Journal articles: 'Black Police Executives' – Grafiati (2024)

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The Commission on the Accreditation of Law Enforcement (CALEA) employs rigorous evaluation techniques. Objective accreditation, such as made possible by CALEA, is important from the public’s perspective and in the national community of law enforcement.To counteract a general distrust of law enforcement agencies, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) developed a grant to develop standards by which the quality and performance of law enforcement could be measured. LEAA developed 107 standards and, though well received by the law enforcement community, no single group or agency took the initiative to begin a program to evaluate and implement the standards. In 1979, the Department of Justice established an additional grant that effectively organized the four major law enforcement groups: the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Sheriff’s Association, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, and the Police Executive Research Forum.

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Una de las consecuencias más importantes de la crisis económico- financiera ha sido situar en el debate político-criminal determinadas cuestiones asociadas a la mala praxis en el ámbito bancario. Sobre esta cuestión, uno de los supuestos de mayor importancia ha sido el llamado caso de las Tarjetas Black, relativo al cobro de remuneraciones fuera de lo previsto legalmente por los directivos de Caja Madrid y Bankia. En este trabajo se presenta un análisis de la problemática estudiada, en relación con los criterios seguidos por la SAN 4/2017, de 23 de febrero y la STS 438/2018, de 3 de octubre, para la resolución del caso. One of the most important consequences of the economic and financial crisis has been bringing up to the criminal policy debate some issues regarding bad practices in the banking sector. About it, one of the leading cases has been the so-called Black Cards case, concerning the charging of unlawful executive compensations by Caja Madrid and Bankia executives. In this work, an analysis of this issue has been presented, according to the criteria followed by the SAN 4/2017 and the STS 438/2018, in order to resolve this case

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Police brutality and widespread systemic racism represent historical and current sources of trauma in Black communities. Both the Black Lives Matter movement and counseling psychology propose to confront these realities at multiple levels. Black Lives Matter seeks to increase awareness about systemic racism and promote resilience among Black people. Counseling psychology states values of multiculturalism, social justice, and advocacy. Executive leadership in counseling psychology may seek to promote racial justice, yet struggle with how to participate in Black Lives Matter movements and address racial discrimination within larger systems spontaneously and consistently. However, counseling psychology trainees and professionals are actively involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, leading the way forward. Through the framework of spontaneity in social movements, this manuscript highlights what counseling psychologists are currently contributing to Black Lives Matter and makes recommendations that build on the opportunity counseling psychologists have for further involvement in the movement.

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Education is considered an important pillar of economic development and a vital factor for nation building in post-1994 South Africa. Higher education (HE) is offered by government-subsidized universities and colleges, while there has been an increase in the number of private higher education institutions (PHEIs), which offer more expensive, unsubsidized tertiary education. While all state bodies and public entities are required to apply the provisions of the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Act, this is not (yet) seemingly a requirement for PHEIs. This study used an adapted version of the “5 Star” research methodology to explore the potential financial impact and influence of the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) black economic empowerment (BEE) policy on PHEIs. The research shows that the BEE policy has the potential to financially impact and influence most of the components of the total quality service (TQS) framework for PHEIs in terms of preferential procurement from suppliers, company ownership, appointment of executive, middle and junior managers, employment of academic and administrative staff, and throughput of black student graduates. Management at PHEIs should be alerted to the fact that it is probably not merely a matter of IF, but rather WHEN the policy will start impacting on the financial stability and viability of PHEIs as BEE compliance becomes mandatory.

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Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach (Rescuing) was published shortly before the outbreak in 2020 of the novel coronavirus and its myriad human rights and class issues regarding equality, discrimination, health, and labor rights of people of color. This was also prior to the concurrent public murder of George Floyd as an unarmed Black man by the Minneapolis police in late May 2020, and the resulting continuing Black Lives Matter massive national and international movement against the deaths of Floyd and others and the history of systemic American racism, including police shooting deaths, discrimination, and brutality against African Americans, particularly unarmed Black men. Such comprehensive street protests have not been seen in America since 1968. They represent, inter alia, the cover of disguises of national racism being publicly stripped away, and the national confrontation with irrefutable evidence of a wide spectrum of systemic rights violations and the deficits of American law and government to ensure African Americans’ basic rights. Further, Rescuing was published before it became fully apparent that the federal government's responses to Black Lives Matter, particularly the executive branch, would fan the racial conflicts of national mourning and demands for new justice narratives, rather than healing and unifying for American citizens as a whole, even as these protests were the most diverse in recent memory.

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The University of Missouri–Columbia was selected to host the Student Affiliates of Seventeen (SAS) Executive Board from 2019–2022 and began their term in August 2019, following a successful three-year tenure by Ball State University. The new executive board has anchored its term in four pillars—Growth and Sustainability, Justice and Equity, Excellence and Innovation, and Wellness and Positive Development—which have guided the organization over the past year. This report reviews the purpose of SAS and discusses membership development, programming, advocacy, and the organizational development activities of the organization, including progress on goals to increase and engage membership and foster a more equitable and socially just organization that embraces liberation as a value. Counseling psychology students’ and the organization’s response and adjustment to the COVID-19 pandemic and national reckoning with police brutality and anti-Black racism are also discussed.

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This study investigates the intersections of policy, affect, and the lives of migrant youth. We approach the Trump Administration’s contingent reversal of a “zero tolerance” family separation policy as an illustrative case for understanding how affect mediates policy-making processes. Combining Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) and affect studies, we analyze 184 print media texts between the declaration of zero tolerance (May 2018) and President Trump’s repeal of his executive order (June 2018). We argue that mainstream media invited publics to sympathize with migrant youth and shame zero tolerance policy and its defenders. While shame catalyzed nationwide #KeepFamiliesTogether protests, it also animated political actions that recuperated “America” as a tolerant nation (e.g., “Love, not hate, makes America great”). In doing so, shame suppressed structural critiques of U.S. state violence toward migrant as well as Black, Indigenous, and minoritized families and youth. We conclude by discussing how a “pedagogy of discomfort” offers one way to build toward more historically responsive and intersectional coalitions for migrant and education justice.

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VisitScotland is the national tourism organisation for Scotland, primarily responsible for marketing Scotland as a destination. The agency is also the Scottish Executive's (Government) principal adviser on policy matters relating to tourism and has the ambition to be the best national tourism organisation in the world. In order to reach this goal, it is committed to futures thinking, in particular using scenario planning in order to frame this thinking. This paper describes how VisitScotland designed a scenario planning process based upon three clusters: A scenario planning group, environmental scanning; and a forecasting model/economic analysis.

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A significant development in the area of gender quota legislation is driven by South Africa’s latest National Policy Framework for Women Empowerment and Gender Equality (WEGE) legislation. This legislation expands on the values and principles that need to be integrated into policies, practices and programs of the private sector and government to ensure gender equality and quotas. The legislation strives for 50 per cent female representation on the executive bodies of all organisations. Another unique feature of diversity in South Africa is achieved through the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Program. South Africa’s BEE Scorecard Policies and Empowerment Strategies are unique, affecting quota decisions and behaviour.

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ABSTRACTBecause gender equality actors rarely have sufficient power to create new institutions, this article asks how they can achieve positive gender change in constrained circ*mstances when the creation of new rules is not possible. Building on a feminist institutionalist approach to analyzing gendered institutional dynamics, power, and resistance, we open the “black box” of one executive: Michelle Bachelet’s first presidency in Chile (2006–10). Using theory-guided process tracing and primarily qualitative data, we examine key reforms in three policy areas—health, pensions, and childcare—that were central to Bachelet’s first program. By analyzing how efforts to incorporate positive gender change fared differently in each area, this study shows how far utilizing, subverting, or converting existing rules—more “hidden” forms of change, often away from legislatures—can be effective, if limited, strategies when gender equality advocates face resistance.

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Drawing on interview data from reading policy actors in California, Michigan, and Texas, this study applied Kingdon's (1984, 1995) multiple streams model to explain how the issue of reading became prominent on the agenda of state governments during the latter half of the 1990s. A combination of factors influenced the status of a state's reading policy agenda, including feedback from parents, teachers, and business groups; student achievement data; political pressure from the state administration; regional and national interest; a pervasive belief that reading is a building block for student success; and a widespread perception that the decline in reading achievement was symbolic of the failure of public schools. In addition, governors promoted reading to high agenda prominence by influencing which issues were placed on the decision agenda (agenda setting) and which alternatives were given serious attention (alternative specification). Finally, the findings suggest that the applicability of Kingdon's national-level model to the state level may depend on both the issue being examined and the participation of the state executive branch.

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The article analyzed understudied state policy of the government of Far Eastern Republic aimed at state monopolization of the areas of harvesting, storage and trade of fur and raw materials in the Transbaikal region. The research conducted a comprehensive analysis of legislative enactments that evolved from strictly prohibitive measures against free trade operations of fur-raw material market to cancellation of the restrictions. The author analyzed government regulations, the consequences of the ban of the free trade of raw materials and their free export abroad. All kinds of fur, medicinal-technical raw materials and raw materials of other origin, obtained from domestic breeds of animals were subject to those state regulations. This policy had very limited effect due to the absence of an extensive branch of the executive power on the ground and unwillingness of the population to obey the laws that infringed on their trade rights. With entry into force of various kinds of bans, the black market of the fur-raw material operations flourished. Along the border with China the smuggling did not stop. The attempt to deal with the criminal phenomenon failed because the customs was in a poorly organized state. Eventually the government and the Council of Ministers of the Republic realized that the existing regulations hindered the development of the raw materials sector of the economy and lead to public discontent. They eventually reversed the monopoly law and a number of related enactments and reintroduced free trade of furs and raw materials. The author concluded that this emergency policy was flawed. Due to the general lack of preparation of the executive branch of government, legislative measures aimed at the state monopolization of the commodity market failed to bring under state control the procurement system and the most important counter-currency. As a result, the market returned to free trade relations.

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The Republic of Crimea is a unique and strategically important region of the Russian Federation in the Azov-Black Sea region. The unique historical path of development of the territory, the multinational and multiconfessional composition of the population, and cultural diversity determined the special place of the Republic of Crimea in the cultural space of Russia. At the present stage of development, state national policy aimed at harmonizing interethnic relations and resolving interethnic conflicts is actively pursued. No doubt, constant replenishment of scientific knowledge about the current state of interethnic relations and trends in their changes is required. Nowadays, federal executive bodies are involved in the implementation of measures in the field of state national policy; civil society institutions take an active part. Significant funds are spent on coordinating their joint activities in the field of national policy, and the visible result is, unfortunately, not always achieved, since there is no single center of interaction, and ethno-confessional factors are not always taken into account in their work. The article is devoted to the implementation of state national policy in the territory of the Republic of Crimea, the peculiarities of its legal regulation, measures to ensure state unity and harmonization of the sphere of interethnic relations in the territory of the Republic of Crimea are also analyzed.

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Abstract Medicaid presents both legislative and regulatory challenges and opportunities. As it moves a legislative agenda forward, the Biden administration also will confront a series of immediate regulatory matters, some of which have been made urgent because of pending judicial action. Chief among these pressing matters are ending Medicaid work requirements and block grant experiments, rescinding the public charge rule, ensuring optimal use of Medicaid's enrollment and renewal simplification tools, rescinding the Title X family planning rule (which has enormous implications for Medicaid beneficiaries), and, when the time comes, preparing states to wind down the “Families First” Medicaid maintenance of effort protection while avoiding erroneous beneficiary disenrollment. The administration could consider encouraging remaining nonexpansion states to pursue §1115 Medicaid expansion experiments; additionally, the administration could pursue Medicaid pandemic recovery demonstrations to support health system recovery during the long period that lies ahead. Thus, while certain advances must await legislation, the administration can move Medicaid forward through executive action.

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Executive Summary This article uses a multidisciplinary approach — analyzing historical sources, refugee and asylum admissions data, legislative provisions, and public opinion data — to track the rise and fall of the US asylum and refugee policy. It shows that there has always been a political struggle between people who advocate for a generous refugee and asylum system and those who oppose it. Today, the flexible system of protecting refugees and asylees, established in 1980, is giving way to policies that weaponize them. It offers a historical analysis of US refugee and asylum policies, as well as xenophobic and nativist attitudes toward refugees. It places Trump administration refugee policies in three categories: those that abandon longstanding US legal principles and policies, most notably non-refoulement and due process; those that block the entry of refugees and asylees; and those that criminalize foreign nationals who attempt to seek asylum in the United States. The article concludes with an analysis of public opinion research to square the growing public support for refugees and asylees shown in polling data with the subgroup popularity of Donald Trump’s harsh xenophobic rhetoric and policies. These seemingly contradictory trends are consistent with research on right-wing populism. It argues that the restoration of generous humanitarian policies requires robust civic engagement and steadfast legislative efforts.

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The article describes the President Yanukovych and his entourage’s actions taken to establish control over the key branches of power in Ukraine. The role of the Donetsk clan’s particular representatives, mainly AndriiKliuev and SerhiiLyovochkin, in implementing the authority concentration schemes, is explored. The context of building up the floor-crossers coalition (officially named “Stability and Reforms”) in 2010 is highlighted. The reasons for Donetsk clan choosing the non-constitutional way of seizing control over the Parliament are explained, such as: rate of action, low price of deputies’ engagement, keeping up the ideological confrontation façade with Julia Tymoshenko’s Bloc and «Our Ukraine – People’s Self-Defence» parliamentary alliance. MykolaAzarov’s cabinet (named March 11, 2010) is analyzed, with specific influential groups identified within its composition, such as MykolaAzarov’s, AndriiKliuev’s, RinatAkhmetov’sDmytroFirtash’s and Victor Yanykovych’s clientele. The quotas of Litvin’s Block, Ukraine’s Communist Party and Russian lobbies have been distinguished. The responsible assignments in security ministries data has been generalized. The fact that Victor Yanukovych’s entourage had established full actual control over top officials of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine in the eve of the Presidential Elections 2010 decisive second ballot is emphasized. The Prosecutor General’s Office, Security Service, Foreign Intelligence, Border Police and National Security and Defense Council’s governing authorities personnel has been analyzed. Specific attention has been paid to AndriiPortnov’s role in implementing the judicial reform aimed at depriving the Ukrainian judiciary of any independence, with the Presidential Office, namely AndriiPortnov, gaining the decisive impact over its activities and preserving but formal procedures and formulas from the relatively autonomous judiciary built under Victor Yushchenko. The facts of placing pressure upon the judges voicing dissent over the reform have been revealed.

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The claim that contemporary historical scholarship has ignored the twentieth-century U.S. Congress is a great understatement. During the past two decades, most social and cultural historians minimized the study of government institutions, policy makers, and policies. They characterized these aspects of American history as elitist, irrelevant, and even illegitimate (Leff 1995; Leuchtenburg 1986).The ultimate villain in this scholarly narrative was Congress, considered to be an insulated haven for white male elites who sub-vert the democratic process in favor of vested interest groups.When Congress appeared in a few academic books, it was treated as an archaic institution that functions as either a road block or a rubber stamp to proposals that emanate from the executive branch or from mass social movements.Those interested in the modern history of Congress can turn only to the work of journalists such as John Jacobs (1995) and Richard Cohen (1999) who rely on political biography in attempts to understand the institution’s past.

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This volume details the important items in the development of the concept of endangered species, from John Locke to the current problems of the twenty-first century. Excerpts from more than fifty different significant documents appear, in roughly chronological order. The scope covers more than just endangered animals and plants, with related discussions on such items as water rights, utilitarianism, outdoor recreation, and climate change. Each chapter consists of the relevant sections of an essential document in the development of endangered species policy. Quotations from essays, actual congressional bills, speeches to Congress, executive orders and Supreme Court cases are among the featured items. Not all are easy to understand, especially the court cases, with their many case references. Each quoted item is followed by a one-page analysis explaining why the selection is considered noteworthy, as well as a brief list of further reading. Occasional “Did You Know” sidebars, briefly summarizing a particular problem that pertains to the subject of the chapter, provide clarifying information and/or examples. A small number of unindexed black and white illustrations seem to have been added as an afterthought, almost at random.

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Thе article presents an analysis of the content produced by Sevastopol TV companies and studios. Based on Roskomnadzor data the authors provide a list of Sevastopol TV channels, describe the thematic and genre features of TV programs. The main research methods are TV channel broadcast monitoring and content analysis. The authors come to the conclusion that the TV space of Sevastopol is heterogeneous. Both state and private TV channels are present in the city media market. The authors demonstrate how depending on the form of ownership and the goals of the founders the editorial policy of TV channels and the thematic focus of programs change. Thus state TV channels cover more of the activities of the Executive and Legislative city government. Private TV channels address problematic issues of the population with some criticism of the authorities. The basis of the broadcast is informational and socio-political programs, the most common genres are interviews and news. The authors also describe video content produced by two organizations that are not registered as separate mass media, such as a branch of VGTRK – GTRK Sevastopol and a TV studio of the black sea Fleet of the Russian Federation.

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Abstract Understanding factors that influence cognitive performance remain critical priorities, particularly among racial/ethnic groups that have higher prevalence of dementia. This study assesses race/ethnic (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, Hispanic) differences in cognitive performance in adjusted models accounting for co-existing self-reported chronic conditions (arthritis, diabetes, cancer, depressive symptoms, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, lung disease, osteoporosis, stroke), age, sex, education, and income. Data from the 2011-2017 National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS), a nationally-representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries (N=7,041, mean age=77.5), were used to estimate a series of cross-sectional multivariable linear regressions to evaluate race/ethnic differences in cognitive performance scores on the NHATS cognitive composite test of memory, orientation, and executive function domains (range 0-33) over seven years. In adjusted models, black participants had lower cognitive scores relative to white participants in 2011 (b=-2.25, 95% CI[-2.52, -1.98]) and by the end of the observation period in 2017 (b=-3.24, 95% CI[-3.72, -2.76]). Similarly, Hispanic participants experienced lower cognitive scores relative to white participants in 2011 (b=-2.31, 95% CI[-2.77, -1.84]) which persisted to the end of the observation window (b=-2.77, 95% CI[-3.66, -1.89]). Racial/ethnic groups had significantly lower cognitive scores relative to white Medicare beneficiaries over seven years of assessment. These analyses build toward longitudinal analyses of repeated observations of cognitive performance. Given the broad clinical and policy implications involved in caring for persons with dementia, it will be important to intervene earlier on modifiable risk factors to postpone cognitive declines among older minority ethnic adults.

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As the first national law to address racial discrimination in housing, the 1968 Fair Housing Act was truly a landmark piece of legislation. It prohibited homeowners, real-estate agents, lenders, and other housing professionals from engaging in a range of practices they had commonly used to keep neighborhoods racially segregated, such as refusing to sell or rent to a person because of his or her race, lying about the availability of a dwelling, or blockbusting (inducing white owners to sell by telling them that blacks were moving into the neighborhood). The last of the 1960s-era civil rights laws, the Fair Housing Act tackled the arena long felt to be the most sensitive to whites. Intense controversy, demonstrations, and violence over fair housing issues had occurred in many cities and states since at least the 1940s. Although John F. Kennedy promised during his presidential campaign to end housing discrimination “with the stroke of a pen,” once elected, he waited two years to sign a limited executive order. In 1966, a fair housing bill supported by President Johnson failed in Congress. Unlike other civil rights bills, the issue of housing evoked opposition not just from the South but also from the North. Opponents claimed that it challenged basic American values such as “a man's home is his castle”; to supporters, the symbolism of homeownership as “the American Dream” only underscored the importance of ensuring that housing was available to all Americans, regardless of race.

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This article uses religious coping theory to theorize about how and why race and ethnic groups on death row frame religious last statements at the moment of imminent death. Unique data (N = 269) drawn from death row inmates in Texas between December 1982 and April 2016 reveal uniformity in the dominance that black, white, and Hispanic inmates assign to relational forms of expressions that draw them closer to God and expressions that facilitate spiritual intimacy with others, over self-focused expressions that represent efforts to gain control over the imminent death experience or signal a transformed life. There is a hierarchy of preferred religious coping methods that changes for each group following the implementation of a new policy allowing the family and friends of murder victims (co-victims) to witness the execution of inmates. It is concluded that race and ethnic groups differ in the premium they place on preferred religious coping strategies when faced with imminent death, and a change in social context, such as the sudden presence of co-victims at executions, increases the religious content of last statements for all groups.

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Such a disruptive technology as the blockchain platform has a potential to provide value-added contributions towards multiple-disciplinary applications these days. Blockchain technology, considered as the second generation of the Internet in the digital age, has been applied in practice for various industry such as finance, healthcare, tourism, retailing, manufacturing, education, public sector, supply chains management, agri-food industry and so on. In which, supply chain operations, particularly agri-food management, becomes a prosperous beneficiary from blockchain technology. In the local context, Vietnam has been achieved the competitive advantages in agricultural production among the world in some agri-food products such as black peppercorn, cashew nuts, coffee, coconut, rice, and rubber. Furthermore, Vietnam is considered as one of pioneers in implementing blockchain technology for traceability and transparency of agri-food products across Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. However, design and implementation of the blockchain technology application in agri-food production in the case of Vietnam agriculture industry have been confronted with opportunities and challenges, besides its strengths and weaknesses in nature. This paper aims to concentrating on the analysis of Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of blockchain-applied supply chain relevant to agri-food products. In addition, the application of blockchain technology in supply chains has been expected to promote the sustainable development of Vietnam agriculture, in the accordance with the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the 21st century. We adopt the research method of interpretive approach to synthesize the literature and reasonably induce research conclusions. We finally prescribe some policy recommendations and implications for agri-food stakeholders such as regional policy makers, agri-food based blockchain platform designers, executives, and farmers as users in relevant to facilitate the blockchain technology for agri-food chains in Vietnam agriculture.

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The recently released Special Operations Executive (SOE) personal file of Major Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard (HS 9/1200/5) sheds new light on the man who helped fly General Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco, leading ultimately to the overthrow of the democratically elected republican government and thirty-six years of brutal dictatorship. Contrary to the previous portrayal of Pollard, a genial, rough-and-ready gung-ho ‘adventurer’ who flew the future Caudillo to Morocco on a whim, the files reveal Pollard to have been an experienced British intelligence officer, talented linguist, and firearms expert with considerable firsthand experience of wars and revolutions in Mexico, Morocco, and Ireland, where he had served as a police adviser in Dublin Castle during the ‘stormy days’ of the Black and Tans in the early 1920s. Pollard, who listed his hobbies in Who's Who as ‘hunting and shooting’, was the sporting editor of Country Life and a member of Lord Leconfield's hunt. He was also a renowned and passionate firearms expert having written numerous books on the subject including the section on ‘small arms’ for the official war office textbook. His friend Douglas Jerrold, who himself later served in British intelligence, recalled that Pollard ‘looked and behaved, like a German Crown Prince and had a habit of letting off revolvers in any office he happened to visit’. Once Jerrold plucked up the courage to ask Pollard if he had ever killed anybody.

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The problem of demographic processes in Crimea is acutely relevant in the light of recent political events. Besides, this issue is gaining more scientific importance due to the fact that during the Soviet period, Crimea conducted special demographic and migration policy, different from all adjacent regions. The consequences of the Soviet demographic and migration policy now impact the elaboration of a stable position and action plan of Ukraine on the deoccupation of the peninsula, the development of state policy towards the indigenous peoples of Crimea, etc. It is worth mentioning that Crimea was of special strategic importance for the USSR, and therefore the demographic structure of the population of the peninsula constituted a subject of particular attention as for the Union leadership so for the heads of local executive and party bodies. In addition, Crimea had special conditions for economic activity, different from other regions, and thus migration processes within the peninsula were to be planned and carried out according to the policy of the Soviet government and the Crimean socioeconomic situation. The scholarly research has not yet properly reflected the problem of the migration policy of the USSR in Crimea in the 1920s, so this blank space must be filled. The article considers the policy pursued by the Bolshevik Party and its subordinate Soviet authorities on the issue of relocation and resettlement of the Crimean population within the peninsula. The research is based on the analysis of materials of the State Archives of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which are currently inaccessible to Ukrainian scholars due to the occupation of the peninsula. The article also provides the analysis of the Soviet leaders’ plans on relocating the population to Crimea and its settlement, the prerequisites and factors that influenced the development and implementation of local demographic and migration policies. It studies some aspects of the Soviet leadership plans on resolving the national question in the USSR in general due to the resettlement policy in Crimea, namely creating there a Jewish republic. Special attention is paid to the resettlement of Tatar families to Crimea. It is noted that the migration policy of the Soviet government within the Crimean peninsula had a contradictory character, which led to the overall failure of the developed large-scale plans.

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Today global and national economy is facing numerous hardly predictable events, which N. Talleb called ‘the black swam’ events, i.e. events having serious consequences both for economy in general and for industries in particular. Integrated corporate structures are still being formed at the expense of M&A deals. Statistic and diagnostic of M&A deals in leading companies testify that these deals have a high degree of risk, while classical management in M&A developed in the last 20 years requires drastic changes. Finance community considers acquisition of new businesses as a conventional method of getting different preferences, such as knowledge and skill diffusion in the field of innovation, opportunity of penetrating new markets, possible obtaining the synergy effect, including one within the frames of ‘the so-called ‘mum’s bias’. By studying global and home experience we can clearly observe that the majority of companies-buyers (or companies-aggressors) pursue policy of acquisition in respect of companiestargets, in other words, the company-target is not considered as an object of any investment. It could be investment in capital, in optimization of the system of strategic management in the company-target or in upgrading businessmodel, etc. In this respect the authors study specific features of corporate management within the frames of ShareholderActivism, non-executive directors and agent theory, identify contradictions and show changes in these fields.

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Italy and Spain were the first countries affected by the shift of the pandemic epicentre from east to west. The rapid spread of the virus in allegedly similar social settings, the relatively high numbers of cases and casualties, and the adoption of drastic containment measures were similar in the two countries during the first wave of the pandemic. Both countries are enmeshed in an unstable political equilibrium at the centre, governed by recently established national political coalitions that have continuously been called into question and exposed to significant public debt. The two countries differ in the role of the executive vis-a-vis the legislative, and the tensions between central coordination and regional centrifugal forces. To improve the understanding of how the pandemic has influenced decision-making and crisis management, this article explains the relevance of institutional veto points, as well as differences between the two countries. There is room to match coordination, policy capacity and shared accountability through more collaborative governance. Points for practitioners Governing a transboundary crisis that involves different governmental levels is about creating an effective coordination mechanism that clarifies responsibilities, avoiding those who may block decision-making processes (veto players) through being incentivized to do so due to the absence of adequate shared accountability systems. National and regional managers should realize that the separation of territorial powers not accompanied by political coordination jeopardizes policy capacity in both the short and long term.

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The relationship between executive compensation and bank risk-taking is one of the core topics of corporate governance theory. Especially after the 2008 global financial crisis, due to the characteristics of banks, such as systemic risk, this relationship has become more important. However, though usually calculated on the basis of cash salary and inside equity, which can promote risk incentives, inside debt was considered a tool for risk reduction in prior empirical analyses. Based on actual bank situations, we had doubts about this relationship and wanted to verify the specific relationship between inside debt and risk. We initiated this research by setting up a theoretical model between inside debt and bank default risk and by simulating the result using data from Wells Fargo & Co. to draw the function image. We are the first to define the three kinds of compensation in three dimensions. Then, considering bankruptcy, we found the black box effect exists. Therefore, different from prior views, pay me later not only reduces but also increases risk. We expect our findings to offer help to the formulation of policies for pay contracts.

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The financial crisis in the UK began in late 2008 and the consequential economic recession has brought to the attention of media, commentators, policy makers and academics the importance of corporate governance. This research explores UK governance, what it means, what are its influences and how it is changing at the time of this financial crisis. The researchers conducted a series of qualitative interviews in five UK companies across a spectrum of industries (including institutional investors) in late 2008. Three key propositions were investigated: Proposition 1 is that board characteristics, the importance of which are pronounced by agency theorists are not the only key factor in „best practice‟ governance. Proposition 2 is that shareholders and stakeholder involvement in governance will improve governance practices. Proposition three is that key to understanding governance failures is examining cognition and behaviours inside the black box of decision-making. Propositions two and three were supported by the interviews. The main conclusions are that the importance of good governance in establishing trust again at the time of the financial crisis is key and changes seem to be called for in a number of areas: in enhancing shareholder voice; better disclosure in explaining variations to the application of the principles of the Combined Code, in explaining risks, and in how decisions are made; and ensuring that executive remuneration is more clearly linked to profits, costs of capital and risk and reflects long-term value creation.

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The article is devoted to the analysis of the events that took place in July 1907 - the anarchists expropriated a large amount of money from the boat «Sofia» in the Black Sea. Considering this event, the author discusses the essence and role of political expropriations during the revolution of the early twentieth century, the peculiarities of the tactics of anarchist groups in Ukraine, the fate of some anarchists and their associations. For the South of Ukraine in 1906-1908 political expropriations were common. The article examinates the robbery of a steamer and a train near Odessa, a bank robbery in Odessa, a robbery of a cash register in Verkhnedneprovsk, carried by anarchists. Such actions were conducted not only by anarchists, but also by Bolsheviks, social revolutionaries and other radicals. The expropriations that were carried out by the Odessa anarchists in July-September 1907 became the last chord of the anarchist practice of «direct actions» that allowed, for some time, to restrain the political horizons of the federation of anarchist-syndicalists and communist anarchists also known as the «Working Group Anarchists in the South» (1907–1910). The theme of the discussion is a question about anarchist expropriation, which some researchers consider only as «criminal gangsterism». The article states that the money that was captured by anarchists, initially, went to purely political actions: the preparation of strikes, the printing of propaganda publications, organizational expenses and the purchase of weapons. After the expropriation on the steamer «Sofia», the anarchists sent part of the money to organize a strike of Odessa sailors and port workers, to organize acts of terror against representatives of the executive and judicial authorities. In the second half of 1907, the anarchist groups showed a tendency for self-provision of revolutionaries – spending money that was captured during the expropriation for personal needs, which led to the disappearance of money, weakening of the activities of anarchist structures, the collapse of anarchist groups. «Money depravity» has become one of the causes of the crisis in the anarchist movement and to the disintegration of individual groups. After a series of high-profile expropriations, the police sent all their forces to search for «malefactors». Many anarchists were arrested, including 14 out of 18 participants in the robbery at Sophia, several people were executed. Chasing of the police led to mass arrests and to the emigration of part of anarchists abroad.

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Executive Summary This article provides detailed estimates of foreign-born (immigrant) workers in the United States who are employed in “essential critical infrastructure” sectors, as defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (DHS 2020). Building on earlier work by the Center for Migration Studies (CMS), the article offers exhaustive estimates on essential workers on a national level, by state, for large metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), and for smaller communities that heavily rely on immigrant labor. It also reports on these workers by job sector; immigration status; eligibility for tax rebates under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act); and other characteristics. It finds that: Sixty-nine percent of all immigrants in the US labor force and 74 percent of undocumented workers are essential workers, compared to 65 percent of the native-born labor force. Seventy percent of refugees and 78 percent of Black refugees are essential workers. In all but eight US states, the foreign-born share of the essential workforce equals or exceeds that of all foreign-born workers, indicating that immigrant essential workers are disproportionately represented in the labor force. The percentage of undocumented essential workers exceeds that of native-born essential workers by nine percentage points in the 15 states with the largest labor force. In the ten largest MSAs, the percentages of undocumented and naturalized essential workers exceed the percentage of native-born essential workers by 12 and 6 percent, respectively. A total of 6.2 million essential workers are not eligible for relief payments under the CARES Act, as well as large numbers of their 3.8 million US citizen children (younger than age 17), including 1.2 million US citizen children living in households below the poverty level. The foreign-born comprise 33 percent of health care workers in New York State, 32 percent in California, 31 percent in New Jersey, 28 percent in Florida, 25 percent in Nevada and Maryland, 24 percent in Hawaii, 23 percent in Massachusetts, and 19 percent in Texas. Section I of the article describes the central policy paradox for foreign-born workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: that they are “essential” at very high rates, but many lack status and they have been marginalized by US immigration and COVID-19-related policies. Section II sets forth the article’s main findings. Section III outlines major policy recommendations.

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The article is based on the analysis of a wide range of documentary sources reflecting qualitative characteristics of production personnel of regional food industry enterprises. The authors consider the problems of industry staffing in the first years following the end of the Great Patriotic War. The historiography of the topic is represented by publications on various aspects of national industry development, which take into account modern achievements of historical science and development of source base. However, assessment of qualification and social maturity of human resources, material conditions of work, and influence of all these factors on the efficiency of food industry have not yet been subject of special research. The territorial framework of the study is limited the Kursk region in its borders prior to 1954. On this territory, which was a part of the Central Black Earth economic region of the RSFSR, the food industry was a traditional and developing branch of production, as it had its own potent raw material base. The solution of staffing problems in the post-war years was significantly affected by the region’s front-line situation, which has influenced the nature of the tasks to be solved. The main sources are executive directives of government bodies and record keeping materials of enterprises, which characterize the state of the industry human resources. The documentary materials used in preparation of this article have been identified by the authors in the fonds of the Russian State Archive of Economics and in the State Archive of the Kursk Region. They reveal the multi-factorial process of providing the food industry, the main branch of regional economy, with competent employees. The authors have analyzed the content of the documents and presented, on the basis of archival sources, a general overview of the human resources in the industry in the post-war years of reconstruction and modernization. The most informative, from the point of view of the designated topic, are the regional archival fonds. The documentary sources used in the preparation of the article address the situation with personnel in the regional food industry in 1946–48 years quite objectively. Their introduction into scientific use contributes to authoritative depiction of personnel policy implemented locally in the days of post-war economic recovery.

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Background Projects to implement health care and social care innovations involving technologies are typically ambitious and complex. Many projects fail. Greenhalgh et al’s nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread, and sustainability (NASSS) framework was developed to analyze the varied outcomes of such projects. Objective We sought to extend the NASSS framework to produce practical tools for understanding, guiding, monitoring, and researching technology projects in health care or social care settings. Methods Building on NASSS and a complexity assessment tool (CAT), the NASSS-CAT tools were developed (in various formats) in seven co-design workshops involving 50 stakeholders (industry executives, technical designers, policymakers, managers, clinicians, and patients). Using action research, they were and are being tested prospectively on a sample of case studies selected for variety in conditions, technologies, settings, scope and scale, policy context, and project goals. Results The co-design process resulted in four tools, available as free downloads. NASSS-CAT SHORT is a taster to introduce the instrument and gauge interest. NASSS-CAT LONG is intended to support reflection, due diligence, and preliminary planning. It maps complexity through stakeholder discussion across six domains, using free-text open questions (designed to generate a rich narrative and surface uncertainties and interdependencies) and a closed-question checklist; this version includes an action planning section. NASSS-CAT PROJECT is a 35-item instrument for monitoring how subjective complexity in a technology implementation project changes over time. NASSS-CAT INTERVIEW is a set of prompts for conducting semistructured research or evaluation interviews. Preliminary data from empirical case studies suggest that the NASSS-CAT tools can potentially identify, but cannot always help reconcile, contradictions and conflicts that block projects’ progress. Conclusions The NASSS-CAT tools are a useful addition to existing implementation tools and frameworks. Further support of the implementation projects is ongoing. We are currently producing digital versions of the tools, and plan (subject to further funding) to establish an online community of practice for people interested in using and improving the tools, and hold workshops for building cross-project collaborations. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/16861

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on the interactive effects of intrinsic and extrinsic factors on R&D output by analysing Chinese-listed industrial family firms. It proposes modelling the moderating influence of quality of government (QOG) on the relationship between family firm governance types (family control and family management) and R&D output from the “twin agency” perspective (Stulz, 2005).Design/methodology/approachThe data set is organised as an unbalanced panel. This study exploits random-effects GLS regression, analysing both cross-sectional and time variation, and estimating the mean effects. The GLS model corrects the variance- and sequence-related problems of linear model random items and remains consistent and robust when the error term is heteroscedastic and non-normally distributed.FindingsThe findings provide several empirical conclusions: in areas with a higher QOG, family firms with greater family control (i.e. voting rights of the board) achieve more R&D output than firms with less family control; and QOG has no significant interactive effects with family management (i.e. the ratio of family managers among top managers) on R&D output. The main contribution of this paper is to show that in areas with a higher QOG, greater R&D output for family firms depends on greater family control rather than family management. These findings give a better understanding of the interactive influence of inside and outside agency problems in family firms in general and their R&D output in particular across different cities, and may help both family firms’ leaders and government policy makers to foster innovation by controlling intrinsic and extrinsic agency problems.Research limitations/implicationsTo date, most family firm innovation research has concentrated upon governance and R&D behaviour (Block, 2012; Brinkerink and Bammens, 2018; Chrisman and Patel, 2012; Lee and O’Neill, 2003). Few studies, however, have been performed from the major strategic (control) and operational (management) orientations, into the influence of outside (QOG) and inside (governance) factors upon innovation. This study attempts to fill that gap. It uses patent counts to measure the economic and technological importance of innovation. It argues that different QOG may lead major controllers or executives in family firms to have different motivations, and hence to approach innovation differently from the agency perspective.Practical implicationsThe main contribution of this study is to show that in areas with a higher QOG, higher R&D outputs of family firms depend on higher family control rather than family management, due to the interactive influence of inside and outside agency problems. When family management is high, the direct effect is high, because family management may reduce the principal–agent agency cost (PAAC), but the interactive effect of QOG and family management is not significant. In areas with high QOG, although family management may reduce the PAAC, principal–principal and altruism agency costs may increase. Based on the twin agency theory, differing inside expropriation issues between strategic (family control) and operational (family management) orientations are the main differentiator, one accentuated by the external expropriation issues of QOG.Social implicationsThese results contribute to a better understanding of family firms in general and their R&D output in particular across different cities. The findings also show of interest for government policy makers who should be aware of the significance of FFs’ characteristics for innovation and their incentives to conduct R&D projects.Originality/valueThe research uses Stulz’s (2005) “Twin agency” concept to analyse the interacting effects of state-level agency problems of governments with firm-level agency problems of family firms on R&D output. This paper answers the main question: What are the interactive effects of QOG and family firm governance on R&D output? The main contribution of the paper is to bridging the current gap in the literature.

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Purpose Boards presently are considered the most critical component in improving corporate governance (CG). Board diversity is increasingly being recommended as a tool for enhancing firm performance. Academic research and regulatory action regarding board diversity are focussed mainly on gender and ethnic composition of boards. However, the perspective of board members on board diversity and its impact is mostly missing. Moreover, while strategic leadership perspective suggests that a broader set of upper echelon’s characteristics may shape their actions, empirical evidence investigating the impact of less-explored attributes of diversity is almost non-existent. While the research on the input–output relationship between board diversity and firm performance remains equivocal, an intervening relationship between board diversity and board effectiveness needs to be understood. The purpose of this paper is to address all three limitations and explore the subject from board members’ perspective. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents the findings of qualitative, exploratory research conducted by interviewing 42 board members of FTSE 350 companies. The data are analysed thematically. Findings The findings of the research suggest that board members of FTSE 350 companies consider the diversity of functional experience to be a critical requirement for boards’ role-effectiveness. Functionally diverse boards manage external dependencies more effectively and challenge assumptions of the executive more efficiently, thus improving CG. The findings significantly contribute to the literature on board diversity, as well as to strategic leadership theory and other applicable theories. The research is conducted with a relatively small but elite and difficult to approach set of 42 board members of FTSE 350 companies. Practical implications The paper makes a unique and significant contribution to praxis by presenting the perspective of practitioners of CG – board members. The findings may encourage board nomination committees to seek board diversity beyond the gender and ethnic characteristics of directors. The findings may also be relevant for policy formulation, as they indicate that functionally diverse boards have improved effectiveness in a range of board roles. Social implications Board diversity is about building a board that accurately reflects the make-up of the population and stakeholders of the society where the company operates. The aim of board diversity is to cultivate a broad range of attributes and perspectives that reflects real-world demographics as boards need to continue to earn their “licence to operate in society” as organisations have a responsibility to multiple constituents and stakeholders, including the community and the wider society within which they exist. Building social capital through diversity has value in the wider context of modern society and achieving social justice. Originality/value The paper makes an original and unique contribution to strategic leadership theory by strengthening the argument of the theory. The paper explores beyond widely researched attributes of gender and ethnicity on boards and explores the impact of a less-researched characteristic of directors – their functional experience. Moreover, the paper opens the “black box” of CG – boards, and presents the perspectives of board members. The findings indicate that board members in FTSE 350 boards define diversity more broadly than academics and regulatory agencies often do.

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The University of Missouri–Columbia’s (MU) counseling psychology program was selected to host the Student Affiliates of Seventeen (SAS) Executive Board from 2019–2022 and is currently in the second year of its tenure. The purpose of this report is to review and evaluate the work of the SAS Executive Board at MU in 2020–2021. The report details the rationale for and initial transition to a hybrid national model for an executive board for the remainder of the tenure. This report also reviews the purpose of SAS, discusses the selection of a theme for 2020–2021, and shares highlights and programming updates related to the four pillars: (a) Excellence and Innovation, (b) Growth and Sustainability, (c) Justice and Equity, and (d) Wellness and Positive Development. The SAS tri-chairs close the report with a brief reflection on their service amidst the pandemics of COVID-19, anti-Black racism and police brutality, and a multitude of other injustices targeted at minoritized groups who hold non-White ethnic and racial identities.

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Village democratization has emerged in Indonesia in line with the implementation of regional autonomy policy. In fact, village democratization facing some constraints. One of the serious problems is the blank of political education or civic education as an impact of floating mass policy in rural area, during the New Order era. Besides that, the state apparatus seem not too serious to encourage village democratization, from the beginning the policy has been declared. The socialization process in rural area is very weak. At the implementation stages, formulation of the regional regulation are very rigid. It seems that the state apparatus feel more comprehend about the custom and interest of village people, than the villagers themselves. In this case, the state apparatus seems too arrogant. Basically, the prospect of village democratization is in the village people hand. The support and encouragement from the pro-democratic society, id est intellectuals, academicians, researchers, journalists, NGOs activist, mass organizations, executive and legislative can however, accelerate the practice of village democratization.

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Abstract Federalism and the associated multi-level polity-structure have been frequently blamed for delaying the implementation of European Union (EU) directives. However, this verdict is incomplete as only a few studies open the “black box” of federalism to analyse the involvement of subnational parliaments and executives or second chambers in policy implementation. This article fills this gap and explains the transposition delay on the level of each individual implementation measure. Our novel data set covers about 850 directives and the corresponding 1,950 implementation measures between 1990 and 2018 in Germany. Using logistic regression models, we find that involving the subnational authorities substantially delays transposition. Subnational measures are three times more likely to be delayed than national ones. The effect of the veto power of a second chamber remains inconclusive. Our findings highlight the challenges federalism poses for the multi-level implementation of EU policies and have implications for the broader literature on compliance with public policies.

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In 2014, the then president of South Africa, Mr Jacob Zuma, delivered his State of the Nation Address in Parliament and promised that economic transformation would take centre stage. This promise was made against the backdrop of transformation having stalled and difficulties being experienced in reducing social inequality and poverty. He called on social partners to debate the issue of wage inequality and the possibility of instituting a national minimum wage to reduce income inequalities. He promised that the structure of the economy would be transformed through industrialisation and broad-based black economic empowerment and through strengthening and expanding the role of the state in the economy. However, these commitments have not been kept and remain under threat given the extent of corruption in national government departments and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The revelations in the financial reports of the Public Protector and the Auditor-General on SOEs raise key questions relating to the role of the national government departments and SOEs in driving radical economic transformation. A fundamental and radical change is required if the economy is to be run to the benefit of all poor South Africans, the majority of whom are black people. One possibility is to institute ethical leadership and an executive that is accountable. Twenty-three years into freedom and democracy, and the majority of South Africans, black people in particular, are still economically disempowered. This is a concern given the developmental objectives of government as espoused in its National Development Plan (NDP) 2030. As long as the country continues to battle with the persistent triple challenge of poverty, unemployment and inequality, radical economic transformation remains a pipe dream. Considering the current state of affairs, the objective of radical economic transformation (i.e. to place the economy on a qualitatively different path that ensures more rapid and sustainable growth, higher investment, increased employment, reduced inequality and the deracialisation of the economy) is far-fetched. Any political posture not aimed at giving effect to the NDP, the New Growth Path and the Industrial Policy Action Plan to stimulate growth, employment and the re-industrialisation of the South African economy will not lead to radical economic transformation.

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The issue of international terrorism at the beginning of the 21st century, in the United States in particular, has left populations asking: “who and where is the enemy and how do we bring them to justice?” But a more important question could be “Who is the victim and who is not, and what measures are appropriate while minimising collateral damage?” Peeling away the complex layers in the politics of anti‐terror policy leads to the inevitable conclusion that long gone are the alleged days of “black and white” cases of nation‐wide warfare. Franz Kafka all too often warns of the psychosocial pressure that follows as a result of the hegemonic power dynamic, and though imperialism was no new concept in Kafka’s era, his concerns shine ever brighter in light of the rise of the neo‐colonial anti‐terror initiative. Politics aside, this situation is a powerful echo, prophecy even, of a host of Kafka’s literary works, which warn of a ‘psycho‐dystopian’ world of torture machines on colony‐island penitentiaries, of summary executions and the breaching of basic human rights to achieve a government’s desired end. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how Der Prozeβ (The Trial) – with its parallels to the ethereal nature of law‐ is still relevant to the case of the U.S.‐led “War on Terror” in a world of liberally accessible media and information, spreading discontent and paranoia in the hearts and minds of the very population that the anti‐terror policy is designed to “protect”.

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IntroductionAccounts of criminals, their victims, and their pursuers have become entrenched within the sphere of popular culture; most obviously in the genres of true crime and crime fiction. The centrality of the pursuer in the form of the detective, within these stories, dates back to the nineteenth century. This, often highly-stylised and regularly humanised protagonist, is now a firm feature of both factual and fictional accounts of crime narratives that, today, regularly focus on the energies of the detective in solving a variety of cases. So familiar is the figure of the detective, it seems that these men and women—amateurs and professionals—have always had an important role to play in the pursuit and punishment of the wrongdoer. Yet, the first detectives were forced to overcome significant resistance from a suspicious public. Some early efforts to reimagine punishment and to laud the detective include articles written by Charles Dickens; pieces on public hangings and policing that reflect the great Victorian novelist’s commitment to shed light on, through written commentaries, a range of important social issues. This article explores some of Dickens’s lesser-known pieces, that—appearing in daily newspapers and in one of his own publications Household Words—helped to change some common perceptions of punishment and policing. Image 1: Harper's Magazine 7 December 1867 (Charles Dickens Reading, by Charles A. Barry). Image credit: United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. A Reliance on the Scaffold: Early Law Enforcement in EnglandCrime control in 1720s England was dependent upon an inconsistent, and by extension ineffective, network of constables and night watchmen. It would be almost another three decades before Henry Fielding established the Bow Street Foot Patrol, or Bow Street Runners, in 1749, “six men in blue coats, patrolling the area within six miles of Charing Cross” (Worsley 35). A large-scale, formalised police force was attempted by Pitt the Younger in 1785 with his “Bill for the Further prevention of Crime and for the more Speedy Detection and Punishment of Offenders against the Peace” (Lyman 144). The proposed legislation was withdrawn due to fierce opposition that was underpinned by fears, held by officials, of a divestment of power to a new body of law enforcers (Lyman 144).The type of force offered in 1785 would not be realised until the next century, when the work of Robert Peel saw the passing of the Metropolitan Police Act 1829. The Police Act, which “constituted a revolution in traditional methods of law enforcement” (Lyman 141), was focused on the prevention of crime, “to reassure the lawful and discourage the wrongdoer” (Hitchens 51). Until these changes were implemented violent punishment, through the Waltham Black Act 1723, remained firmly in place (Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill 359) as part of the state’s arsenal against crime (Pepper 473).The Black Act, legislation often referred to as the ‘Bloody Code’ as it took the number of capital felonies to over 350 (Pepper 473), served in lieu of consistency and cooperation, across the country, in relation to the safekeeping of the citizenry. This situation inevitably led to anxieties about crime and crime control. In 1797 Patrick Colquhoun, a magistrate, published A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis in which he estimated that, out of a city population of just under 1 million, 115,000 men and women supported themselves “in and near the Metropolis by pursuits either criminal-illegal-or immoral” (Lyman 144). Andrew Pepper highlights tensions between “crime, governance and economics” as well as “rampant petty criminality [… and] widespread political corruption” (474). He also notes a range of critical responses to crime and how, “a particular kind of writing about crime in the 1720s demonstrated, perhaps for the first time, an awareness of, or self-consciousness about, this tension between competing visions of the state and state power” (Pepper 474), a tension that remains visible today in modern works of true crime and crime fiction. In Dickens’s day, crime and its consequences were serious legal, moral, and social issues (as, indeed, they are today). An increase in the crime rate, an aggressive state, the lack of formal policing, the growth of the printing industry, and writers offering diverse opinions—from the sympathetic to the retributive—on crime changed crime writing. The public wanted to know about the criminal who had disturbed society and wanted to engage with opinions on how the criminal should be stopped and punished. The public also wanted to be updated on changes to the judicial system such as the passing of the Judgement of Death Act 1823 which drastically reduced the number of capital crimes (Worsley 122) and how the Gaols Act, also of 1823, “moved tentatively towards national prison reform” (Gattrell 579). Crimes continued to be committed and alongside the wrongdoers were readers that wanted to be diverted from everyday events by, but also had a genuine need to be informed about, crime. A demand for true crime tales demonstrating a broader social need for crimes, even the most minor infractions, to be publicly punished: first on the scaffold and then in print. Some cases were presented as sensationalised true crime tales; others would be fictionalised in short stories and novels. Standing Witness: Dickens at the ScaffoldIt is interesting to note that Dickens witnessed at least four executions in his lifetime (Simpson 126). The first was the hanging of a counterfeiter, more specifically a coiner, which in the 1800s was still a form of high treason. The last person executed for coining in England was in early 1829; as Dickens arrived in London at the end of 1822, aged just 10-years-old (Simpson 126-27) he would have been a boy when he joined the crowds around the scaffold. Many journalists and writers who have documented executions have been “criticised for using this spectacle as a source for generating sensational copy” (Simpson 127). Dickens also wrote about public hangings. His most significant commentaries on the issue being two sets of letters: one set published in The Daily News (1846) and a second set published in The Times (1849) (Brandwood 3). Yet, he was immune from the criticism directed at so many other writers, in large part, due to his reputation as a liberal, “social reformer moved by compassion, but also by an antipathy toward waste, bureaucratic incompetence, and above all toward exploitation and injustice” (Simpson 127). As Anthony Simpson points out, Dickens did not sympathise with the condemned: “He wrote as a realist and not a moralist and his lack of sympathy for the criminal was clear, explicit and stated often” (128). Simpson also notes that Dickens’s letters on execution written in 1846 were “strongly supportive of total abolition” while later letters, written in 1849, presented arguments against public executions rather than the practice of execution. In 1859 Dickens argued against pardoning a poisoner. While in 1864 he supported the execution of the railway carriage murderer Franz Müller, explaining he would be glad to abolish both public executions and capital punishment, “if I knew what to do with the Savages of civilisation. As I do not, I would rid Society of them, when they shed blood, in a very solemn manner” (in Simpson 138-39) that is, executions should proceed but should take place in private.Importantly, Dickens was consistently concerned about society’s fascination with the scaffold. In his second letter to The Daily News, Dickens asks: round what other punishment does the like interest gather? We read of the trials of persons who have rendered themselves liable to transportation for life, and we read of their sentences, and, in some few notorious instances, of their departure from this country, and arrival beyond the sea; but they are never followed into their cells, and tracked from day to day, and night to night; they are never reproduced in their false letters, flippant conversations, theological disquisitions with visitors, lay and clerical […]. They are tried, found guilty, punished; and there an end. (“To the Editors of The Daily News” 6)In this passage, Dickens describes an overt curiosity with those criminals destined for the most awful of punishments. A curiosity that was put on vile display when a mob gathered on the concourse to watch a hanging; a sight which Dickens readily admitted “made [his] blood run cold” (“Letter to the Editor” 4).Dickens’s novels are grand stories, many of which feature criminals and criminal sub-plots. There are, for example, numerous criminals, including the infamous fa*gin in Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (1838); several rioters are condemned to hang in Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (1841); there is murder in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844); and murder, too, in Bleak House (1853). Yet, Dickens never wavered in his revulsion for the public display of the execution as revealed in his “refusal to portray the scene at the scaffold [which] was principled and heartfelt. He came, reluctantly to support capital punishment, but he would never use its application for dramatic effect” (Simpson 141).The Police Detective: A Public Relations ExerciseBy the mid-1700s the crime story was one of “sin to crime and then the gallows” (Rawlings online): “Crimes of every defcription (sic) have their origin in the vicious and immoral habits of the people” (Colquhoun 32). As Philip Rawlings notes, “once sin had been embarked upon, capture and punishment followed” (online). The origins of this can be found in the formula relied upon by Samuel Smith in the seventeenth century. Smith was the Ordinary of Newgate, or prison chaplain (1676–1698), who published Accounts of criminals and their gruesome ends. The outputs swelled the ranks of the already burgeoning market of broadsides, handbills and pamphlets. Accounts included: 1) the sermon delivered as the prisoner awaited execution; 2) a brief overview of the crimes for which the prisoner was being punished; and 3) a reporting of the events that surrounded the execution (Gladfelder 52–53), including the prisoner’s behaviour upon the scaffold and any last words spoken. For modern readers, the detective and the investigation is conspicuously absent. These popular Accounts (1676–1772)—over 400 editions offering over 2,500 criminal biographies—were only a few pence a copy. With print runs in the thousands, the Ordinary earnt up to £200 per year for his efforts (Emsley, Hitchco*ck, and Shoemaker online). For:penitence and profit made comfortable bedfellows, ensuring true crime writing became a firm feature of the business of publishing. That victims and villains suffered was regrettable but no horror was so terrible anyone forgot there was money to be made. (Franks, “Stealing Stories” 7)As the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution were having their full impact, many were looking for answers, and certainty, in a period of radical social transformation. Sin as a central motif in crime stories was insufficient: the detective was becoming essential (Franks, “True Crime” 239). “In the nineteenth century, the role of the newly-fashioned detective as an agent of consolation or security is both commercially and ideologically central to the subsequent project of popular crime writing” (Bell 8). This was supported by an “increasing professionalism and proficiency of policemen, detectives, and prosecutors, new understandings about psychology, and advances in forensic science and detection techniques” (Murley 10). Elements now included in most crime narratives. Dickens insisted that the detective was a crucial component of the justice system—a figure to be celebrated, one to take centre stage in the crime story—reflecting his staunch support “of the London Metropolitan Police” (Simpson 140). Indeed, while Dickens is known principally for exposing wretched poverty, he was also interested in a range of legal issues as can be evinced from his writings for Household Words. Image 2: Household Words 27 July 1850 (Front Page). Image credit: Dickens Journals Online. W.H. Wills argued for the acceptance of the superiority of the detective when, in 1850, he outlined the “difference between a regular and a detective policeman” (368). The detective must, he wrote: “counteract every sort of rascal whose only means of existence it avowed rascality, but to clear up mysteries, the investigation of which demands the utmost delicacy and tact” (368). The detective is also extraordinarily efficient; cases are solved quickly, in one example a matter is settled in just “ten minutes” (369).Dickens’s pro-police pieces, included a blatantly promotional, two-part work “A Detective Police Party” (1850). The narrative begins with open criticism of the Bow Street Runners contrasting these “men of very indifferent character” to the Detective Force which is “so well chosen and trained, proceeds so systematically and quietly, does its business in such a workman-like manner, and is always so calmly and steadily engaged in the service of the public” (“Police Party, Part I” 409). The “party” is just that: a gathering of detectives and editorial staff. Men in a “magnificent chamber”, seated at “a round table […] with some glasses and cigars arranged upon it; and the editorial sofa elegantly hemmed in between that stately piece of furniture and the wall” (“Police Party, Part I” 409). Two inspectors and five sergeants are present. Each man prepared to share some of their experiences in the service of Londoners:they are, [Dickens tells us] one and all, respectable-looking men; of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence; with nothing lounging or slinking in their manners; with an air of keen observation, and quick perception when addressed; and generally presenting in their faces, traces more or less marked of habitually leading lives of strong mental excitement. (“Police Party, Part I” 410) Dickens goes to great lengths to reinforce the superiority of the police detective. These men, “in a glance, immediately takes an inventory of the furniture and an accurate sketch of the editorial presence” and speak “very concisely, and in well-chosen language” and who present as an “amicable brotherhood” (“Police Party, Part I” 410). They are also adaptable and constantly working to refine their craft, through apeculiar ability, always sharpening and being improved by practice, and always adapting itself to every variety of circ*mstances, and opposing itself to every new device that perverted ingenuity can invent, for which this important social branch of the public service is remarkable! (“Police Party, Part II” 459)These detectives are also, in some ways, familiar. Dickens’s offerings include: a “shrewd, hard-headed Scotchman – in appearance not at all unlike a very acute, thoroughly-trained schoolmaster”; a man “with a ruddy face and a high sun-burnt forehead, [who] has the air of one who has been a Sergeant in the army” (“Police Party, Part I” 409-10); and another man who slips easily into the role of the “greasy, sleepy, shy, good-natured, chuckle-headed, un-suspicious, and confiding young butcher” (“Police Party, Part II” 457). These descriptions are more than just attempts to flesh out a story; words on a page reminding us that the author is not just another journalist but one of the great voices of the Victorian era. These profiles are, it is argued here, a deliberate strategy to reassure readers.In summary, police detectives are only to be feared by those residing on the wrong side of the law. For those without criminal intent; detectives are, in some ways, like us. They are people we already know and trust. The stern but well-meaning, intelligent school teacher; the brave and loyal soldier defending the Empire; and the local merchant, a person we see every day. Dickens provides, too, concrete examples for how everyone can contribute to a safer society by assisting these detectives. This, is perfect public relations. Thus, almost singlehandedly, he builds a professional profile for a new type of police officer. The problem (crime) and its solution (the detective) neatly packaged, with step-by-step instructions for citizens to openly support this new-style of constabulary and so achieve a better, less crime-ridden community. This is a theme pursued in “Three Detective Anecdotes” (1850) where Dickens continued to successfully merge “solid lower-middle-class respectability with an intimate knowledge of the criminal world” (Priestman 177); so, proffering the ideal police detective. A threat to the criminal but not to the hard-working and honest men, women, and children of the city.The Detective: As Fact and as FictionThese writings are also a precursor to one of the greatest fictional detectives of the English-speaking world. Dickens observes that, for these new-style police detectives: “Nothing is so common or deceptive as such appearances at first” (“Police Party, Part I” 410). In 1891, Arthur Conan Doyle would write that: “There is nothing so deceptive as an obvious fact” (78). Dickens had prepared readers for the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes: who was smarter, more observant and who had more determination to take on criminals than the average person. The readers of Dickens were, in many respects, positioned as prototypes of Dr John Watson: a hardworking, loyal Englishman. Smart. But not as smart as those who would seek to do harm. Watson needed Holmes to make the world a better place; the subscriber to Household Words needed the police detective.Another article, “On Duty with Inspector Field” (1851), profiled the “well-known hand” responsible for bringing numerous offenders to justice and sending them, “inexorably, to New South Wales” (Dickens 266). Critically this true crime narrative would be converted into a crime fiction story as Inspector Field is transformed (it is widely believed) into the imagined Inspector Bucket. The 1860s have been identified as “a period of awakening for the detective novel” (Ashley x), a predictor of which is the significant sub-plot of murder in Dickens’s Bleak House. In this novel, a murder is committed with the case taken on, and competently solved by, Bucket who is a man of “skill and integrity” a man presented as an “ideal servant” though one working for a “flawed legal system” (Walton 458). Mr Snagsby, of Bleak House, observes Bucket as a man whoseems in some indefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply at the very last moment [… He] notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his little finger, or the brooch, composed of not much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he wears in his shirt. (278) This passage, it is argued here, places Bucket alongside the men at the detective police party in Household Words. He is simultaneously superhuman in mind and manner, though rather ordinary in dress. Like the real-life detectives of Dickens’s articles; he is a man committed to keeping the city safe while posing no threat to law-abiding citizens. ConclusionThis article has explored, briefly, the contributions of the highly-regarded Victorian author, Charles Dickens, to factual and fictional crime writing. The story of Dickens as a social commentator is one that is familiar to many; what is less well-known is the connection of Dickens to important conversations around capital punishment and the rise of the detective in crime-focused narratives; particularly how he assisted in building the professional profile of the police detective. In this way, through fact and fiction, Dickens performed great (if under-acknowledged) public services around punishment and law enforcement: he contributed to debates on the death penalty and he helped to build trust in the radical social project that established modern-day policing.AcknowledgementsThe author offers her sincere thanks to the New South Wales Dickens Society, Simon Dwyer, and Peter Kirkpatrick. The author is also grateful to the reviewers of this article for their thoughtful comments and valuable suggestions. ReferencesAshley, Mike. “Introduction: Seeking the Evidence.” The Notting Hill Mystery. Author. Charles Warren Adams. London: The British Library, 2012. xxi-iv. Bell, Ian A. “Eighteenth-Century Crime Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003/2006. 7-17.Brandwood, Katherine. “The Dark and Dreadful Interest”: Charles Dickens, Public Death and the Amusem*nts of the People. MA Thesis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2013. 19 Feb. 2017 <https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/558266/Brandwood_georgetown_0076M_12287.pdf;sequence=1>.Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. London: Macmillan & Co, 1964.Cruickshanks, Eveline, and Howard Erskine-Hill. “The Waltham Black Act and Jacobitism.” Journal of British Studies 24.3 (1985): 358-65.Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. London: Richard Bentley,1838.———. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty. London: Chapman & Hall, 1841. ———. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Chapman & Hall, 1844.———. “To the Editors of The Daily News.” The Daily News 28 Feb. 1846: 6. (Reprinted in Antony E. Simpson. Witnesses to the Scaffold. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008. 141–149.)———. “Letter to the Editor.” The Times 14 Nov. 1849: 4. (Reprinted in Antony E. Simpson. Witnesses to the Scaffold. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008. 149-51.)———. “A Detective Police Party, Part I.” Household Words 1.18 (1850): 409-14.———. “A Detective Police Party, Part II.” Household Words 1.20 (1850): 457-60.———. “Three Detective Anecdotes.” Household Words 1.25 (1850): 577-80.———. “On Duty with Inspector Field.” Household Words 3.64 (1851): 265-70.———. Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853/n.d.Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. London: Penguin, 1892/1981. 74–99.Emsley, Clive, Tim Hitchco*ck, and Robert Shoemaker. “The Proceedings: Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online, n.d. 4 Feb. 2017 <https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Ordinarys-accounts.jsp>. Franks, Rachel. “True Crime: The Regular Reinvention of a Genre.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 1.2 (2016): 239-54. ———. “Stealing Stories: Punishment, Profit and the Ordinary of Newgate.” Refereed Proceedings of the 21st Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs: Authorised Theft. Eds. Niloofar Fanaiyan, Rachel Franks, and Jessica Seymour. 2016. 1-11. 20 Mar. 2017 <http://www.aawp.org.au/publications/the-authorised-theft-papers/>.Gatrell, V.A.C. The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Gladfelder, Hal. Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Hitchens, Peter. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003.Lyman, J.L. “The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829.” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 55.1 (1964): 141-54.Murley, Jean. The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture. Westport: Praeger, 2008.Pepper, Andrew. “Early Crime Writing and the State: Jonathan Wilde, Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville in 1720s London.” Textual Practice 25.3 (2011): 473-91. Priestman, Martin. “Post-War British Crime Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 173-89.Rawlings, Philip. “True Crime.” The British Criminology Conferences: Selected Proceedings, Volume 1: Emerging Themes in Criminology. Eds. Jon Vagg and Tim Newburn. London: British Society of Criminology (1998). 4 Feb. 2017 <http://www.britsoccrim.org/volume1/010.pdf>.Simpson, Antony E. Witnesses to the Scaffold: English Literary Figures as Observers of Public Executions. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008.Walton, James. “Conrad, Dickens, and the Detective Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23.4 (1969): 446-62.Wills, William Henry. “The Modern Science of Thief-Taking.” Household Words 1.16 (1850): 368-72.Worsley, Lucy. A Very British Murder: The Curious Story of How Crime Was Turned into Art. London: BBC Books, 2013/2014.

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All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. They encouraged the hippies moving up here, even when they came out for Aquarius, old Uncle Lyle and Richard Donnelly, they came out and they blessed the mob out here, it was like the hairy people had come back, with the Nimbin, cause the Nimbynji is the little hairy people, so the hairy people came back (Jerome). References Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, 'Total Revolution,' and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (Nov. 2006): 747-784. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of New England, Armidale, 2010. Broadley, Colin, and Judith Jones, eds. Nambassa: A New Direction. Auckland: Reed, 1979. Bryant, Gordon M. Parliament of Australia. Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. 1 May 1973. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Cameron, Ian. “Aquarius Festival Photographs.” 1973. Clarke, Jennifer. Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. Derrett, Ross. Regional Festivals: Nourishing Community Resilience: The Nature and Role of Cultural Festivals in Northern Rivers NSW Communities. PhD Thesis. Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2008. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Survival Festival May 1973.” 1 Aug. 1972. Pamphlet. MS 6945/1. Nimbin Aquarius Festival Archives. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ---. E-mail to author, 11 July 2012. ---. “The Aquarius Festival.” Aquarius Rainbow Region. n.d. Farnham, Ken. Acting Executive Officer, Aboriginal Council for the Arts. 19 June 1973. Letter. MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Foley, Gary. “Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective (1997).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_8.html›. ---. “Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori Struggle for Self-Determination (1999).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_9.html›. ---. “Black Power in Redfern 1968-1972 (2001).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html›. ---. “An Evening with Legendary Aboriginal Activist Gary Foley.” Conference Session. Marxism 2012 “Revolution in the Air”, Melbourne, Mar. 2012. Hoff, Jennifer. Bundjalung Jugun: Bundjalung Country. Lismore: Richmond River Historical Society, 2006. Jacob, Jeffrey. New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1997. Jerome, Burri. Interview. 31 July 2012. Joseph, Paul. Interview. 7 Aug. 2012. Joseph, Paul, and Brendan ‘Mookx’ Hanley. Interview by Rob Willis. 14 Aug. 2010. Audiofile, Session 2 of 3. nla.oh-vn4978025. Rob Willis Folklore Collection. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Kijas, Johanna, Caravans and Communes: Stories of Settling in the Tweed 1970s & 1980s. Murwillumbah: Tweed Shire Council, 2011. King, Vivienne (Aunty Viv). Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Munro-Clarke, Margaret. Communes of Rural Australia: The Movement Since 1970. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986. Nethery, Amy. “Aboriginal Reserves: ‘A Modern-Day Concentration Camp’: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres.” Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2009. 4. Newton, Janice. “Aborigines, Tribes and the Counterculture.” Social Analysis 23 (1988): 53-71. Newton, John. The Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Offord, Baden. “Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of Belonging and Sites of Confluence.” Transformations 2 (March 2002): 1-5. Oshlak, Al. Interview. 27 Mar. 2013. Partridge, Christopher. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2006): 3-5. Perkins, Charlie. “Charlie Perkins on 1965 Freedom Ride.” Youtube, 13 Oct. 2009. Perone, James E. Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair. Greenwood: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. Roberts, John. Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Roberts, Cecil. Interview. 6 Aug. 2012. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: University of California Press,1969. St John, Graham. “Going Feral: Authentica on the Edge of Australian culture.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 8 (1997): 167-189. Smith, Sherry. Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Stell, Alex. Dancing in the Hyper-Crucible: The Rite de Passage of the Post-Rave Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of Westminster, London, 2005. Stone, Trevor Bauxhau. Interview. 1 Oct. 2012. Wedd, Leila. Interview. 27 Sep. 2012. White, Paul. “Aquarius Revisited.” 1973. Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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There are certain discourses operating in contemporary western culture that are granted tremendous power and authority to speak about those issues that cut across the racial, class, and gender boundaries of a culture. Life, death and politics are all central and legitimate categories for the discourses generated by media institutions. As we slide from the 'factual' realm (which the news media is taken to represent) into the fictional, the authority to speak of these categories steadily declines. Certain films and television dramas have this legitimacy, provided that they retain a certain verisimilitude that is seen as factual. A bit further down this scale are sitcoms. Sitcoms are often criticised when they attempt to shift the comedic tone into a moralising one -- or as in the case of Ally McBeal, attempts at covering serious topics are trivialised by media hype about the lead character’s skirt length. At the very bottom of this discursive scale come adventure stories -- fantasy and action films and television shows, frequently targeted and marketed to teenagers and young adults. Regardless of content, these texts are the focus of continual derision and contempt for the representational strategies that they employ to address the issues named above. Despite this contempt, these subordinate texts and discourses are paradoxically also granted a good deal of causative power. Moral outrage invariably turns to violent and fantastic media as a cause whenever horrific violence is committed in real life. The most clear and shocking example of course have been the recent high school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, and what follows is a brief case study of the discursive hierarchy in operation in North American media cultures. The news media, in covering the shootings, had what appeared to be utterly free and unquestioned access to investigate, examine, and even influence the situation as it happened. Reporters were on the scene, as usual, asking painfully obvious questions of the traumatised teachers and students. It was not until some time later that slightly bemused mutterings were heard from the police forces that, for instance, a local television station had somewhat overstepped its poorly defined boundaries when it broadcast the frantic telephone calls of a student trapped in the school while the killers were still at large. Following the factual reports, the desperate search for causation began. And the usual suspects were rounded up with considerable haste. The killers played Doom and other video games to improve their sharp-shooting abilities. The Gothic-industrial music of Marilyn Manson and KMFDM filled them with hatred for all humanity. Surfing the 'net had sapped their social skills. Wearing black trench coats had overheated their brains and made them want to be more like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Or perhaps not. Interviews with survivors and evidence gathered by police seemed to suggest that the motivational triggers were to be found in the two killers' social environment. The boys' diaries revealed their rage at the alienation and bullying they suffered at the hands of the school's elite jock culture. And yet such findings are almost completely ignored in the discourses of gossip and current affairs analysis. It's as if space to interpret and interrogate the evidence isn't available in the discourses used to represent this event. In a move clearly inspired by the cascading moral panic, the Warner Brothers network in the US removed several episodes of their hit show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the schedules. The network made the claim that the episodes, depicting armed teenagers fighting demons on a high school campus, were pulled because of sensitivity to the grief of the bereaved families. I find it suggestive that, while the Buffy episodes were pulled outright, a police drama on the same network is merely being placed under greater executive scrutiny. It's obviously inadequate from a cultural studies perspective to locate the reasons for these events purely in the discourse of moral panic in the USA. It’s time, then, to take a closer look at the processes and conditions that structure the media hierarchy. Network news programmes employ a range of signification systems designed to embody certain values; authority, credibility and responsibility. These systems are frequently expressed in the production values of the programmes, and the businesslike, middle class (and middle-aged), appearance of the presenters. Any correspondence of these values with the actual production practices employed by the programmes is increasingly accidental in a market driven and structured by insatiable demands for entertainment over knowledge. This of course was clearly seen in the thirst for spectacle that accompanied the initial reports from the Columbine massacre. Popular drama shows that are based on a science fictional or fantasy premise, and are geared towards teenagers and young adults, typically have no access to those signifiers of high status. The concerns that they deal with are marginalised and representations of them in the wider media focus on their violent content and supposed ludicrousness of the situations depicted. And so a TV show which shows violence but is always careful to also depict the emotional consequences of violence, is trivialised and scapegoated because it employs a different discourse of realism than a news broadcast operating almost purely in the register of spectacle (self-important moralising aside). Clearly the triggers for violence, especially of the kind that prompted this media panic, are many and interact in complex ways. What is not clear is that the popular culture texts discussed are in any way prominent as triggers. The fact that they are represented as such in the news media and the discourses of common-sense indicates a tremendous anxiety at work. This anxiety seems to frequently congeal around fantasy texts. Images of the fantastic disrupts the hierarchy of realist discourses that order and regulate the media and must be continually subjected to disavowal and dismissal. Perhaps, then, real violence can only be seen in these terms as a pretext for this process. References Katz, Jon. "Voices from the Hellmouth." Slashdot.org. 25 Apr. 1999. 13 June 1999 <http://slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.shtml>. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1987. Martin, Adrian. "In the Name of Popular Culture." Australian Cultural Studies: a Reader. Ed. John Frow and Meaghan Morris. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1993. 117-32. Stevenson, Nick. Understanding Media Cultures: Social Theory and Mass Communication. London: Sage, 1995. Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. "By the Numbers: Science Looks at Littleton, and Shrugs." The New York Times on the Web. 9 May 1999. 13 June 1999 <http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/050999colo-shooting-odds-review.php>. Taylor, Charles. "The WB's Big Daddy Condescension." Salon Magazine. 26 May 1999. 13 June 1999 <http://www.salon.com/>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell. "Seen But Not Heard: Pop Culture Scapegoats and the Media Discourse Hierarchy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/seen.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, "Seen But Not Heard: Pop Culture Scapegoats and the Media Discourse Hierarchy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/seen.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell. (1999) Seen but not heard: pop culture scapegoats and the media discourse hierarchy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/seen.php> ([your date of access]).

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With the emergence and expansion of post-manufacturing knowledge economies, formerly industrial inner cities in the West have become intensified staging grounds for a range of spatial claims. Among these are processes of residential gentrification, the cultural politics of heritage preservation, the struggles for community development, and the growth of creative industries, such as art, design, architecture, publishing and film, which I focus on here.1 Throughout the last two decades in the UK, inner cities and central city fringe districts have been subject to an assortment of strategies that have endeavored to revitalize them economically and socially. Prominent among these attempts has been the encouragement of new, and the incubation of existing, small-scale creative enterprises. Regeneration executives choose these enterprises for a range of reasons. Creative activities are associated with popular culture that disaffected, unemployed youth find appealing; they are able to occupy and rehabilitate underused existing building stock and to sensitively recycle historic buildings, thereby preserving urban scales; and, as a number of scholars have pointed out, they exhibit transaction-rich, network-intensive organization (Castells 1992; Lash and Urry 1994; Scott 2000). As a result, concerted efforts to design creative industry quarters have sprung up across the UK, including Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham. In London, a whole band of formerly industrial, inner-city districts from King's Cross, down through Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Shoreditch and Spitalfields, and along the wharves of the Thames's South Bank, are being or have been revitalized in part through the strategic deployment of creative industries. Certainly, how creative industries and economies develop varies. At King's Cross, nonprofit and commercial creative companies have emerged quietly in a context of protracted struggle over the future of the Railway Lands, which will be reshaped by the coming terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. At Spitalfields, high-profile conversions of Truman Brewery and the Spitalfields Market site into artisanal stalls, creative businesses, and leisure (café, restaurant, and sport) facilities are generating a new local creative economy, bringing in visitors and creating new customer bases for Spitalfields' Bangladeshi restaurant keepers and garment entrepreneurs.2 Whatever the conditions for growth, creative industries have been aided by the rhetoric of Cool Britannia and New Labour's cultural -- or more accurately --creative industrial policy. I would even put forth that, in the form of the creative quarter, the creative industries represent the urbanist logic of Cool Britannia, threatening to elaborate, following the other logics of BritArt and BritPop, a BritSpace. Now, according to some of Britain's foremost cultural critics, Cool Britannia was born sometime in 1996 in the Sunday Times, and died two years later, soon after a piece in the New Musical Express that showcased young musician discontent with New Labour creative industrial policy (Hewison 1996; McRobbie 1999, 4). Yet, before we close the casket, I want to suggest that Cool Britannia be understood as a symptom of a range of 'causes' that have been transforming the idioms of politics, governance, culture, citizenship, social organization; and, as the creative quarter evokes, the city. An itinerary of these causes would include: the expansion of a consumer-driven service/knowledge economy; the growth and globalization of communication and information technologies; the 'flexibilization' of regimes of production; the mutation of the function of the welfare state and corresponding meaning of citizenship; and, the dominance of intellectual property notions of culture. While these shifts are transforming societies around the world, in the UK, they became closely identified with New Labour and its attempts to institutionalize the rhetoric of the Third Way during the late 1990s (e.g., Blair 1998; Giddens 1998). In imagining itself as a force of change, New Labour capitalized on two events that gave birth to Cool Britannia: (1) the glamorization of British art and young British artists in the mid-1990s; and (2) the emergence of a discourse of 'rebranding' Britain, disseminating from reports from brand specialists Wolff Olins and think tank Demos (Bobby 1999).3 The first, producing the nBA (new British Art) and the yBAs (young British Artists) are media events with their own genealogies that have received copious critical attention (e.g., Ford 1996; McRobbie 1999; Roberts 1996, 1998; Stallabrass 1999; Suchin 1998). This glamorization involved the discovery of the artists by the mainstream media and a focus on artistic entrepreneurship in creating, shaping and responding to an enlarged market for cultural products. In the process, some of these artists effectively became brands, authoring, legitimating and licensing a certain kind of ironic, post-political art that was palatable to the international art market.4 The second cause stems from responses to anxiety over post-imperial Britain's future in a post-manufacturing, globalized, knowledge economy. For both the Demos thinkers and Wolff Olins consultants, these were centered on the need to re-imagine British national subjectivity as if it were a commercial brand. The discourse of branding is tangential to that of intellectual property, in which brands are value codings managed through networks of trademarks, patents, copyrights and royalties. Rosemary Coombe (1998) has written, albeit in a different political context, on the increasing dominance of notions of culture defined through intellectual property, and adjudicated by international trade experts. Indeed, New Labour creative industrial policies, as demonstrated in former Culture Secretary, Chris Smith's, essays that linked creativity, entrepreneurship and economic growth (Smith 1998) and initiatives under the Creative Industries Mapping Document (DCMS 2001) reveal how the relationship between the state and national culture is being renegotiated. Less meaningful is the state that served as sponsor or patron of cultural activities for its citizens. Rather, under New Labour, as Nikolas Rose argues (1999), and critics of New Labour cultural policy interrogate (Greenhalgh 1998; Littler 2000), the state is an enabler, partnering with entrepreneurs, small-scale firms, and multinational enterprises to promote the traffic in cultural property. How such a shift affects the production of urban space, and the future meanings attached to the British city remain to be explored. In the context of the American city, M. Christine Boyer (1995), elaborates how an iterative regime of architectural styles and planning ethics functions as a late capitalist cultural logic of urbanism that discards elements, often in decaying and abandoned sections, that cannot be easily incorporated. Borrowing on Kevin Lynch's (1960) notion of the imageable city, she writes: physically, these spaces are linked imaginatively to each other, to other cities, and to a common history of cultural interpretations (82). Within this scenario, the elements of the creative quarter copy, print, art supply and film developing stores, hip cafes and restaurants, galleries, studios, loft conversions and street furniture are gradually linked together to form a recognizable and potentially iterative matrix, overlaid on the disused former industrial district. Moreover, as a prominent, coordinated technique in the revitalization strategies of British cities, and given the aftermath of Cool Britannia, the creative quarter must be seen also as a symptom of a symptom. For, if Cool Britannia is itself produced through the application of branding discourse to the level of national subjectivity, and to the glamorization of the artist, then it is only a short step to contemplate the urbanist logic of the creative quarter as BritSpaceâ„¢. Notes 1. A creative industry is one that has its origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which [has] a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. I am following the definition of creative industries used by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It was first used in the Creative Industries Mapping Document, released in November 1998 and was maintained in the second, more extensive mapping exercise in February 2001. The list of activities designated as creative are: advertising, architecture, art and antiques, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio. 2. I discuss the emergence of creative enterprises at King's Cross and Spitalfields at length in my doctoral dissertation (Deckha 2000). 3. As Bobby (1999) reports, the Wolff Olins consultants commented that looking at business attitudes towards national identity and UK industry found that 72% of the world's leading companies believe a national image is important when making purchase decisions. In light of this, and worryingly for British business, only 36% of our respondents felt that a 'made in the UK' label would influence their decision positively. 4. Lash and Urry describe this process of branding in the creative or cultural industries: What (all) the culture industries produce becomes increasingly, not like commodities but advertisem*nts. As with advertising firms, the culture industries sell not themselves but something else and they achieve this through 'packaging'. Also like advertising firms, they sell 'brands' of something else. And they do this through the transfer of value through images (1994, 138). References Blair T. (1998) The Third Way: New Politics for a New Century. The Fabian Society, London. Bobby D. (1999) Original Britain' could succeed where 'Cool Britannia' failed Brand Strategy November 22: 6. Boyer M C. (1995) The Great Frame-Up: Fantastic appearances in contemporary spatial politics, Liggett H., Perry D. C., eds. Spatial Practices. Sage, New York. 81-109. Castells M. (1992) The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Coombe R. (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Deckha N. (2000) Repackaging the Inner City: Historic Preservation, Community Development, and the Emergent Cultural Quarter in London. Unpublished MS, Rice University. Department of Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS]. (2001) Creative industries mapping document [http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/p...] Ford S. (1996) Myth Making Art Monthly March: 194. Giddens A. (1998) The Third Way. Polity, Cambridge. Greenhalgh L. (1998) From Arts Policy to Creative Economy Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 87, May: 84-94. Hewison R. (1996) Cool Britannia Sunday Times, 19 May. Lash S. and Urry J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. Sage, London. Littler J. (2000) Creative Accounting: Consumer Culture, The 'Creative Economy' and the Cultural Policies of New Labour in Bewes T. and Gilbert J. eds. Cultural Capitalism. Lawrence & Wishart, London. 203-222. Lynch K. (1960) The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. McRobbie A. (1999) In the Culture Society. Routledge, London. Roberts J. (1996) Mad for it!: Philistinism, the everyday and new British art Third Text, 35 (Summer): 29-42. Roberts J. (1998) Pop Art, the Popular and British Art of the 1990s in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 53-78. Rose N. (1999) Inventiveness in politics: review of Anthony Giddens, The Third Way Economy and Society, 28.3: 467-493. Scott A.J. (2000) The Cultural Economy of Cities. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Smith C. (1998) Creative Britain. Faber and Faber, London. Stallabrass J. (1999) High Art Lite. Verso, London. Suchin P. (1998) After a Fashion: Regress as Progress in Contemporary British Art in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 95-110. Links http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/part1.pdf Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deckha, Nityanand. "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php>. Chicago Style Deckha, Nityanand, "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deckha, Nityanand. (2002) Britspaceâ„¢?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]).

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Introduction Television has become more and more restricted within the past few years. Rating systems and "family programming" have taken over the broadcast networks, relegating violent programming, often some of the most cutting edge work in television, to pay channels. There are very few people willing to stand up and say that viewers -- even young children -- should be able to watch whatever they want, and that viewing acts of violence can actually result in more mature, balanced adults. Jib Fowles is one of those people. His book, The Case For Television Violence, explores the long history of violent content in popular culture, and how its modern incarnation, television, fulfils the same function as epic tragedy and "penny dreadfuls" did -- the diverting of aggressive feelings into the cathartic action of watching. Fowles points out the flaws in studies linking TV violence to actual violence (why, for example, has there been a sharp decline in violent crime in the U.S. during the 1990s when, by all accounts, television violence has increased?), as well as citing overlooked studies that show no correlation between viewing and performing acts of violence. The book also demonstrates how efforts to censor TV violence are not only ineffective, but can lead to the opposite result: an increase in exposure to violent viewing as audiences forsake traditional broadcast programming for private programming through pay TV and videocassettes. The revised excerpt below describes one of the more heated topics of debate -- the V-Chip. Television Violence and You Although the antiviolence fervor crested in the US in the first half of the 1990s, it also continued into the second half. As Sissela Bok comments: "during the 1990s, much larger efforts by citizen advocacy groups, churches, professional organizations, public officials, and media groups have been launched to address the problems posed by media violence" (146). It continues as always. On the one side, the reformist position finds articulation time and again; on the other side, the public's incessant desire for violent entertainment is reluctantly (because there is no prestige or cachet to be had in it) serviced by television companies as they compete against each other for profits. We can contrast these two forces in the following way: the first, the antitelevision violence campaign, is highly focussed in its presentation, calling for the curtailment of violent content, but this concerted effort has underpinnings that are vague and various; the second force is highly diffused on the surface (the public nowhere speaks pointedly in favor of violent content), but its underpinnings are highly concentrated and functional, pertinent to the management of disapproved emotions. To date, neither force has triumphed decisively. The antiviolence advocates can be gratified by the righteousness of their cause and sense of moral superiority, but violent content continues as a mainstay of the medium's offerings and in viewers' attention. Over the longer term, equilibrium has been the result. If the equilibrium were upset, however, unplanned consequences would result. The attack on television violence is not simply unwarranted; it carries the threat of unfortunate dangers should it succeed. In the US, television violence is a successful site for the siphoning off of unwanted emotions. The French critic Michel Mourlet explains: "violence is a major theme in aesthetics. Violence is decompression: Arising out of a tension between the individual and the world, it explodes as the tension reaches its pitch, like an abscess burning. It has to be gone through before there can be any repose" (233). The loss or even diminishment of television violence would suggest that surplus psychic energy would have to find other outlets. What these outlets would be is open to question, but the possibility exists that some of them might be retrogressive, involving violence in more outright and vicious forms. It is in the nation's best interest not to curtail the symbolic displays that come in the form of television violence. Policy The official curbing of television violence is not an idle or empty threat. It has happened recently in Canada. In 1993, the Canadian Radio- Television and Telecommunications Commission, the equivalent of the Australian Broadcasting Authority or of the American FCC, banned any "gratuitous" violence, which was defined as violence not playing "an integral role in developing the plot, character, or theme of the material as a whole" (Scully 12). Violence of any sort cannot be broadcast before 9 p.m. Totally forbidden are any programs promoting violence against women, minorities, or animals. Detailed codes regulate violence in children's shows. In addition, the Canadian invention of the V-chip is to be implemented, which would permit parents to block out programming that exceeds preset levels for violence, sexuality, or strong language (DePalma). In the United States, the two houses of Congress have held 28 hearings since 1954 on the topic of television violence (Cooper), but none has led to the passage of regulatory legislation until the Telecommunications Act of 1996. According to the Act, "studies have shown that children exposed to violent video programming at a young age have a higher tendency for violent and aggressive behavior later in life than children not so exposed, and that children exposed to violent video programming are prone to assume that acts of violence are acceptable behavior" (Section 551). It then requires that newly manufactured television sets must "be equipped with a feature designed to enable viewers to block display of all programs with a common rating" (Telecommunications Act of 1996, section 551). The V-chip, the only available "feature" to meet the requirements, will therefore be imported from Canada to the United States. Utilising a rating system reluctantly and haltingly developed by the television industry, parents on behalf of their children would be able to black out offensive content. Censorship had passed down to the family level. Although the V-chip represents the first legislated regulation of television violence in the US, that country experienced an earlier episode of violence censorship whose outcome may be telling for the fate of the chip. This occurred in the aftermath of the 1972 Report to the Surgeon General on Television and Social Behavior, which, in highly equivocal language, appeared to give some credence to the notion that violent content can activate violent behavior in some younger viewers. Pressure from influential congressmen and from the FCC and its chairman, Richard Wiley, led the broadcasting industry in 1975 to institute what came to be known as the Family Viewing Hour. Formulated as an amendment to the Television Code of the National Association of Broadcasters, the stipulation decreed that before 9:00 p.m. "entertainment programming inappropriate for viewing by a general family audience should not be broadcast" (Cowan 113). The definition of "inappropriate programming" was left to the individual networks, but as the 1975-1976 television season drew near, it became clear to a production company in Los Angeles that the definitions would be strict. The producers of M*A*S*H (which aired at 8:30 p.m.) learned from the CBS censor assigned to them that three of their proposed programs -- dealing with venereal disease, impotence, and adultery -- would not be allowed (Cowan 125). The series Rhoda could not discuss birth control (131) and the series Phyllis would have to cancel a show on virginity (136). Television writers and producers began to rebel, and in late 1975 their Writers Guild brought a lawsuit against the FCC and the networks with regard to the creative impositions of the Family Viewing Hour. Actor Carroll O'Connor (as quoted in Cowan 179) complained, "Congress has no right whatsoever to interfere in the content of the medium", and writer Larry Gelbert voiced dismay (as quoted in Cowan 177): "situation comedies have become the theater of ideas, and those ideas have been very, very restricted". The judge who heard the case in April and May of 1976 took until November to issue his decision, but when it emerged it was polished and clear: the Family Viewing Hour was the result of "backroom bludgeoning" by the FCC and was to be rescinded. According to the judge, "the existence of threats, and the attempted securing of commitments coupled with the promise to publicize noncompliance ... constituted per se violations of the First Amendment" (Corn-Revere 201). The fate of the Family Viewing Hour may have been a sort of premoniton: The American Civil Liberties Union is currently bringing a similar case against proponents of the V-chip -- a case that may produce similar results. Whether or not the V-chip will withstand judicial scrutiny, there are several problematic aspects to the device and any possible successors. Its usage would appear to impinge on the providers of violent content, on the viewers of it, and indeed on the fundamental legal structure of the United States. To confront the first of these three problems, significant use of the V- chip by parents would measurably reduce the audience size for certain programmes containing symbolic violence. Little else could have greater impact on the American television system as it is currently constituted. A decrease in audience numbers quickly translates into a decrease in advertising revenues in an advertising system such as that of the United States. Advertisers may additionally shy away from a shunned programme because of its loss of popularity or because its lowered ratings have clearly stamped it as violent. The decline in revenues would make the programme less valuable in the eyes of network executives and perhaps a candidate for cancellation. The Hollywood production company would quickly take notice and begin tailoring its broadcast content to the new standards. Blander or at least different fare would be certain to result. Broadcast networks may begin losing viewers to bolder content on less fastidious cable networks and in particular to the channels that are not supported and influenced by advertising. Thus, we might anticipate a shift away from the more traditional and responsible channels towards the less so and away from advertising-supported channels to subscriber-supported channels. This shift would not transpire according to the traditional governing mechanism of television -- audience preferences. Those to whom the censored content had been destined would have played no role in its neglect. Neglect would have transpired because of the artificial intercession of controls. The second area to be affected by the V-chip, should its implementation prove successful, is viewership, in particular younger viewers. Currently, young viewers have great license in most households to select the content they want to watch; this license would be greatly reduced by the V-chip, which can block out entire genres. Screening for certain levels of violence, the parent would eliminate most cartoons and all action- adventure shows, whether the child desires some of these or not. A New York Times reporter, interviewing a Canadian mother who had been an early tester of a V-chip prototype, heard the mother's 12-year-old son protesting in the background, "we're not getting the V-chip back!" The mother explained to the reporter, "the kids didn't like the fact that they were not in control any longer" (as quoted in DePalma C14) -- with good reason. Children are losing the right to pick the content of which they are in psychological need. The V-chip represents another weapon in the generational war -- a device that allows parents to eradicate the compensational content of which children have learned to make enjoyable use. The consequences of all this for the child and the family would be unpleasant. The chances that the V-chip will increase intergenerational friction are high. Not only will normal levels of tension and animosity be denied their outlet via television fiction but also so will the new superheated levels. It is not a pleasant prospect. Third, the V-chip constitutes a strong challenge to traditional American First Amendment rights of free speech and a free press. Stoutly defended by post-World War II Supreme Courts, First Amendment rights can be voided "only in order to promote a compelling state interest, and then only if the government adopts the least restrictive means to further that interest" (Ballard 211). The few restrictions allowed concern such matters as obscenity, libel, national security, and the sometimes conflicting right to a fair trial. According to legal scholar Ian Ballard, there is no "compelling state interest" involved in the matter of television violence because "the social science evidence used to justify the regulation of televised violence is subject to such strong methodological criticism that the evidence is insufficient to support massive regulatory assault on the television entertainment industry" (185). Even if the goal of restricting television violence were acceptable, the V-chip is hardly "the least restrictive means" because it introduces a "chilling effect" on programme producers and broadcasters that "clearly infringes on fundamental First Amendment rights" (216). Moreover, states Ballard, "fear of a slippery slope is not unfounded" (216). If television violence can be censored, supposedly because it poses a threat to social order, then what topics might be next? It would not be long before challenging themes such a feminism or multiculturalism were deemed unfit for the same reason. Taking all these matters into consideration, the best federal policy regarding television violence would be to have no policy -- to leave the extent of violent depictions completely up to the dictates of viewer preferences, as expertly interpreted by the television industry. In this, I am in agreement with Ian Ballard, who finds that the best approach "is for the government to do nothing at all about television violence" (218). Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jib Fowles. "Television Violence and You." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/television.php>. Chicago style: Jib Fowles, "Television Violence and You," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/television.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jib Fowles. (2000) Television Violence and You. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/television.php> ([your date of access]).

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Abstract:

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

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Abstract:

The L Word: Generation Q is the reboot of The L Word, a long running series about a group of lesbians and bisexuals in Los Angeles in the early 2000s. Both programmes are unique in their positioning of lesbian characters and have been well received by audiences and critics alike. These programmes present a range of characters and narratives, previously excluded from mainstream film and television, bringing a refreshing change from the destructive images typically presented before. We argue that the reboot Generation Q now offers more meaningful representation of the broader lesbian and transgender communities, and discuss its relevance in the changing portrayals of gay representation. Gay visibility has never really been an issue in the movies. Gays have always been visible. It is how they have been visible that has remained offensive for almost a century. (Russo 66) In 2004 The L Word broke new ground as the very first television series written and directed by predominantly queer women. This set it apart from previous representations of lesbians by Hollywood because it portrayed a community rather than an isolated or lone lesbian character, that was extraneous to a cast of heterosexuals (Moore and Schilt). The series brought change, and where Hollywood was more often “reluctant to openly and non-stereotypically engage with gay subjects and gay characters” (Baker 41), the L Word offered an alternative to the norm in media representation. “The L Word’s significance lies in its very existence” according to Chambers (83), and this article serves to consider this significance in conjunction with its 2019 reboot, the L Word: Generation Q, to ascertain if the enhanced visibility and gay representation influences the system of representation that has predominantly been excluding and misrepresentative of gay life. The exclusion of authentic representation of lesbians and gays in Hollywood film is not new. Over time, however, there has been an increased representation of gay characters in film and television. However, beneath the positive veneer remains a morally disapproving undertone (Yang), where lesbians and gays are displayed as the showpiece of the abnormal (Gross, "Out of the Mainstream"). Gross ("Out of the Mainstream") suggests that through the ‘othering’ of lesbians and gays within media, a means of maintaining the moral order is achieved, and where being ‘straight’ results in a happy ending. Lesbians and gays in film thus achieve what Gerbner referred to as symbolic annihilation, purposefully created in a bid to maintain the social inequity. This form of exclusion often saw controversial gay representation, with a history of portraying these characters in a false, excluding, and pejorative way (Russo; Gross, "What Is Wrong"; Hart). The history of gay representation in media had at times been monstrous, playing out the themes of gay sexuality as threatening to heterosexual persons and communities (Juárez). Gay people were incorrectly stereotyped, and gay lives were seen through the slimmest of windows. Walters (15) argued that it was “too often” that film and television images would narrowly portray gays “as either desexualized or over sexualized”, framing their sexuality as the sole identity of the character. She also contested that gay characters were “shown as nonthreatening and campy 'others' or equally comforting and familiar boys (and they are usually boys, not girls) next door” (Walters 15). In Russo’s seminal text, The Celluloid Closet, he demonstrated that gay characters were largely excluded from genuine and thoughtful presentation in film, while the only option given to them was how they died. Gay activists and film makers in the 1980s and beyond built on the momentum of AIDS activism (Streitmatter) to bring films that dealt with gay subject matter more fairly than before, with examples like The Birdcage, Philadelphia, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, and In and Out. Walters argues that while “mainstream films like Brokeback Mountain and The Kids are Alright entertain moviegoers with their forthright gay themes and scenes” (12), often the roles have been more of tokenisation, representing the “surprisingly gay characters in a tedious romcom, the coyly queer older man in a star-studded indie hit, the incidentally gay sister of the lead in a serious drama” (Walters 12). This ambivalence towards the gay role model in the media has had real world effects on those who identify themselves as lesbian or gay, creating feelings of self-hatred or of being ‘unacceptable’ citizens of society (Gamson), as media content “is an active component in the cultural process of shaping LGBT identities” (Sarkissian 147). The stigmatisation of gays was further identified by the respondents to a study on media and gay identity, where “the prevailing sentiment in these discussions was a sense of being excluded from traditional society” (Gomillion and Guiliano 343). Exclusion promotes segregation and isolation, and since television media are ever-present via conventional and web-based platforms, their messages are increasingly visible and powerful. The improved portrayal of gay characters was not just confined to the area of film and television however, and many publications produced major stories on bi-sexual chic, lesbian chic, the rise of gay political power and gay families. This process of greater inclusion, however, has not been linear, and in 2013 the media advocacy group known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD) mapped the quantity, quality, and diversity of LGBT people depicted in films, finding that there was still much work to be done to fairly include gay characters (GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index). In another report made in 2019, which examined cable and streaming media, GLAAD found that of the 879 regular characters expected to appear on broadcast scripted primetime programming, 10.2% were identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and or queer (GLAAD Where Are We on TV). This was the highest number of queer characters recorded since the start of their reporting. In January 2004, Showtime launched The L Word, the first scripted cable television to focus chiefly on lesbians. Over the course of six seasons it explored the deep bonds that linked the members of an evolving lesbian friendship circle. The central themes of the programme were the love and friendship between the women, and it was a television programme structured by its own values and ideologies. The series offered a moral argument against the widespread sexism and anti-gay prejudice that was evident in media. The cast, however, were conventionally beautiful, gender normative, and expensively attired, leading to fears that the programme would appeal more to straight men, and that the sex in the programme would be exploitative and p*rnographic. The result, however, was that women’s sex and connection were foregrounded, and appeared as a central theme of the drama. This was, however, ground-breaking television. The showrunner of the original L Word, Ilene Chaiken, was aware of the often-damning account of lesbians in Hollywood, and the programme managed to convey an indictment of Hollywood (Mcfadden). The L Word increased lesbian visibility on television and was revolutionary in countering some of the exclusionary and damaging representation that had taken place before. It portrayed variations of lesbians, showing new positive representations in the form of power lesbians, sports lesbians, singles, and couples. Broadly speaking, gay visibility and representation can be marked and measured by levels of their exclusion and inclusion. Sedgwick said that the L Word was particularly important as it created a “lesbian ecology—a visible world in which lesbians exist, go on existing, exist in forms beyond the solitary and the couple, sustain and develop relations among themselves of difference and commonality” (xix). However, as much as this programme challenged the previous representations it also enacted a “Faustian bargain because television is a genre which ultimately caters to the desires and expectations of mainstream audiences” (Wolfe and Roripaugh 76). The producers knew it was difficult to change the problematic and biased representation of queer women within the structures of commercial media and understood the history of queer representation and its effects. Therefore, they had to navigate between the legitimate desire to represent lesbians as well as being able to attract a large enough mainstream audience to keep the show commercially viable. The L Word: Generation Q is the reboot of the popular series, and includes some of the old cast, who have also become the executive producers. These characters include Bette Porter, who in 2019 is running for the office of the Mayor of Los Angeles. Shane McCutchen returns as the fast-talking womanising hairdresser, and Alice Pieszecki in this iteration is a talk show host. When interviewed, Jennifer Beals (executive producer and Bette Porter actor) said that the programme is important, because there have been no new lesbian dramas to follow after the 2004 series ended (Beals, You Tube). Furthermore, the returning cast members believe the reboot is important because of the increased attacks that queer people have been experiencing since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Between the two productions there have been changes in the film and television landscape, with additional queer programmes such as Pose, Orange Is the New Black, Euphoria, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Are You the One, for example. The new L Word, therefore, needed to project a new and modern voice that would reflect contemporary lesbian life. There was also a strong desire to rectify criticism of the former show, by presenting an increased variation of characters in the 2019 series. Ironically, while the L Word had purposefully aimed to remove the negativity of exclusion through the portrayal of a group of lesbians in a more true-to-life account, the limited character tropes inadvertently marginalised other areas of lesbian and queer representation. These excluded characters were for example fully representative trans characters. The 2000s television industry had seemingly returned to a period of little interest in women’s stories generally, and though queer stories seeped into popular culture, there was no dedicated drama with a significant focus on lesbian story lines (Vanity Fair). The first iteration of The L Word was aimed at satisfying lesbian audiences as well as creating mainstream television success. It was not a tacky or p*rnographic television series playing to male voyeuristic ideals, although some critics believed that it included female-to-female sex scenes to draw in an additional male viewership (Anderson-Minshall; Graham). There was also a great emphasis on processing the concept of being queer. However, in the reboot Generation Q, the decision was made by the showrunner Marja-Lewis Ryan that the series would not be about any forms of ‘coming out stories’, and the characters were simply going about their lives as opposed to the burdensome tropes of transitioning or coming out. This is a significant change from many of the gay storylines in the 1990s that were seemingly all focussed on these themes. The new programme features a wider demographic, too, with younger characters who are comfortable with who they are. Essentially, the importance of the 2019 series is to portray healthy, varied representations of lesbian life, and to encourage accurate inclusion into film and television without the skewed or distorted earlier narratives. The L Word and L Word: Generation Q then carried the additional burden of countering criticisms The L Word received. Roseneil explains that creating both normalcy and belonging for lesbians and gays brings “cultural value and normativity” (218) and removes the psychosocial barriers that cause alienation or segregation. This “accept us” agenda appears through both popular culture and “in the broader national discourse on rights and belongings” (Walters 11), and is thus important because “representations of happy, healthy, well integrated lesbian and gay characters in film or television would create the impression that, in a social, economic, and legal sense, all is well for lesbians and gay men” (Schacter 729). Essentially, these programmes shouldered the burden of representation for the lesbian community, which was a heavy expectation. Critiques of the original L Word focussed on how the original cast looked as if they had all walked out of a high-end salon, for example, but in L Word: Generation Q this has been altered to have a much more DIY look. One of the younger cast members, Finlay, looks like someone cut her hair in the kitchen while others have styles that resemble YouTube tutorials and queer internet celebrities (Vanity Fair). The recognisable stereotypes that were both including and excluding have also altered the representation of the trans characters. Bette Porter’s campaign manager, for example, determines his style through his transition story, unlike Max, the prominent trans character from the first series. The trans characters of 2019 are comfortable in their own skins and supported by the community around them. Another important distinction between the representation of the old and new cast is around their material wealth. The returning cast members have comfortable lives and demonstrate affluence while the younger cast are less comfortable, expressing far more financial anxiety. This may indeed make a storyline that is closer to heterosexual communities. The L Word demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of feminist debates about the visual representation of women and made those debates a critical theme of the programme, and these themes have been expanded further in The L Word: Generation Q. One of the crucial areas that the programme/s have improved upon is to denaturalise the hegemonic straight gaze, drawing attention to the ways, conventions and techniques of reproduction that create sexist, heterosexist, and hom*ophobic ideologies (McFadden). This was achieved through a predominantly female, lesbian cast that dealt with stories amongst their own friend group and relationships, serving to upend the audience position, and encouraging an alternative gaze, a gaze that could be occupied by anyone watching, but positioned the audience as lesbian. In concluding, The L Word in its original iteration set out to create something unique in its representation of lesbians. However, in its mission to create something new, it was also seen as problematic in its representation and in some ways excluding of certain gay and lesbian people. The L Word: Generation Q has therefore focussed on more diversity within a minority group, bringing normality and a sense of ‘realness’ to the previously skewed narratives seen in the media. In so doing, “perhaps these images will induce or confirm” to audiences that “lesbians and gay men are already ‘equal’—accepted, integrated, part of the mainstream” (Schacter 729). 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