-class status (Punter 191). However, it has been argued by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard that Charles Dickens may have been the first author to present London as a Gothic city, in particular his description of Seven Dials in Bell’s Life in London, 1837, where the anxiety and unease of the narrator is associated with place (11). Furthermore, Thomas de Quincey uses Gothic imagery in his descriptions of London in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, calling the city a “vast centre of mystery” (217). This was followed in 1840 with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a stranger through the labyrinthine streets of London, experiencing its poorest and most dangerous areas. At the end of the story, Poe calls the stranger “the type and the genius of deep crime (...) He is the man of the crowd” (n. p). This association of crowds with crime is also used by Jack London in his book The People of the Abyss, published in 1905, where the author spent time living in the slums of the East End. Even William Blake could be considered to have used Gothic imagery in his description of the city in his poem London, written in 1794. The Gothic city became a recognisable and popular trope in the fin-de-siècle, or end-of-century Gothic literature, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. This fin-de-siècle literature reflected the anxieties inherent in increasing urbanisation, wherein individuals lose their identity through their relationship with the city. Examples of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature include The Beetle by Richard Marsh, published in 1897, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year. Evil is no longer restricted to foreign countries in these stories, but infects familiar city streets with terror, in a technique that is described as ‘everyday Gothic’ (Paulden 245). The Gothic city “is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable (...) evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within” (Woodford n.p). The London Press and Whitechapel Prior to the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel had already been given an evil reputation in the London press, heavily influenced by W.T. Stead’s reports for The Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885. In these reports, Stead revealed how women and children were being sold into prostitution in suburbs such as Whitechapel. Stead used extensive Gothic imagery in his writing, one of the most enduring being the image of London as a labyrinth with a monstrous Minotaur at its centre, swallowing up his helpless victims. Counter-narratives about Whitechapel do exist, an example being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, who attempted to demystify the East End by walking the streets of Whitechapel and interviewing its inhabitants in the 1860’s. Another is Arthur G. Morrison, who in 1889 dismissed the graphic descriptions of Whitechapel by other reporters as amusing to those who actually knew the area as a commercially respectable place. However, the Ripper murders in the autumn of 1888 ensured that the Gothic image of the East End would become the dominant image in journalism and literature for centuries to come. Whitechapel was a working-class slum, associated with poverty and crime, and had a large Jewish and migrant population. Indeed the claim was made that “had Whitechapel not existed, according to the rationalist, then Jack the Ripper would not have marched against civilization” (Phillips 157). Whitechapel was known as London’s “heart of darkness (…) the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery” (Ackroyd 679). Therefore, the reporters of the London press who visited Whitechapel during and immediately following the murders understandably imbued the suburb with a Gothic atmosphere in their articles. One such newspaper article, An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel, released in November of 1888, demonstrates these characteristics in its description of Whitechapel. The anonymous reporter, writing during the Ripper murders, describes the suburb as a terrible dark ocean in which there are human monsters, where a man might get a sense of what humanity can sink to in areas of poverty. This view was shared by many, including author Margaret Harkness, whose 1889 book In Darkest London described Whitechapel as a monstrous living entity, and as a place of vice and depravity. Gothic literary tropes were also already widely used in print media to describe murders and other crimes that happened in London, such as in the sensationalist newspaper The Illustrated Police News. An example of this is an illustration published in this newspaper after the murder of Mary Kelly, showing the woman letting the Ripper into her lodgings, with the caption ‘Opening the door to admit death’. Jack is depicted as a manifestation of Death itself, with a grinning skull for a head and clutching a doctor’s bag filled with surgical instruments with which to perform his crimes (Johnston n.p.). In the magazine Punch, Jack was depicted as a phantom, the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, representing the poverty of the East End, floating down an alleyway with his knife looking for more victims. The Ripper murders were explained by London newspapers as “the product of a diseased environment where ‘neglected human refuse’ bred crime” (Walkowitz 194). Whitechapel became a Gothic space upon which civilisation projected their inadequacies and fears, as if “it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life” (Ackroyd 678). And in the wake of Jack the Ripper, this writing of Whitechapel as a Gothic space would only continue, with the birth of ‘Ripperature’, the body of fictional and non-fiction literature devoted to the murders. The Birth of Ripperature: The Curse upon Mitre Square and Leather Apron John Francis Brewer wrote the first known text about the Ripper murders in October of 1888, a sensational horror monograph entitled The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer made use of well-known Gothic tropes, such as the trans-generational curse, the inclusion of a ghost and the setting of an old church for the murder of an innocent woman. Brewer blended fact and fiction, making the Whitechapel murderer the inheritor, or even perhaps the victim of an ancient curse that hung over Mitre Square, where the second murdered prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, had been found the month before. According to Brewer, the curse originated from the murder of a woman in 1530 by her brother, a ‘mad monk’, on the steps of the high altar of the Holy Trinity Church in Aldgate. The monk, Martin, committed suicide, realising what he had done, and his ghost now appears pointing to the place where the murder occurred, promising that other killings will follow. Whitechapel is written as both a cursed and haunted Gothic space in The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer’s description of the area reflected the contemporary public opinion, describing the Whitechapel Road as a “portal to the filth and squalor of the East” (66). However, Mitre Square is the former location of a monastery torn down by a corrupt politician; this place, which should have been holy ground, is cursed. Mitre Square’s atmosphere ensures the continuation of violent acts in the vicinity; indeed, it seems to exude a self-aware and malevolent force that results in the death of Catherine Eddowes centuries later. This idea of Whitechapel as somehow complicit in or even directing the acts of the Ripper will later become a popular trope of Ripperature. Brewer’s work was advertised in London on posters splashed with red, a reminder of the blood spilled by the Ripper’s victims only weeks earlier. It was also widely promoted by the media and reissued in New York in 1889. It is likely that a ‘suggestion effect’ took place during the telegraph-hastened, press-driven coverage of the Jack the Ripper story, including Brewer’s monograph, spreading the image of Gothic Whitechapel as fact to the world (Dimolianis 63). Samuel E. Hudson’s account of the Ripper murders differs in style from Brewer’s because of his attempt to engage critically with issues such as the failure of the police force to find the murderer and the true identity of Jack. His book Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel, London, was published in December of 1888. Hudson described the five murders canonically attributed to Jack, wrote an analysis of the police investigation that followed, and speculated as to the Ripper’s motivations. Despite his intention to examine the case objectively, Hudson writes Jack as a Gothic monster, an atavistic and savage creature prowling Whitechapel to satisfy his bloodlust. Jack is associated with several Gothic tropes in Hudson’s work, and described as different types of monsters. He is called: a “fiend bearing a charmed and supernatural existence,” a “human vampire”, an “incarnate monster” and even, like Brewer, the perpetrator of “ghoulish butchery” (Hudson 40). Hudson describes Whitechapel as “the worst place in London (...) with innumerable foul and pest-ridden alleys” (9). Whitechapel becomes implicated in the Ripper murders because of its previously established reputation as a crime-ridden slum. Poverty forced women into prostitution, meaning they were often out alone late at night, and its many courts and alleyways allowed the Ripper an easy escape from his pursuers after each murder (Warwick 560). The aspect of Whitechapel that Hudson emphasises the most is its darkness; “off the boulevard, away from the streaming gas-jets (...) the knave ran but slight chance of interruption” (40). Whitechapel is a place of shadows, its darkest places negotiated only by ‘fallen women’ and their clients, and Jack himself. Hudson’s casting of Jack as a vampire makes his preference for the night, and his ability to skilfully disembowel prostitutes and disappear without a trace, intelligible to his readers as the attributes of a Gothic monster. Significantly, Hudson’s London is personified as female, the same sex as the Ripper victims, evoking a sense of passive vulnerability against the acts of the masculine and predatory Jack, Hudson writing that “it was not until four Whitechapel women had perished (...) that London awoke to the startling fact that a monster was at work upon her streets” (8). The Complicity of Gothic Whitechapel in the Ripper Murders This seeming complicity of Whitechapel as a Gothic space in the Ripper murders, which Brewer and Hudson suggest in their work, can be seen to have influenced subsequent representations of Whitechapel in Ripperature. Whitechapel is no longer simply the location in which these terrible events take place; they happen because of Whitechapel itself, the space exerting a self-conscious malevolence and kinship with Jack. Historically, the murders forced Queen Victoria to call for redevelopment in Spitalfields, the improvement of living conditions for the working class, and for a better police force to patrol the East End to prevent similar crimes (Sugden 2). The fact that Jack was never captured “seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves: that the East End was the true Ripper,” (Ackroyd 678) using the murderer as a way to emerge into the public consciousness. In Ripperature, this idea was further developed by the now popular image of Jack “stalking the black alleyways [in] thick swirling fog” (Jones 15). This otherworldly fog seems to imply a mystical relationship between Jack and Whitechapel, shielding him from view and disorientating his victims. Whitechapel shares the guilt of the murders as a malevolent and essentially pagan space. The notion of Whitechapel as being inscribed with paganism and magic has become an enduring and popular trope of Ripperature. It relates to an obscure theory that drawing lines between the locations of the first four Ripper murders created Satanic and profane religious symbols, suggesting that they were predetermined locations for a black magic ritual (Odell 217). This theory was expanded upon most extensively in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, published in 1999. In From Hell, Jack connects several important historical and religious sites around London by drawing a pentacle on a map of the city. He explains the murders as a reinforcement of the pentacle’s “lines of power and meaning (...) this pentacle of sun gods, obelisks and rational male fire, within unconsciousness, the moon and womanhood are chained” (Moore 4.37). London becomes a ‘textbook’, a “literature of stone, of place-names and associations,” stretching back to the Romans and their pagan gods (Moore 4.9). Buck’s Row, the real location of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, is pagan in origin; named for the deer that were sacrificed on the goddess Diana’s altars. However, Moore’s Whitechapel is also Hell itself, the result of Jack slipping further into insanity as the murders continue. From Hell is illustrated in black and white, which emphasises the shadows and darkness of Whitechapel. The buildings are indistinct scrawls of shadow, Jack often nothing more than a silhouette, forcing the reader to occupy the same “murky moral and spiritual darkness” that the Ripper does (Ferguson 58). Artist Eddie Campbell’s use of shade and shadow in his illustrations also contribute to the image of Whitechapel-as-Hell as a subterranean place. Therefore, in tracing the representations of Whitechapel in the London press and in Ripperature from 1888 onwards, the development of Whitechapel as a Gothic location becomes clear. From the geographical setting of the Ripper murders, Whitechapel has become a Gothic space, complicit in Jack’s work if not actively inspiring the murders. Whitechapel, although known to the public before the Ripper as a crime-ridden slum, developed into a Gothic space because of the murders, and continues to be associated with the Gothic in contemporary Ripperature as an uncanny and malevolent space “which seems to compel recognition as not of this earth" (Ackroyd 581). References Anonymous. “An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel.” Littell’s Living Age, 3 Nov. 1888. Anonymous. “The Nemesis of Neglect.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 29 Sep. 1888. Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001. Brewer, John Francis. The Curse upon Mitre Square. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co, 1888. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2011. Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1-2 (2009): 58. Harkness, Mary, In Darkest London. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1889. Hudson, Samuel E. Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel. London, Philadelphia, 1888. Johnstone, Lisa. “Rippercussions: Public Reactions to the Ripper Murders in the Victorian Press.” Casebook 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rippercussions.html›. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1905. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861. Moore, Alan, Campbell, Eddie. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. London: Knockabout Limited, 1999. Morrison, Arthur G. “Whitechapel.” The Palace Journal. 24 Apr. 1889. Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2006. Paulden, Arthur. “Sensationalism and the City: An Explanation of the Ways in Which Locality Is Defined and Represented through Sensationalist Techniques in the Gothic Novels The Beetle and Dracula.” Innervate: Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies 1 (2008-2009): 245. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. London: Continuum International, 2010. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Man of the Crowd.” The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Vol. 5. Raven ed. 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2151/2151-h/2151-h.htm›. Punter, David. A New Companion to the Gothic. Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Stead, William Thomas. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. Sugden, Peter. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson Publishing, 2002. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1998. Woodford, Elizabeth. “Gothic City.” 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.nus.edu.au/sg/ellgohbh/gothickeywords.html›.

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Women in Universities Women have been fighting for the right to participate in universities since 1873, when Sophia Jex Blake went to court with her fight to enrol at Edinburgh University. In rejecting her application, one of the judges stated: It is a belief, widely entertained, that there is a great difference in the mental constitution of the two sexes, just as there is in their physical conformation. The powers and susceptibilities of women are as noble as those of men; but they are thought to be different, and, in particular, it is considered that they have not the same power of intense labour as men .... (Scutt 224) In Australia, from the 1850s to the 1880s, both the University of Sydney and The University of Melbourne refused to admit women as students. In 1879, the Chancellor of the University of Sydney suggested that: The best course to be taken by advocates of advanced education for women, would be to found some sort of affiliated college for them in the vicinity of the University ... if there really be a widespread wish on the part of young women for a higher education ..." (Scutt 228). Having finally won the right to study at university in 1881, and to enter the academic workforce, women are still finding many of the old prejudices remain. Numerous studies have demonstrated that women's experiences in academe are qualitatively different from men's and that women are systematically paid lower salaries than men of equivalent academic achievement, age and length of service (Bagilhole 431-47; Loder 713-4; McElrath 269-81;). Studies have shown that differences in the experiences of male and female faculty are largely explained by gender (Booth & Burton 312-33; Everett 159-75; Over & Lancaster 309-18; Ready 7) and sex discrimination is highlighted as an ongoing contributor to the inequity (Allport 5-8; Hall & Swadener 1; Tuohy 8). A recent UNESCO-Commonwealth (http://www.unesco.org/) report states that: ... in spite of advances which women have made in many areas of public life in the past two decades, in the area of higher education management they are still a long way from participating on the same footing as men. With hardly an exception, the global picture is one of men outnumbering women at about five to one at middle management level and at about twenty to one at senior management level (Singh 4). The introduction in Australia of Sex Discrimination legislation (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/sex_discrimination/) in 1984 and more recently, Affirmative Action policies ( http://www.austlii.edu.au/) in employment and promotion rounds in some universities has not improved women's situation to the extent expected. In 1978, women held 16% of full time academic posts while gaining 25% of all higher degrees and 30% of undergraduate degrees (Commonwealth Government statistics cited by Over and McKenzie 61-71). In 1999, 54% of students were women yet women's participation in academe had only increased to 35% (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). Women are mainly employed at the lowest academic levels. In 1999, 72% of women were employed at Levels A and B (Associate Lecturer/Lecturer) compared to 46% of men, with only 8% of women reaching Levels D and E (Associate Professor/Professor) compared to 26% of men. Women continue to be clustered in the traditionally female areas of Health, Education and Arts while few seem to have successfully broken through the barriers in the traditionally male areas of Engineering, Architecture or Agriculture (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). Business has traditionally been viewed as a male preserve but enrolments have increased to the point where women almost equal men. However, the staff ratio of men to women remains very low at 70/30 (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). The slow growth rate for women in academe belies the fact that more women than men are now completing university degrees. The purpose of this study was to determine how well the experiences of academic women in the male-dominated faculties of business and commerce, reflect the literature on women in universities, in general. Previous empirical studies have found inequitable treatment of women without necessarily exploring the processes of discrimination. The Study This study involved interviews with academic women who had been employed in faculties of business and commerce for at least five years. The research used the 'snowballing' technique: participants initially comprised women known to me but as these women told female colleagues of my study I was given the names of other women who were willing to participate. Participants comprised twenty-one women from three universities in Western Australia, two universities in New South Wales and one Victorian university. One woman had recently left academe and started her own business because of discriminatory practices she had encountered and another was contemplating leaving. In each university, women comprised a minority of the faculty and felt disadvantaged in some way. A semi-structured interview was used to explore with the women the issues that had been identified from previous studies of sex discrimination in the academic profession. Open-ended questions were used and the interviews conducted face to face, or, in the case of those interstate, via telephone or email. The women spoke frankly about their experiences. Findings and Discussion Promotion Each of the women in this study said that their university had established an internal promotion policy based on merit. However, they felt the greatest problem they had encountered in gaining promotion was in determining the criteria upon which they would be judged each year, and in meeting those criteria. "I have been chasing promotion for over five years. At first I was told that I would not be promoted until I got my masters degree so I worked really hard to complete it but then a male colleague was promoted without a masters. Once I got the masters I was told I needed to publish to be promoted but in the next year someone else was promoted without any publications. You go all out to meet the criteria each year but in the next year the promotions committee changes and so do the criteria for that year"(Lecturer applying for Senior Lecturer position). The promotion procedure at one university was explained by a Senior Lecturer who had served on promotion committees on two occasions. "There are about ten criteria upon which promotion can be based. When the applications are received we all get together to determine which are the criteria to be applied. In the last promotion round only four of the ten criteria were used so only people satisfying those criteria were selected." When asked whether the criteria were the same as the previous year she replied: "Last year there was more emphasis on qualifications and publications. This year community involvement and involvement in university affairs were judged as more important ... it varies from year to year". On questioning about the promotion procedures at their universities, women stated they were largely dissatisfied with the process, that they were presumed to be satisfied with their lot while the men were actively encouraged to apply. "I was told not to bother to apply (for a senior lecturer position) as I would not get it ... that there was a queue of people to be promoted before me - (named males) - and until they were promoted, I would not be considered" (Lecturer). "The position was advertised with a specific male applicant in mind and specifically excluded me by stating that the appointee must have supervisory experience. Women in my department are not given the opportunity to supervise students so I didn't even bother applying."(Lecturer aspiring to a Senior Lecturer position). One woman, upon inquiring why she was not promoted, was told that she should be grateful to have tenure and asked why she wanted to be promoted, anyway. "They would never have said that to a male, they would have expected a male to be working towards promotion" (Associate Lecturer). All women interviewed stated that they had problems keeping up with the 'goal posts' which moved from year to year. The 'moving of the goal posts' is one means by which universities are able to maintain the position of women at lower levels. Unsurprisingly, some women said they felt that promotion at their university was based on politics rather than merit. However, defining merit in universities is problematic. According to Burton (430), definitions of what is meritorious depend upon the power of particular groups to define it and, as a result, can change. The narrow view of merit is 'the best person for the job' which Burton (113) describes as an "overwhelming tendency to select in your own image". Burton (430) and Allport (5) claim universities define merit along male cultural lines with current selection, remuneration and career progression practices strongly influenced by an underlying gender bias. Burton (430) argues that there is still a tendency for work to be ranked as 'men's' or women's work with lower status attributed to the latter and an assumption that different skills and abilities are needed for each. Over and McKenzie (61-71) claim that women are disadvantaged by the fact that invalid merit criteria are applied to them which men as a group are more likely to satisfy. They state that the academic careers of most women do not fit the stereotypic male experience and it is mainly men who decide whether women should be promoted. At one university in the study, the merit criteria for senior lecturer include the requirement that aspirants have a number of overseas conference presentations. "Some of us are single working mothers and overseas conference attendance is out of the question because who's going to mind our children while we are away? The senior males were astonished when I mentioned that this was a problem for me. It had never occurred to them" (Associate Lecturer on why women at her university do not apply for promotion). Family Responsibilities The women commented on the numerous difficulties they had encountered in combining an academic career with responsibility for children. They felt that certain male faculty members perceived married women with children as lacking in career commitment, whereas married men with families were viewed as being more stable and committed to their careers. One married woman claimed that when she needed to go home to tend a sick child, her male Head of Department told her she should "get her priorities right". In 1992, Family Responsibility provisions were added to the Sex Discrimination Act (http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/171/top.htm). However, it would appear that individual practice doesn't always follow as a result of changes in policy. Equal Pay On the subject of equal pay for equal work, the women said that they were often paid lower wages than their male colleagues despite having higher qualifications and equivalent teaching and research experience. Some women felt that the barriers between academic levels were used to artificially maintain the wage gap between men and women, regardless of qualifications and ability. This was felt to be particularly the case between the levels of Associate Lecturer (Level A) and Lecturer (Level B). "They find excuses to keep you at Associate Lecturer so that they can pay you less to do the same work that you would be doing as a lecturer ... lecturing, coordinating units and so on"(Associate Lecturer). "There are no men below Lecturer in my Department, either lecturing or with Masters degrees. As soon as they get their Masters they are promoted to Lecturer.... I'm coordinating units as an Associate Lecturer while some male lecturers have less responsibility' (Associate Lecturer with Masters degree and publications) Two women said that they had been performing higher level duties (Level B) for up to five years while working on their Masters but their university refused to pay them at the higher level until they had completed their degree. Even when they satisfied all the requirements for the Masters degree and had a letter from their supervisor saying they had satisfied all the requirements, the university refused to pay them until they had actually graduated, which was some time later. Shortly afterwards their university took on two men to perform the same duties, paying these at the higher level even though they had not completed a masters degree. One former lecturer claimed that she was employed at a time when there was a large turnover of staff in her department. A number of new staff were appointed of whom she was the only female. Although she and the other new staff were all employed at Lecturer Level B, it wasn't until later on that she discovered that the men were appointed at the top of the Lecturer salary scale while she was appointed at the bottom, with a salary differential of about10 000pa. This was despite the fact that both she and the men had similar qualifications and work experience at commencement. Teaching Loads Another complaint by women concerned inequitable teaching loads. An analysis in one Business School showed that women had higher teaching loads while men were given more time off for research. The women complained that the supervision of post-graduate students was divided up between the men, and women were excluded. Since research publication and student supervision are usually the most highly ranked criteria in academic promotion rounds, women who are not given the opportunity to participate in these areas are disadvantaged when applying for promotion. This problem is compounded since women are overwhelmingly employed at the lower levels where responsibility for the majority of teaching takes place. This leaves them with little time left to devote to research even if given the opportunity. The women also said they were often pressured into taking on higher duties than those prescribed in the Position Classification Standards for their level. They tended to acquiesce because of their need to prove they were better than men to gain promotion. One woman said that the extra administrative duties she had been given meant that she had less time for research which actually reduced her prospects for tenure and promotion. She said she didn't dare complain as the men in her department would use it as an excuse to question her commitment to her job. Conclusion An examination of women's perceptions and experiences in the workplace can help us understand the informal processes that work against women. The experiences of the women discussed in this paper provide an insight into the subtle processes that continue to operate in some higher education institutions to prevent women from reaching their full potential. Although equal opportunity legislation (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about_the_commission/legislation/index.html) has been enacted to prevent discrimination and disadvantage to women, the implementation of policy does not always filter through to the operational levels. It is still possible to circumvent legislation in subtle ways, perhaps without even being aware that these practices are discriminative. The women in this study spoke frankly about their experiences and the difficulties they had encountered in gaining equal recognition to men, with very few satisfied that they were receiving equitable treatment. The women felt that their work was not valued as highly as that of the men they worked with and they were given less opportunities for advancement. Overall, the interviews with the women revealed interesting insights into their experiences in pursuing academic careers and in trying to gain recognition for their achievements. The collective experiences of the women provide an insight into the subtle ways in which disadvantage can be engendered. The findings of this study have serious implications for university administrators, particularly deans and heads of schools. There are many well-qualified women academics and universities cannot afford to overlook the valuable contribution these women can make to teaching, research and university governance. References Allport, Caroline. "Improving Gender Equity: Using Industrial Bargaining". NTEU Frontline4.1 (1996): 5-8. Bacchi, Carol. "The Brick Wall: Why So Few Women Become Senior Academics". Australian Universities Review36.1 (1993): 36-41. Bagilhole, Barbara. "Survivors in a Male Preserve: A Study of British Women Academics' Experiences and Perceptions of Discrimination in a UK University". Higher Education26 (1993): 431-47. Booth, Alison, and Jonathon Burton. "The Position of Women in UK Academic Economics". The Economic Journal110.464 (2000): 312-33. Burton, Clare. "Merit and Gender: Organisations and the Mobilisation of Masculine Bias." Australian Journal of Social Issues22 (1987): 424-35. Burton, Clare. An Equity Review of Staffing Policies and Associated Decision-making at Edith Cowan University. Report commissioned by ECU. 1994. DETYA. Selected Higher Education Statistics. 1999. Everett, James. "Sex, Rank and Qualifications at Australian Universities". Australian Journal of Management19.2 (1994): 159-75. Hall, Elaine, and Beth Blue Swadener. "Chilly Climate: A Study of Subtle Sex Discrimination at a State University". Initiatives (Online)59.3 (2000): 1. Loder, Natasha. "US Science Shocked by Revelations of Sexual Discrimination". Nature405.6787 (2000): 713-4. McElrath, Karen. "Gender, Career Disruption and Academic Rewards". Journal of Higher Education63.3 (1992): 269-81. Over, Ray, and Sandra Lancaster. "The Early Career Patterns of Men and Women in Australian Universities". The Australian Journal of Education28.3 (1984): 309-18. Over, Ray, and Beryl Mckenzie. "Career Prospects for Women in Australian Universities". Journal of Tertiary Educational Administration7.1 (1985): 61-71. Ready, Tinker. "West Coast US Recognizes Academic Gender Bias". Nature Medicine 7.1 (2000): 1. Scutt, Jocelyn. The Sexual Gerrymander.The Law Printer, 1994. Singh, Jasbir. "Women and Management in Higher Education: A Commonwealth Project." A.C.U. Bulletin of Current Documentation. 133 (1998): 2-8. Tuohy, John. "Sex Discrimination Infects Med Schools: Women Say Bias Blocks Chances for Advancement". USA Today2000. 8. Links http://www.unesco.org/ http://www.deet.gov.au/ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/sex_discrimination/ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about_the_commission/legislation/index.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgibin/disp.pl/au/legis/cth/consol%5fact/aaeofwa 1986634/?query=title+%28+%22affirmative+action%22+%29 http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/171/top.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer. "Women and Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml >. Chicago Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer, "Women and Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer. (2001) Women and Work. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml > ([your date of access]).

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In the recent past of advancement in computer vision object detection and identification technologies are most valuable approaches in our day life. It is mostly used to find a different kind of objects being and provide a security in many zones. It becomes very difficult for achieving a best object detection or identification with high rate in a various situation and criteria. While working with different entities researcher job is going to very difficult but providing high availability is good omen to develop advisable, flexible environments. Like MODI i.e. “Multiple Object Detection Interface”. The main aim of this paper is to identify the object on user requirement. Detect the information or content based on the type i.e. color, face, shape or eyes. It is helpful to the user to retrieve the objects based on his requirements while expose his/her analysis on images. Majorly, Multi color identification done through with the help of HSV color channels. Shape Identification Hough cycle/rectangle transformation. Finally choose human gestures as eyes and face detection with the help of HAAR like features. Every aspect is available in the market. We are trying to make it as single platform as MODI.

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Abstract Background/Aims The role of art in rheumatology is under-investigated. Several well-known artists have suffered from rheumatic disease. Their insights and achievements potentially provide reassurance and encouragement to our patients. Creating art may also offer therapeutic benefits for patients. Finally, the artistic environment can affect mood and behaviour. We highlight several inspirational artists. Methods Four artists offer valuable insights: Michaelangelo (d. 1564) was able to master sculpture, painting and architecture despite hand osteoarthritis and persisted in working until his death, age 89. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (d. 1919) developed severe RA aged 50. He continued to paint for the rest of his life, being carried to outdoor scenes on a sedan and designing an innovative rolling canvas to complete some of his finest work. He painted on small pieces of wood at night to distract from his arthritic pain. Frida Kahlo (d.1954), the Mexican artist, experienced chronic generalised pain and fatigue in keeping with fibromyalgia. This was after a bus accident at eighteen resulted in multiple pelvic and vertebral fractures. Self-portraiture became the cornerstone of her bold art during the solitude of her convalescence. Maud Lewis (d.1970), the Canadian folk painter, had JIA in early childhood resulting in a limp and severe hand changes. She spent much time indoors due to her pain and the ridicule faced from her peers. She developed an eagerness for drawing; to the extent that she painted on any surface she could find of her small cottage. Results These artists’ own words reveal the resilience they gained from their art. Renoir stated: 'Out of doom and misery the most beautiful song may rise'. Lewis reported ‘As long as I’ve got a brush in front of me, I’m alright.’, whilst Kahlo was similarly quoted to say ‘I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint’. A small study in 2017 with 17 patients with RA showed improvement not only in hand function but also self-perception and quality of life after participating in daily art-based intervention (origami, painting and clay modelling) for four weeks. Furthermore, a common theme between these famous artists was how they favoured bright colours in their artwork, which may have positive effects on mood. Colouring can reduce stress in children in paediatric waiting rooms. Within other settings, research suggests that visual art depicting nature can reduce anxiety in emergency department waiting rooms. Conclusion Although exceptionally talented people, the artists discussed show the inspiring possibilities of creativity despite severe rheumatic disease. We suggest sharing these stories with our patients and considering further study into the therapeutic potential of creating art in rheumatic conditions. Attention should be paid to the artistic environment in which we see our patients. Disclosure S. Amar: None. M. Lloyd: None.

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“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies In a world where nothing is certain… and even the objectivity of science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness. – David Lodge (“Sense and Sensibility”) Leon Edel expressed the central puzzle of writing biography as “every life takes its own form and a biographer must find the ideal and unique literary form that will express it” (qtd. in Novarr 165). My primary challenge in writing Poisoned: The Trials of Mary Dean – a biography in the form of a (fictionalised) first-person memoir purportedly written by the subject herself – was the location of a textual voice for Mary that, if not her own, could have credibly belonged to a woman of her time, place and circ*mstance. The ‘Dean case’ caused a sensation across Australia in the mid-1890s when George Dean was arrested for the attempted murder of his 20-year-old wife, Mary. George was a handsome Sydney ferry master who had played the romantic lead in a series of spectacular rescues, flinging himself into the harbour to save women passengers who had fallen overboard. When on trial for repeatedly poisoning his wife, his actions and motivations were not probed; instead, Mary’s character and behaviour and, by extrapolation, those of the entire female sex, were examined and analysed. This approach climaxed in defence counsel claims that Mary poisoned herself to frame her husband, but George was found guilty and sentenced to hang, the mandatory punishment for attempted murder at that time. Despite the persuasive prosecution evidence and the jury’s unanimous verdict, the Sydney press initiated a public outcry. After a series of inflamed community meetings and with a general election approaching, the Premier called for a Royal Commission into Dean’s conviction. This inquiry came to the extraordinary conclusion that: the facts, as shown, are quite as compatible with the hypothesis that Mrs. Dean ... administered the arsenic to herself – possibly at the prompting of her mother and without any intention of taking a fatal dose – as that the poison was administered to her by her husband with an intent to kill. (Regina v George Dean 16) George was freed with a Royal Pardon and Mary was publicly reviled as a pariah of the lowest order. This unhappy situation continued even after it was revealed that her husband had confessed his guilt to his solicitor, and charges of conspiracy and perjury were brought against George and his lawyers who were then members of the New South Wales Parliament. Although the lawyers both escaped relatively unscathed, George Dean was gaoled for 14 years. This was despite Mary’s story having obvious potential for a compelling biographical narrative. To begin with, she experiences the terror of suspecting her own husband is poisoning her as she convalesces after the birth of their child. She survives repeated doses of strychnine and arsenic, only to confront the humiliating certainty that her husband was desperate to be rid of her. Then, weak and ill, she has to endure the ordeal of police-court proceedings and a criminal trial when she is damned as a witch conspiring with her wicked mother to ruin her husband. Withstanding assertions that her childhood home was a brothel and she a prostitute, she spends long weeks in hospital knowing her husband is under sentence of execution, only to be released, destitute, with a sickly child she has poisoned with her own breast milk. Still physically debilitated, she is called before a Royal Commission where she is again violently cross-examined and, on the day of her twenty-first birthday, is confronted with the knowledge that not only was her mother a transported convict, but that she is, herself, of illegitimate birth. When the Commission finds in her husband’s favour, Mary has to watch her poisoner pardoned, freed and feted as a popular celebrity, while she faces an increasingly viperous press, and is jeered at and spat on in the streets. Next, she is forced to testify at yet another series of public trials and finally, even when her husband confesses his crime and is gaoled for perjury (his Royal Pardon saving him from again facing an attempted murder charge), she is ostracised as the penniless wife of a common criminal and illegitimate daughter of a transported convict. Despite this, and having little more than the shame of divorce to look forward to, Mary nevertheless regains her health and, four years after her final court appearance, marries a respectable shopkeeper. A year later, in 1902, she gives birth to her second child. together with examples written by women of her time, class and education, fabricating an extended letter (written by Mary, but based on historical evidence) seemed a viable textual solution. For centuries, domestic letters were a major means of autobiographical expression for ‘non-literary’, working-class women and, moreover, a textual format within which Mary (silenced for over a century) could finally relate her own version of events. These decisions aligned with what John Burnett has identified as the most common motivations for a working-class person to write an autobiographical narrative: “belief that he [sic] had some important … personal triumph over difficulties and misfortune … to leave for one’s children or grandchildren” (11). This relatively common human desire also tailored neatly with a central theme animating Mary’s life – that ignorance about the past can poison your future. To create a textual voice for Mary in her narrative, I utilised the literary process of ‘ventriloquising’ or providing a believable (fictional) voice for a historical character – the term ‘literary ventriloquism’ was coined by David Lodge in 1987 for how novelists create (and readers ‘hear’) the various voices in literary works (100). While biographies including Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner (2000) and, as Richard Freadman has noted, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) have effectively employed varieties of biographical ventriloquism, this is a literary device more frequently used by fiction writers. It is also interesting to note that when skilled fiction writers employ ventriloquism, their resulting works are often perceived as much as biography-histories as imaginative pieces. Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is the invented document of which Kelly biographers dream, an autobiographical account supposedly written by Kelly so his infant daughter might “comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered” (5), but the voice Carey created was so credible that historians (including Ian Jones and Alex McDermott) debated its authenticity. This was despite Carey making no claims for the historical accuracy of his work. Of course, I primarily tested my text against such press interviews, Mary’s own letters and the articulations of her voice reported in the trial and other court records. Not that the latter group of texts can be taken as ‘verbatim’ transcriptions. Although court and other legal records provide, as Karen Dubinskyhas noted, “a window into instances of personal life … we can hear people talking about love, emotional and sexual intimacy, power, betrayal and broken promises” (4), such texts are profoundly mediated documents. The citations we now read in print passed through many hands – Mary’s testimonies would have been initially noted by the court stenographer, then transcribed, corrected, edited, typeset, corrected again, printed and bound – with each stage in the process incorporating inaccuracies, omissions and changes into the text. And, however accurate, such transcripts are never complete, neither indicating the tone in which answers were given, nor the speakers’ hesitations, pauses or accompanying gestures. The transcripts I used also record many examples of Lyndal Roper’s “forced discourse”, where Mary was directed to give only usually abbreviated responses to questions, questions which no doubt often directed the tone, content and even wording of her answers (54). Despite these limitations, it was following Mary in court through these texts, cringing at the humiliation and bullying she was subjected to, rallying when she showed spirit and almost cheering when she was finally vindicated, which allowed me to feel a real human connection with her as my subject. It was via these texts (and her own letters) that I also became aware that Mary Dean had been a person who, at the same time as she was living her life, was also (as are we all) remembering, forgetting and, probably, fabricating stories about that life – stories which, at times, challenged and contradicted each other. My aim was always to move beyond finding a persuasive textual voice for Mary, that is one which seemed authentic (and suitable for a novel), to one able to tell some of the contradictory stories of Mary’s life, as she no longer could. Ultimately, I wanted every utterance of my textual rendering of her speech to declare (as J. M. Coetzee has one of his characters say): “I live, I suffer, I am here. With cunning and treachery, if necessary, I fight against becoming one of the forgotten ones of history” (3). Works Cited Allen, Judith A. Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880. Melbourne: Oxford U P, 1990. Burnett, John, ed. Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane, 1976. Carey, Peter. The True History of the Kelly Gang, St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2000. Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker and Warburg, 1977. Daily Telegraph, 9 October 1895: 5. Dubinsky, Karen. Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1993. Freadman, Richard. â??Prose and Cons of a Bizarre Lifeâ?. The Age 27 May 2000: Saturday Extra, 7. Holmes, Katie. Spaces in Her Day: Australian Womenâ??s Diaries of the 1920s-1930s. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1995. â??Interview with Mrs. Dean.â? Truth 5 May 1895: 7. Jones, Ian. â??Not in Nedâ??s Natureâ?. The Weekend Australian 18-9 Aug. 2001: R12-3. Lodge, David. â??After Bakhtin.â? The Linguistics of Writing. Ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987: 89-102. Lodge, David. â??Sense and Sensibilityâ?. The Guardian Unlimited 2 Nov. 2002. [accessed 12/11/02] <http://books.guardian.co..uk/review/story/0,12084,823955,00.php> McDermott, Alex. â??Ned Kellyâ??s Yawp.â? Australian Book Review Mar. 2002: 16-8. McDermott, Alex. â??The Apocalyptic Chant of Edward Kellyâ?. The Jerilderie Letter. Melbourne: Text, 2001. v-xxxiv. Motion, Andrew. Wainewright the Poisoner. London: Faber, 2000. Novarr, David. The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880-1970. West Layfayette, In.: Perdue U P, 1986. Peers, Juliet. What No Man Had Ever Done Before. Malvern, Vic.: Dawn Revival, 1992. Regina v George Dean: Report of the Royal Commission, Appointed Seventh Day of May, 1895. Sydney: Government, 1895. Roper, Lyndal. Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Seymour, Mary. Letter to George Clements, 12 October 1891. Letters to Frank Brereton, 22 October 1891, 30 December 1891, 25 April 1892. Regina v George Dean: Report of the Royal Commission: 244-46. Spender, Dale. â??Journal on a Journal.â? Womenâ??s Studies International Forum 10.1 (1987): 1-5. Sydney Morning Herald. 9 October 1895: 8, 10 October 1895: 5. Links http://books.guardian.co..uk/review/story/0 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "Imagining Mary Dean " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/07-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (2004, Jan 12). Imagining Mary Dean . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/07-brien.php>

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The lack of a multidisciplinary approach is certainly among the causes of the ineffectiveness of intervention in the field of cardiovascular secondary prevention. By multidisciplinary approach is meant involving cardiologists, nurses, rehabilitation therapists, dieticians as well as psychologists in the framing of interventions tailor made to patients needs. In particular, people working in the nursing area can play a very important role which can be summed up into three different levels: a technical level, aiming at the cooperation with cardiologists to carry out diagnostic examinations and give a portrait of patients in terms of risks; a second level consists in giving information, and helping to face the disease, as well as stepping in during its evolution, almost a health counsellor for the patients; finally the nurse can act as a psychological support both to the patient and his/her family during acute illnesses and reassure him/her that he/she is being treated properly and that successively will resume a good quality of life. Hospital represent an ideal place for secondary prevention, at least in the first phases of the intervention. The results collected during hospitalization would be rapidly lost if they were not followed and sustained in the medium- long term by structured follow-up programmes. The development of ambulatories might represent a link between hospitals and the territory, i.e. the specialist and one’s personal physician. The staff of ambulatories should comprise a cardiologist and a trained professional nurse, this being specialized, specifically, in cardiology and cardiovascular prevention. Staff of the type described could work independently, co-ordinating ambulatories on the territory within the framework of standardized recognized protocols and relating information concerning patients, general practitioners and other surgeries. In this way, an essential link of the continuity in medical care would be guaranteed.

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The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) Family Network show Switched at Birth tells two stories—one which follows the unique plot of the show, and one about the new openness of television executives toward integrating more people with a variety of visible and invisible physical embodiments, such as hearing loss, into television content. It first aired in 2011 and in 2017 aired its fifth and final season.The show focuses on two teen girls in Kansas City who find out they were switched due to a hospital error on the day of their birth and who grew up with parents who were not biologically related to them. One, Bay Kennish (Vanessa Marano), lives with her wealthy parents—a stay-at-home mom Kathryn (Lea Thompson) and a former professional baseball player, now businessman, father John (D.W. Moffett). She has an older brother Toby (Lucas Grabeel) who is into music. In her high school science class, Bay learns about blood types and discovers her parents’ blood types could not have produced her. The family has professional genetic tests done and discovers the switch (ABC Family, “This Is Not a Pipe”).In the pilot episode, Bay’s parents find out that deaf teen, Daphne Vasquez (Katie Leclerc), is actually their daughter. She lives in a working class Hispanic neighbourhood with her hairdresser single mother Regina (Constance Marie) and grandmother Adrianna (Ivonne Coll), both of whom are of Puerto Rican ancestry. Daphne is deaf due to a case of meningitis when she was three, which the rich Kennishes feel happened because of inadequate healthcare provided by working class Regina. Daphne attends an all-deaf school, Carlton.The man who was thought to be her biological father, Angelo Sorrento (Gilles Marini), doesn’t appear in the show until episode 10 but becomes a series regular in season 2. It becomes apparent that Daphne believes her father left because of her deafness; however, as the first season progresses, the real reasons begin to emerge. From the pilot onwards, the show dives into clashes of language, culture, ethnicity, class, and even physical appearance—in one scene in the pilot, the waspy Kennishes ask Regina if she is “Mexican.” As later episodes reveal, many of these physical appearance issues are revealed to have fractured the Vasquez family early on—Daphne is a freckled, strawberry blonde, and her father (who is French and Italian) suspected infidelity.The two families merge when the Kennishes ask Daphne and her mother to move into their guest house in order get to know their daughter better. That forces the Kennishes into the world of deafness, and throughout the show this hearing family therefore becomes a surrogate for a hearing audience’s immersion into Deaf culture.Cultural Inclusivity: The Way ForwardShow creator Lizzy Weiss explained that it was actually the ABC Family network that “suggested making one of the kids disabled” (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences). Weiss was familiar with American Sign Language (ASL) because she had a “classical theatre of the Deaf” course in college. She said, “I had in the back of my head a little bit of background at least about how beautiful the language was. So I said, ‘What if one of the girls is deaf?’” The network thought it was wonderful idea, so she began researching the Deaf community, including spending time at a deaf high school in Los Angeles called Marlton, on which she modelled the Switched at Birth school, Carlton. Weiss (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences) says of the school visit experience:I learned so much that day and spoke to dozens of deaf teenagers about their lives and their experiences. And so, this is, of course, in the middle of writing the pilot, and I said to the network, you know, deaf kids wouldn’t voice orally. We would have to have those scenes only in ASL, and no sound and they said, ‘Great. Let’s do it.’ And frankly, we just kind of grew and grew from there.To accommodate the narrative structure of a television drama, Weiss said it became clear from the beginning that the show would need to use SimCom (simultaneous communication or sign supported speech) for the hearing or deaf characters who were signing so they could speak and sign at the same time. She knew this wasn’t the norm for two actual people communicating in ASL, but the production team worried about having a show that was heavily captioned as this might distance its key—overwhelmingly hearing—teen audience who would have to pay attention to the screen during captioned scenes. However, this did not appear to be the case—instead, viewers were drawn to the show because of its unique sign language-influenced television narrative structure. The show became popular very quickly and, with 3.3 million viewers, became the highest-rated premiere ever on the ABC Family network (Barney).Switched at Birth also received much praise from the media for allowing its deaf actors to communicate using sign language. The Huffington Post television critic Maureen Ryan said, “Allowing deaf characters to talk to each other directly—without a hearing person or a translator present—is a savvy strategy that allows the show to dig deeper into deaf culture and also to treat deaf characters as it would anyone else”. Importantly, it allowed the show to be unique in a way that was found nowhere else on television. “It’s practically avant-garde for television, despite the conventional teen-soap look of the show,” said Ryan.Usually a show’s success is garnered by audience numbers and media critique—by this measure Switched at Birth was a hit. However, programs that portray a disability—in any form—are often the target of criticism, particularly from the communities they attempting to represent. It should be noted that, while actress Katie Leclerc, who plays Daphne, has a condition, Meniere’s disease, which causes hearing loss and vertigo on an intermittent basis, she does not identify as a deaf actress and must use a deaf accent to portray Daphne. However, she is ASL fluent, learning it in high school (Orangejack). This meant her qualifications met the original casting call which said “actress must be deaf or hard of hearing and must speak English well, American Sign Language preferred” (Paz, 2010) Leclerc likens her role to that of any actor to who has to affect body and vocal changes for a role—she gives the example of Hugh Laurie in House, who is British with no limp, but was an American who uses a cane in that show (Bibel).As such, initially, some in the Deaf community complained about her casting though an online petition with 140 signatures (Nielson). Yet many in the Deaf community softened any criticism of the show when they saw the production’s ongoing attention to Deaf cultural details (Grushkin). Finally, any lingering criticisms from the Deaf community were quieted by the many deaf actors hired for the show who perform using ASL. This includes Sean Berdy, who plays Daphne’s best friend Emmett, his onscreen mother, played by actress Marlee Matlin, and Anthony Natale who plays his father; their characters both sign and vocalize in the show. The Emmett character only communicates in ASL and does not vocalise until he falls in love with the hearing character Bay—even then he rarely uses his voice.This seemingly all-round “acceptance” of the show gave the production team more freedom to be innovative—by season 3 the audience was deemed to be so comfortable with captions that the shows began to feature less SimCom and more all-captioned scenes. This lead to the full episode in ASL, a first on American mainstream television.For an Hour, Welcome to Our WorldSwitched at Birth writer Chad Fiveash explained that when the production team came up with the idea for a captioned all-ASL episode, they “didn’t want to do the ASL episode as a gimmick. It needed to be thematically resonant”. As a result, they decided to link the episode to the most significant event in American Deaf history, an event that solidified its status as a cultural community—the 1988 Deaf President Now (DPN) protest at Gallaudet University in Washington. This protest inspired the March 2013 episode for Switched at Birth and aired 25 years to the week that the actual DPN protest happened. This episode makes it clear the show is trying to completely embrace Deaf culture and wants its audience to better understand Deaf identity.DPN was a pivotal moment for Deaf people—it truly solidified members of a global Deaf community who felt more empowered to fight for their rights. Students demanded that Gallaudet—as the premier university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students—no longer have a hearing person as its president. The Gallaudet board of trustees, the majority of whom were hearing, tried to force students and faculty to accept a hearing president; their attitude was that they knew what was best for the deaf persons there. For eight days, deaf people across America and the world rallied around the student protestors, refusing to give in until a deaf president was appointed. Their success came in the form of I. King Jordan, a deaf man who had served as dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the time of the protest.The event was covered by media around the world, giving the American Deaf community international attention. Indeed, Gallaudet University says the DPN protest symbolized more than just the hiring of a Deaf president; it brought Deaf issues before the public and “raised the nation’s consciousness of the rights and abilities of deaf and hard of hearing people” (Gallaudet University).The activities of the students and their supporters showed dramatically that in the 1980s deaf people could be galvanized to unite around a common issue, particularly one of great symbolic meaning, such as the Gallaudet presidency. Gallaudet University represents the pinnacle of education for deaf people, not only in the United States but throughout the world. The assumption of its presidency by a person himself deaf announced to the world that deaf Americans were now a mature minority (Van Cleve and Crouch, 172).Deaf people were throwing off the oppression of the hearing world by demanding that their university have someone from their community at its helm. Jankowski (Deaf Empowerment; A Metaphorical Analysis of Conflict) studied the Gallaudet protest within the framework of a metaphor. She found a recurring theme during the DPN protest to be Gallaudet as “plantation”—which metaphorically refers to deaf persons as slaves trying to break free from the grip of the dominant mastery of the hearing world—and she parallels the civil rights movement of African Americans in the 1960s. As an example, Gallaudet was referred to as the “Selma of the Deaf” during the protest, and protest signs used the language of Martin Luther King such as “we still have a dream.” For deaf Americans, the presidency of Gallaudet became a symbol of hope for the future. As Jankowski attests:deaf people perceived themselves as possessing the ability to manage their own kind, pointing to black-managed organization, women-managed organizations, etc., struggling for that same right. They argued that it was a fight for their basic human rights, a struggle to free themselves, to release the hold their ‘masters’ held on them. (“A Metaphorical Analysis”)The creators of the Switched at Birth episode wanted to ensure of these emotions, as well as historical and cultural references, were prevalent in the modern-day, all-ASL episode, titled Uprising. That show therefore wanted to represent both the 1988 DPN protest as well as a current issue in the US—the closing of deaf schools (Anderson). The storyline focuses on the deaf students at the fictitious Carlton School for the Deaf seizing one of the school buildings to stage a protest because the school board has decided to shut down the school and mainstream the deaf students into hearing schools. When the deaf students try to come up with a list of demands, conflicts arise about what the demands should be and whether a pilot program—allowing hearing kids who sign to attend the deaf school—should remain.This show accomplished multiple things with its reach into Deaf history and identity, but it also did something technologically unique for the modern world—it made people pay attention. Because captioning translated the sign language for viewers, Lizzy Weiss, the creator of the series, said, “Every single viewer—deaf or hearing—was forced to put away their phones and iPads and anything else distracting … and focus … you had to read … you couldn’t do anything else. And that made you get into it more. It drew you in” (Stelter). The point, Weiss said, “was about revealing something new to the viewer—what does it feel like to be an outsider? What does it feel like to have to read and focus for an entire episode, like deaf viewers do all the time?” (Stelter). As one deaf reviewer of the Uprising episode said, “For an hour, welcome to our world! A world that’s inconvenient, but one most of us wouldn’t leave if offered a magic pill” (DR_Staff).This episode, more than any other, afforded hearing television viewers an experience perhaps similar to deaf viewers. The New York Times reported that “Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers commented by the thousands after the show, with many saying in effect, “Yes! That’s what it feels like” (Stelter).Continued ResonancesWhat is also unique about the episode is that in teaching the hearing viewers more about the Deaf community, it also reinforced Deaf community pride and even taught young deaf people a bit of their own history. The Deaf community and Gallaudet were very pleased with their history showing up on a television show—the university produced a 30-second commercial which aired within the episode, and held viewing parties. Gallaudet also forwarded the 35 pages of Facebook comments they’d received about the episode to ABC Family and Gallaudet President T. Alan Hurwitz said of the episode (Yahr), “Over the past 25 years, [DPN] has symbolised self-determination and empowerment for deaf and hard of hearing people around the world”. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) also lauded the episode, describing it as “phenomenal and groundbreaking, saying the situation is very real to us” (Stelter)—NAD had been vocally against budget cuts and closings of US deaf schools.Deaf individuals all over the Internet and social media also spoke out about the episode, with overwhelmingly favourable opinions. Deaf blogger Amy Cohen Efron, who participated in 1988′s DPN movement, said that DPN was “a turning point of my life, forcing me to re-examine my own personal identity, and develop self-determinism as a Deaf person” and led to her becoming an activist.When she watched the Uprising episode, she said the symbolic and historical representations in the show resonated with her. In the episode, a huge sign is unfurled on the side of the Carlton School for the Deaf with a girl with a fist in the air under the slogan “Take Back Carlton.” During the DPN protest, the deaf student protesters unfurled a sign that said “Deaf President Now” with the US Capitol in the background; this image has become an iconic symbol of modern Deaf culture. Efron says the image in the television episode was much more militant than the actual DPN sign. However, it could be argued that society now sees the Deaf community as much more militant because of the DPN protest, and that the imagery in the Uprising episode played into that connection. Efron also acknowledged the episode’s strong nod to the Gallaudet student protestors who defied the hearing community’s expectations by practising civil disobedience. As Efron explained, “Society expected that the Deaf people are submissive and accept to whatever decision done by the majority without any of our input and/or participation in the process.”She also argues that the episode educated more than just the hearing community. In addition to DPN, Uprising was filled with other references to Deaf history. For example a glass door to the room at Carlton was covered with posters about people like Helen Keller and Jean-Ferdinand Berthier, a deaf educator in 19th century France who promoted the concept of deaf identity and culture—Efron says most people in the Deaf community have never heard of him. She also claims that the younger Deaf community may also not be aware of the 1988 DPN protest—“It was not in high school textbooks available for students. Many deaf and hard of hearing students are mainstreamed and they have not the slightest idea about the DPN movement, even about the Deaf Community’s ongoing fight against discrimination, prejudice and oppression, along with our victories”.Long before the Uprising episode aired, the Deaf community had been watching Switched at Birth carefully to make sure Deaf culture was accurately represented. Throughout season 3 David Martin created weekly videos in sign language that were an ASL/Deaf cultural analysis of Switched at Birth. He highlighted content he liked and signs that were incorrect, a kind of a Deaf culture/ASL fact checker. From the Uprising episode, he said he thought this quote from Marlee Matlin’s character said it all, “Until hearing people walk a day in our shoes they will never understand” (Martin). That succinctly states what the all-ASL episode was trying to capture—creating an awareness of Deaf people’s cultural experience and their oppression in hearing society.Even a deaf person who was an early critic of Switched at Birth because of the hiring of Katie Leclerc and the use of SimCom admitted he was impressed with the all-ASL episode (Grushkin):all too often, we see media accounts of Deaf people which play into our society’s perceptions of Deaf people: as helpless, handicapped individuals who are in need of fixes such as cochlear implants in order to “restore” us to society. Almost never do we see accounts of Deaf people as healthy, capable individuals who live ordinary, successful lives without necessarily conforming to the Hearing ‘script’ for how we should be. And important issues such as language rights or school closings are too often virtually ignored by the general media.In addition to the episode being widely discussed within the Deaf community, the mainstream news media also covered Uprising intensely, seeing it as a meaningful cultural moment, not just for the Deaf community but for popular culture in general. Lacob wrote that he realises that hearing viewers probably won’t understand what it means to be a deaf person in modern America, but he believes that the episodeposits that there are moments of understanding, commonalities, and potential bridge-building between these two communities. And the desire for understanding is the first step toward a more inclusive and broad-minded future.He continues:the significance of this moment can’t be undervalued, nor can the show’s rich embrace of deaf history, manifested here in the form of Gallaudet and the historical figures whose photographs and stories are papered on the windows of Carlton during the student protest. What we’re seeing on screen—within the confines of a teen drama, no less—is an engaged exploration of a culture and a civil rights movement brought to life with all of the color and passion it deserves. It may be 25 years since Gallaudet, but the dreams of those protesters haven’t faded. And they—and the ideals of identity and equality that they express—are most definitely being heard.Lacob’s analysis was praised by several Deaf people—by a Deaf graduate student who teaches a Disability in Popular Culture course and by a Gallaudet student who said, “From someone who is deaf, and not ashamed of it either, let me say right here and now: that was the most eloquent piece of writing by someone hearing I have ever seen” (Emma72). The power of the Uprising episode illustrated a political space where “groups actively fuse and blend their culture with the mainstream culture” (Foley 119, as cited in Chang 3). Switched at Birth—specifically the Uprising episode—has indeed fused Deaf culture and ASL into a place in mainstream television culture.ReferencesABC Family. “Switched at Birth Deaf Actor Search.” Facebook (2010). <https://www.facebook.com/SwitchedSearch>.———. “This Is Not a Pipe.” Switched at Birth. Pilot episode. 6 June 2011. <http://freeform.go.com/shows/switched-at-birth>.———. “Not Hearing Loss, Deaf Gain.” Switched at Birth. YouTube video, 11 Feb. 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5W604uSkrk>.Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. “Talking Diversity: ABC Family’s Switched at Birth.” Emmys.com (Feb. 2012). <http://www.emmys.com/content/webcast-talking-diversity-abc-familys-switched-birth>.Anderson, G. “‘Switched at Birth’ Celebrates 25th Anniversary of ‘Deaf President Now’.” Pop-topia (5 Mar. 2013). <http://www.pop-topia.com/switched-at-birth-celebrates-25th-anniversary-of-deaf-president-now/>.Barney, C. “’Switched at Birth’ Another Winner for ABC Family.” Contra Costa News (29 June 2011). <http://www.mercurynews.com/tv/ci_18369762>.Bibel, S. “‘Switched at Birth’s Katie LeClerc Is Proud to Represent the Deaf Community.” Xfinity TV blog (20 June 2011). <http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/2011/06/20/switched-at-births-katie-leclerc-is-proud-to-represent-the-deaf-community/>.Chang, H. “Re-Examining the Rhetoric of the ‘Cultural Border’.” Essay presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Dec. 1988.DR_Staff. “Switched at Birth: How #TakeBackCarlton Made History.” deafReview (6 Mar. 2013). <http://deafreview.com/deafreview-news/switched-at-birth-how-takebackcarlton-made-history/>.Efron, Amy Cohen. “Switched At Birth: Uprising – Deaf Adult’s Commentary.” Deaf World as I See It (Mar. 2013). <http://www.deafeyeseeit.com/2013/03/05/sabcommentary/>.Emma72. “ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest.” Comment. The Daily Beast (28 Feb. 2013). <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/28/abc-family-s-switched-at-birth-asl-episode-recalls-gallaudet-protest.html>.Fiveash, Chad. Personal interview. 17 Jan. 2014.Gallaudet University. “The Issues.” Deaf President Now (2013). <http://www.gallaudet.edu/dpn_home/issues.html>.Grushkin, D. “A Cultural Review. ASL Challenged.” Switched at Birth Facebook page. Facebook (2013). <https://www.facebook.com/SwitchedatBirth/posts/508748905835658>.Jankowski, K.A. Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 1997.———. “A Metaphorical Analysis of Conflict at the Gallaudet Protest.” Unpublished seminar paper presented at the University of Maryland, 1990.Lacob, J. “ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest.” The Daily Beast 28 Feb. 2013. <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/28/abc-family-s-switched-at-birth-asl-episode-recalls-gallaudet-protest.html>.Martin, D. “Switched at Birth Season 2 Episode 9 ‘Uprising’ ASL/Deaf Cultural Analysis.” David Martin YouTube channel (6 Mar. 2013). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA0vqCysoVU>.Nielson, R. “Petitioned ABC Family and the ‘Switched at Birth’ Series, Create Responsible, Accurate, and Family-Oriented TV Programming.” Change.org (2011). <http://www.change.org/p/abc-family-and-the-switched-at-birth-series-create-responsible-accurate-and-family-oriented-tv-programming>.Orangejack. “Details about Katie Leclerc’s Hearing Loss.” My ASL Journey Blog (29 June 2011). <http://asl.orangejack.com/details-about-katie-leclercs-hearing-loss>.Paz, G. “Casting Call: Open Auditions for Switched at Birth by ABC Family.” Series & TV (3 Oct. 2010). <http://seriesandtv.com/casting-call-open-auditions-for-switched-at-birth-by-abc-family/4034>.Ryan, Maureen. “‘Switched at Birth’ Season 1.5 Has More Drama and Subversive Soapiness.” The Huffington Post (31 Aug. 2012). <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/switched-at-birth-season-1_b_1844957.html>.Stelter, B. “Teaching Viewers to Hear with Their Eyes Only.” The New York Times 8 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/arts/television/teaching-viewers-to-hear-the-tv-with-eyes-only.html>.Van Cleve, J.V., and B.A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989.Yahr, E. “Gallaudet University Uses All-Sign Language Episode of ‘Switched at Birth’ to Air New Commercial.” The Washington Post 3 Mar. 2013 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/gallaudet-university-uses-all-sign-language-episode-of-switched-at-birth-to-air-new-commercial/2013/03/04/0017a45a-8508-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394_blog.html>.

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Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon’s work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and working-class communities of color in particular often serve to reproduce inequality across generations. It is common, however, for critical scholars analyzing educational inequality to be steeped in either Marxism or critical race theory, and less knowledgeable about the other. As a result, analyses rarely place equal emphasis on both theoretical frames or synthesize race and class. Using theories of racial capitalism to extend Anyon’s political economic analysis, we contend, brings forward conceptual tools and angles that capture the material and ideological work being done by current, highly racialized neoliberal restructuring in and beyond the school walls. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We focus on the ways race operates as a material force that is part and parcel of the capitalist dynamics that create and require inequality, and argue that racial violence structures capitalist development, making the systematic impoverishment of urban schools and neighborhoods possible and permissible. First, we provide an overview of two key theories of racial capitalism from Cedric Robinson and Jodi Melamed. We then revisit Anyon’s work on school knowledge and the hidden curriculum to consider how these operate as forms of epistemic and psychic racial violence that (re)produce racial capitalist conditions. Next, we consider Anyon’s work on political economy and public policy in light of the ways neoliberal racial capitalism links the production of differential human value to capitalist development in urban neighborhoods, deploying public policies that limit the life chances of working class and poor youth of color. Finally, we consider the implications of these dynamics for the “radical possibilities” that inhere in urban schools, arguing that opposition to racial capitalism stretches Anyon’s formulation of the “radical” and the “possible,” as youth oppose racial capitalism by resisting the school itself. Research Design: In this theoretical article, we use theories of racial capitalism to analyze Anyon’s major works in urban education. Putting core concepts from these theories into conversation with Anyon’s findings and her own theorizations, we offer an analytical synthesis that braids together race and class to unpack the production of urban educational inequality. Conclusions/Recommendations: We propose that reading racial capitalism into Anyon’s work can extend her political economic analysis, and through such extension, her findings, analyses, and arguments can be leveraged to help us better understand how race and racism interlock with the ideologies, social structures, and chaos of capitalist development and neoliberal reform. We contend that such an analysis can build out both the “radical” and the “possible” with implications for how we think about opposition and organizing not just within but against schools.

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Introduction This paper is based upon an investigation into the life of a street market in the city of Ha Noi in Vietnam, and experience of the street food served on Ha Noi’s pavements. It draws upon interviews with itinerant food vendors conducted by the researchers and upon accounts of their daily lives from a Vietnamese film subtitled in English and French, sourced from the Vietnamese Women’s Museum (Jensen). The research considers the lives of the people making and selling street food against the distilled versions of cultural experience accessible through the pages of two recent English language cookbooks focussing upon this cuisine. The data from the fieldwork is used as a point for critical comparison (Fram) with recipes and descriptions from Hanoi Street Food (Vandenberghe and Thys) and Vietnamese Street Food (Lister and Pohl), two recent relevant English language cookbooks. The research question addressed is “How are the everyday lives of Vietnamese street market cooks (mis)represented in cookery-related books published for an English-language readership?” The research team comprises an Australian Cultural Studies academic (Lelia Green) and a bi-lingual Vietnamese researcher (Nguyen Hong Van), who is Ha Noi born and bred, but who has lived overseas and whose first degree, in Sociology, is from a Canadian university. In each other’s company and over a period of some weeks, Lelia and Van spent more than 40 hours on ethnographic fieldwork in street markets, and interviewing street vendors. The purpose of the research was exploratory, but it was also undertaken as a means of making the labour and lives of marginalised women more visible, since most itinerant food vendors in Vietnam are women (Jensen). As Bhomik notes, male vendors “are engaged in motor cycle repair or sale of higher priced goods such as personal products, souvenirs etc. and their earnings are higher” (2261). Although the teamwork between Lelia and Van went some way to resolve the challenges posed by insider/outsider qualitative research (Corbin, Dwyer, and Buckle), Van has never lived or worked as a street vendor. First Take an Informal Street Market … Eating on the Street An informal Vietnamese street market is a multi-layered space, ordered according to the geography of the area in which the food is prepared and consumed. The informality of a street market indicates its status between legitimacy and repression. Informal street markets spring up in locales where there is significant demand—usually office workers nearby, and schools. The food they sell is cheap and flavourful, catering for the needs of people who have little time or money and want something hot and nourishing to start, punctuate, or end the day. As markets grow, so the vendors in the market constitute a secondary population in need of sustenance. Itinerant street vendors carry with them everything they need for their day’s work. Typically this includes a little oil or coal-based stove, their raw ingredients, dishes or trays for food preparation and serving, often a bowl for washing food or utensils, and a large bag to carry the dirty dishes used by their customers. Often these tools of their trade will be carried in two baskets balanced upon a pole that acts as a yoke across the vendor’s neck. Sometimes well-resourced vendors will also carry, (or push a bicycle or cart with), sets of small plastic stools and tables, so that their clients can sit and enjoy their food. In the semi-tropical climate of Ha Noi, carrying the raw materials to cook for and feed dozens of patrons is a tiring and difficult business. These street vendors’s lives are made more complex by the semi-legitimacy of the informal street market where itinerants are viewed as potential sources of income by a series of officials who extort small but frequent payments in the form of demanding bribes, or levying fines for illegal activity such as obstructing the pavement (Lincoln). Trung, who sells crab noodles, says the police are the most difficult aspect of her job: “they can come anytime and confiscate all my stuff and give me a fine. One time I was so panicked when I saw them approaching on a small truck that I took all my bowls and ran. The bowl slipped out of my hands and cut into my leg. I still have a deep scar from that accident” (Trung). Now add a smattering of street vendors. Bánh Mỳ: Bread Rolls “1 French baguette”, states the Vandenberghe and Thys recipe for bánh mỳ, implicitly acknowledging the hundred years of French colonisation which provides Vietnam with its excellent breads and pastries, “beat the eggs lightly in a mixing bowl, crumble the paté and combine the paté and the lightly beaten eggs. Put the oil in a small frying pan and cook the omelette […] fold the omelette double and put it on the [grilled, heated] bread […] the variations are endless” (71). The young Vietnamese woman, Anh, sells bánh mỳ trứng ngải cứu, bread rolls with egg cooked with mugwort, an aromatic leafy herb. She explains her initial motivation to sell food on the street: “some women in my village already came to the city to sell. I can’t earn much money at home and I need money to send my children to school, so I decided to follow them” (Anh). She shares rented accommodation in the city with other women—sometimes up to ten people in a room (Jensen)—and starts her day at 4.30am, washing vegetables and preparing her baskets. Although a street trader herself, she is networked into a complex set of supply and delivery connections. Her eggs and bread are delivered fresh each morning and she buys the mugwort from a market near her lodgings. “I leave home around 6am and start walking along the streets. […] I mostly sell to shop keepers. They have to stay in their shop so I bring breakfast to them. I walk through a lot of streets, whenever someone calls out I will stop and make bread for them” (Anh). Mid-morning, at around 10am, Anh goes back to her home to have lunch and prepare for the afternoon, with a fresh delivery of eggs around 1.00-1.30pm. Usually, she leaves again around 2.00pm “but if it’s too hot outside, I will stay until 3pm, because it is very tiring to walk in the heat, and people don’t eat that early either. I go home whenever I sell out […], sometimes as early as 4pm, or as late as 7pm” (Anh). Like many street vendors, Anh has sought out points of contact with the local community to punctuate her walking with episodes of rest. Her customers are mainly other Vietnamese people, “shop keepers and residents of the streets I walk along every day. There is an old lady. I sit in front of her shop every afternoon from 3pm to 5pm. She eats one egg every day” (Anh). Anh has been selling Bánh mỳ on the streets for three years, but this is not her only source of income: “At home I grow rice, but I can only harvest it at the end of the season. It only takes a storm or hail to destroy the whole effort I spend for months […] This [food] is very easy to make, and I make a little profit everyday” (Anh). She has never worked from a recipe book: “I think only people in hotels, like a big chef who makes complicated dishes need recipes, this one is very easy, just a common everyday food” (Anh). As for the problems posed by the policing of informal markets, Anh says: “if I am not careful, the ward police will give me a fine for selling on the street.” Such a calamity can write off the profit of many hours’ or days’ work. Xôi: Sticky Rice Xôi is a popular street food dish, and Lister and Pohl provide two recipes, one for xôi lạc (sticky rice with peanuts)(68), and one for xôi xéo (sticky rice with turmeric and mung beans, and fried shallots) (80). Nga, the xôi seller interviewed for this research, sells both types of sticky rice along with xôi gậc (a festive red sticky rice cooked with and coloured by spiny bitter gourd, and typically eaten at Tết, the celebration for the Lunar New Year) and xôi đỗ đen, sticky rice with black bean. She used to specialise in only one kind of sticky rice but, as she says, “business was slow so I added other types of sticky rice. I sit here in the morning everyday anyway, so I sell different types, a small quantity for each” (Nga). The biggest complication for street vendors selling sticky rice is the requirement that it is still being steamed just before being sold, so that it is hot, soft, and sticky, and not dried out. The cooked sticky rice is usually packed in banana leaves under a plastic cover and put in a bamboo basket. The basket helps with ventilation while banana leaves keep the rice moist and the plastic cover keeps in heat. Traditionally, xôi is also sold in banana leaves. Nga uses first a layer of banana leaf, then one of plastic, and finally newspaper. Nga is a grandmother and constructs her street vending as a retirement job, which puts food on the table for her husband and herself. In Vietnam, there is a tradition that the younger generations look after their elders, but her work as a street vendor means that Nga and her husband can retain their autonomy and help their own family, for longer. Nga starts cooking at 4.00am, but her street food is only one element of her income: “In addition to selling here, I also deliver to restaurants. Actually most of my income comes from them. I deliver at around 5 to 5.30am, and start selling here at 6” (Nga). Both of Lister and Pohl’s recipes start with soaking the sticky rice overnight in water, just as Nga does. She says, “I wash the rice and soak them before I go to bed the night before. I get up, start the stove which uses black coal. I sell out all the rice everyday, otherwise it won’t taste good […] usually I sell out at 8 or 8.30am, 9am at the latest. I don’t work in the afternoon. I pick up my grandchildren at 4pm and take care of them until the end of the day.” Nga has strong views about the place of recipes in cooking, especially in cooking as a business: I don’t need to learn from a book. Written recipes or informal teaching from relatives is the same, they are just the starting point. What matters is you learn from your own experience. For example, you soak your rice for 6 hours today, but your customers complain that the rice is not soft, so you soak it for 8 hours next time. Or maybe you sell to a poorer community, you will adjust your ingredients to cheaper type, so you can reduce your price but still make profit; but if you sell in a richer neighbourhood, you make sure you have good quality, even with higher price, or else they will not buy from you (Nga). Lister and Pohl dedicate a two-page spread (70-1) to Ðặng Thị Sáu and her Xôi shopfront stall, noting that she learned her business from her mother-in-law who was “an itinerant sticky rice peddler for most of her life, walking the city streets, selling from bamboo baskets. It was a hard and uncertain life and not one Sáu wanted to follow” (70). Sáu’s compromise, ultimately, was to sell sticky rice from the comparative security and stability of a fixed location. Lister and Pohl’s focus upon Sáu and her food, along with the pictures of everyday life featured in Vietnamese Street Food, mean that this is more than an inspirational cookbook. It is a vivid introduction to the vernacular foodways of Vietnam “a set of social, economic and cultural practices around the production and consumption of food that are normatively distinctive to an ethnocultural group” (Jonas 119). Bún Riêu Cua: Crab Meat Noodle Crab meat noodle is a complicated recipe and a reminder that many people who eat street food do so because these are favourite Vietnamese dishes which may require considerable effort to prepare. The specialisation of street food vendors, making a complicated dish for the relish of dozens of customers, allows busy Vietnamese workers to enjoy their authentic cuisine at an affordable cost without the time constraints of buying multiple ingredients and making the dish themselves. The recipe in Hanoi Street Food involves several steps: preparation of the sauce using sautéing, frying and reducing (Jones); cooking of the crab in boiling water (not including separately bought crabmeat used in the sauce); creation of a chicken stock, to which the sauce is added; along with the washing and chopping a range of vegetables including soya bean sprouts, spring onions, lettuce, fresh herbs, lime etc., some of which is used as garnish (Vandenberghe, and Thys 90). Trung and her husband have been selling their bún riêu cua for five years. For nine years prior to working as a street food vendor, Trung was a recyclables collector. She began working in the city when she “followed a cousin to Ha Noi so I could earn money to support my family of six people. At first I collected materials such as plastic bottles, metal, papers, etc, but because I carried too much on my shoulders, I developed severe back pain and shoulder pain” (Trung). Now she and her husband use a bicycle to help carry the various necessities for her bún riêu cua street stall, using the vehicle to reduce some of the physical burden of the work. Trung learned how to make bún riêu cua from an aunt in Hai Phong, “I just observed her and other people”. The dish remains time consuming, however:I get up at 3am to start preparing the crab and cook the soup. My husband washes vegetables. It often takes us about 2 hours. By 5am, we leave the house, and we are here by 5.30, ready to sell breakfast […] I am most busy during lunchtime, from 10am to 1-2pm. Breakfast time can last from 6am to 9am. When I am not selling to customers I often get tired and easily fall asleep because I always crave sleep. In between, my husband and I wash dishes. He also delivers to people too. We get lots of phone calls from patients of the hospitals nearby. They say my food is more delicious than food in the hospital’s canteen […] Usually I go home around 4pm in the summer and 5 to 6pm in the winter. But I also stop by different shops to buy ingredients for the next day on my way home. Once I get home, I wash the bowls, re-supply and re-arrange my stuffs, and do some preparation. I work until I go to bed at 9pm (Trung). The illustration for this recipe in Hanoi Street Food is not of the dish itself, but of young Vietnamese men enjoying the dish. As is the case with Lister and Pohl, Vandenberghe and Thys’s book is about more than recipes, it is a rich evocation of daily life on the streets of Vietnam. Serve with a Side-dish of Conclusions Authentic street food is cooked, sold and consumed on the street. However, street food cookbooks tend to recommended shopfront eateries, partly because they are easier to find, and are more convenient, in that neither the tourist nor the vendor is at risk of police intervention. Another reason for featuring the more established vendors with their own premises concerns food hygiene: In 1989 the Vietnamese government adopted a law on the protection of people’s health. A survey on food samples in Hanoi showed that 47 per cent were microbiologically unsafe. [This has now changed.] The government has adopted two practices for ensuring safer street food, namely, monitoring street food vendors through a licensing system, and educating and training them on hygiene (Bhowmik 2260). Such licensing, training and the maintenance of hygiene standards are more difficult to police with itinerant food vendors. In the two cookbooks featured, ingredients tend to be measured as to specific amounts, with the idea that the result should be predictable. Street vendors, however, learn to cook their signature dishes from friends, relatives, and experience. They do not measure their ingredients while cooking, and their products vary from one vendor to another, and also to some extent from day to day, even given the same cook. This creates a special characteristic of street food and means that regular customers gravitate to particular vendors whose choice of seasoning and cooking techniques culminates in the most attractive results according to their personal taste. While there are lots of stalls captioned as bánh mỳ, regular customers will find that there are significant differences between stalls. One reason for this is offered in Lister and Pohl: small quantities of special ingredients that are difficult to get in Vietnam and impossible elsewhere. The cook in a featured Bánh cuốn stall (selling rice pancakes) adds a drop of giant water bug juice to season her dipping broth: “ ‘It’s the real thing! One drop off the top of a chopstick is enough’ she explains” (Lister, and Pohl 33). As is clear from the interviews with vendors, itinerant sellers of street food don’t use recipe books, and have generally learned how to cook their dishes through women’s networks of family and friends. The two cookbooks discussed are designed for consumption by people who engage in or aspire to “food and drink tourism” (Boniface vii) in Vietnam, whether the readers have visited in person or become aware of the cuisine through popular culture, such as Luke Nguyen’s SBS cooking shows (Nguyen). They are as much coffee table books as collections of recipes, and are written by westerners for a western readership. The recipes focus on ingredients that can be sourced in everyday western contexts but the beautiful and evocative photographs of daily life in Vietnam, supplemented by written commentary on people and place, clearly locate the recipes in their Vietnamese cultural context. Culinary tourism allows people unfamiliar with a cuisine and culture to use “food to explore new cultures and ways of being” (Long 21). Street food vendors are part of many communities. They require knowledge, skill, and personal networks to acquire the quality ingredients at the best possible price for the daily routine of food preparation and selling. Whereas recipe books deal with domestic-scale food production, a vendor may cook for a hundred or more people in a single day. Many itinerant street food sellers work in the city to support absent husbands and children in rural locations, taking money home on a regular basis ($20 profit a fortnight makes their labour worthwhile), and spending 10 days in 14 on the streets (Jensen). As women help each other to begin a career as a vendor through oral teaching, observation, and first-hand experience, they do away with the invisible, authoritative voice of cookbooks. Itinerant food sellers are also a part of the larger communities in which they work, including customers, their suppliers, and other actors such as the authorities and the media. This larger community sets the tone for their food, and their lives. The vast majority of vendors of street food are women, prepared to work hard and with passion and pride to make enough money to make a difference to their families. Books about street food might help recreate some of the dishes that can be bought on the streets of Vietnam. After participating in street life, however, as an observer or customer, it becomes clear that recipe cookbooks intended for English readers only capture part of the complexity and beauty of street food, and the lives of those who make it. References Anh. Personal communication. Trans. Nguyen Hong Van. 2013. Boniface, Priscilla. Tasting Tourism: Travelling for Food and Drink. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Bhowmik, Sharit K. “Street Vendors in Asia: A Review.” Economic and Political Weekly (2005): 2256–64. Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. Oxford: Routledge, 2003. Corbin Dwyer, Sonya, and Jennifer L. Buckle. “The Space Between: On Being an Insider-Outsider in Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8.1 (2009): 54–63. Fram, Sheila M. “The Constant Comparative Analysis Method Outside of Grounded Theory.” The Qualitative Report 18, Article 1 (2013): 1–25. 28 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR18/fram1.pdf›. Jensen, Rolf. Street Vendors [DVD of three films, Their Voices, Thuy’s Story and Loi’s Story]. Ha Noi: Vietnamese Women’s Museum, 2012. Jonas, Tammi. “Eating the Vernacular, Being Cosmopolitan.” Cultural Studies Review 19.1 (2013): 117–37. 19 May 2013 ‹http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/viewFile/3076/3428›. Jones, G. Stephen. “The Difference between Sautéing, Pan Frying and Stir Frying [blog post].” The Reluctant Gourmet. 30 Apr. 2010. 28 Apr. 2013 ‹http://reluctantgourmet.com/cooking-techniques/frying/item/856-saute-pan-fry-and-stir-fry›. Lincoln, Martha. “Report from the Field: Street Vendors and the Informal Sector in Hanoi.” Dialectical Anthropology 32.3 (2008): 261–5. Lister, Tracey, and Andreas Pohl. Vietnamese Street Food. Rev. ed. Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2013. Long, Lucy. “A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness.” Culinary Tourism. Ed. Lucy Long. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2004. 20–50. Nga. Personal communication. (trans. Nguyen Hong Van), 2013. Nguyen, Luke. Luke Nyugen’s Vietnam [SBS]. 2009 ‹http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/lukenguyen/watchonline/page/i/1/show/lukenguyen›. Trung. Personal communication. Trans. Nguyen Hong Van. 2013. Vandenberghe, Tom, and Luk Thys. Hanoi Street Food: Cooking and Travelling in Vietnam. Tielt: Uitgeverij Lannoo nv, 2011.

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Abstract:

In the 1980's, I was privileged to attend the profession ceremony of my sister into the Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph (SSJ). She entered the convent in the fall after her high school graduation and, ten years later, had decided that she was ready to make her final vows and commit her life to the work of God on earth and to this particular apostolic community. Though I was happy that my sister was following her calling in life, I worried that she was committing herself to an unnecessarily harsh life, ruled by the long-standing patriarchy of the Catholic Church. I didn't have much faith that the Church, in its tradition and dogma, could accommodate my sister's spirit of activism and desire to bring about social justice. However, this ceremony, designed and enacted by the SSJ, changed my mind about the possibilities. They demonstrated how "sisterhood" and life in community would position my sister to affect change in the community and allow her to participate in the creation of a kinder, more inclusive version of the Catholic religion. The profession ceremony and the accompanying mass, though they reflected the new directions in the Church, were unlike any other Catholic ceremonies that I had ever experienced. In a break from the usual service, the Sisters performed the majority of the activities of the mass. A priest (male, of course) was present only to carry out the consecration of the host for communion services and to give the blessing. The taking of such freedom in the mass by the Sisters was something that was unheard of in earlier days in the Church. In the Catholicism that I knew, the strictly ordered rituals of the mass were to be enacted by the priest and observed by the congregation. The enactment of mass also served as a subliminal vehicle for hierarchically ordering the congregation: from God to priests, to nuns, and finally to the people. The positioning of priests and nuns and their respective roles in the church has been an ongoing struggle for nuns since Vatican II, a series of councils created in 1962 by Pope John XXIII to update the workings and interactions of the Church (http://www.rcchurch/vatican2/). Religious orders were given much more autonomy over their lives and lifestyles, but little had changed in regard to the hierarchy. In 1979 when the Pope visited the U.S., women religious urged him to allow greater recognition and participation for nuns. Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) asked the Pope on behalf of all nuns to "respond by providing the possibility of women as persons being included in all ministries of the church" (Kane, in McNamara, 1996, p.663). Their request went unheeded. Even now, with the turn of a new century, Catholic women religious are still denied the privilege of becoming priests or moving into positions of power within the Church. It has been a great disappointment for many nuns, but they have persevered and created new ways of operating. They changed into contemporary dress, moved beyond just teaching and nursing positions and took up social activism in earnest (Rogers, 1996). They have been bolstered by their desire to make a difference in the church and society, and are determined to find alternative ways to have their voices heard in their work of serving the people. My sister's commitment ceremony also broke from Catholic tradition and reflected the new directions of the SSJ. She based her personal statement of commitment on the Shakertown Pledge, making a connection to another monastic community, the Shakers, who live simply in the service of God and community (http://www.nypl.org). Among others, she made promises of becoming a world citizen, leading an ecologically sound life, living a life of creative simplicity, sharing of her personal wealth with the poor, renewing herself through prayer, meditation, and study, and responsibly participating in a community of faith. This personal statement was followed by her formal commitment to the Sisters of St. Joseph. To the President of the SSJ, (no longer a Mother Superior), my sister vowed to unite her life to the Community, bring the Gospel to the people and seek union of neighbor with neighbor through commitments to poverty, celibacy and obedience. She received a plain gold wedding band, not as a "bride of Christ", but as a symbol of her commitment to God, the community of the SSJ, and the world community. In their simplicity and sincerity, the vows touched my heart. My sister had moved from our nuclear family into a new family of the SSJ and the world. Her work and the world in which she moved would certainly be different than the one we had envisioned throughout our childhood together. According to Schneiders (2000), it is much more difficult today to "locate" and "situate" women religious. Unlike nuns of the earlier part of the century, my sister would not be secluded in a convent, away from people and identifiable only by a flowing black habit and service in an insular community. The world was open to her to find her ministry. In these times, many religious orders find and create their own ministries, like a "bricolage", pieceworking solutions to individually fit the myriad of life situations. Schneiders (2000, p. xxvii) describes the phenomenon in this way: "The unity of the final product and its utility result not from a preordained plan correctly followed but from the inner directedness of the one creating." More than likely, the possibility of continually being involved in creative change was the lure of the SSJ for my sister. For the SSJ, the ever-changing, creative nature of their work allows them the freedom to work in places where ministries are most needed. The Sisters of St. Joseph use their marginalized position in the Church and society as a position for change. At the profession ceremony, the Sisters had found an alternative way to reach the people and serve their congregation. They knowingly pushed the limits of tradition in the church as they expanded their participation in the ceremony and the mass. Then and in the present time, the SSJ, like bell hooks, choose to live on the margins of society for a reason; the margins are "a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one's capacity to react. It offers to one the possibility of a radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternative-new worlds (1990, pp. 149-50)." At the ceremony, members of the SSJ made statements of ongoing commitment to service and their ministries. They spoke in support of poor people, disabled people, those labeled as criminals, and for all those who were not getting their fair share of life. The SSJ profoundly believe in God "who is the origin of all that is", and they seek "the union of ourselves and all people with God and with one another in and through Christ Jesus" (1987, Constitution of the Sisters of St. Joseph, p. 3; http://www.nd.edu/~csjus/home.html). For the SSJ, this charism means becoming prophets of the Church. Like their founding order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Le Puy, France in the seventeenth century, they continually seek out those people and organizations that are in need and create solutions with them. Once programs are established and integrated into the community, they move on to the next area of need. Similarly, they see their formation as Sisters of St. Joseph as a "lifelong process" (SSJ Constitution, p. 18). After the seriousness of the vows and statements, the profession ceremony became a celebration. Happiness and energy filled the chapel as people smiled widely and enthusiastically joined in the singing of hymns. The final song, an old Black spiritual, "Oh, Happy Day", nearly brought the house down. It was the most emotional group expression I had ever seen in a Catholic service. A special experience had been co-created and shared by all of us, even the many long-time traditional Catholics who all responded enthusiastically. With the staid protocol of the mass was cast aside, the spirit of the people took over. Pearce and Cronen (1980) would propose that we, the nuns and laity, in our conjoint action, had reached a moment of liberation; we were able to create a new way of being in the Catholic Church. In their work, the SSJ accept and circumvent the worldly struggles they face with the Catholic Church by acting in a spirit of connection with the people and the community. In their ongoing ministries, the SSJ give witness to their "love of God and neighbor by living simply and working for a more just society" (SSJ Constitution, p. 12). They often struggle with the most difficult of situations and work with the most unfortunate members of society. With their love of God and service, they encourage community members to work with them to change not only the daily conditions of life, but also, the way the Church and others in the community understand and accept all people. The Catholic religion in this form is reachable; the Creator, positioned as God, works through and is simultaneously created in the actions and words of the people. In a circular fashion, God is connected with people, and people are connected neighbor to neighbor, as they connect with the spirit and word of God. In this way, the SSJ continually work toward and create their goal "that all may be one." At the profession ceremony, the people took this gift of spirit with them and, hopefully, were inspired to begin connecting in new ways with the people and chosen God/spirit of their own lives. When my sister first entered the convent, I used to wonder why nuns thanked each other after sharing a religious service. After participating in the profession ceremony, I knew. Thank you, Teresa.